In the movie “The Three Amigos” Steve Martin’s character becomes exasperated with Chevy Chase’s character at one point and says, “It’s like dealing with a six-year-old.” That’s likely to be Tony Snow’s reaction when he has to start dealing with the White House Press Gaggle every day.
Just when you think the press corps can’t make bigger fools of themselves than they already have in the past five years, they go and do something even more cringe-worthy than the last embarrassment. The most recent is the flap over the perceived preference by people in the White House for Fox News over, say, CNN or Radio Havana.
Lame duck Press Secretary Scott McLellan was answering questions aboard Air Force One on April 27 when Jim VandeHei of The Washington Post asked, “Is there a White House policy that all government TVs have to be tuned to Fox?” McClellan pointed out that his TVs show four channels and that every TV in the White House has a split-screen display.
“Well,” said the unsatisfied VandeHei, “they always seem to be tuned to Fox.”
“And these are paid for by taxpayer dollars,” VandeHei continued. Meaning what? That televisions purchased with taxpayer dollars must be tuned to CNN? That taxpayer-bought televisions are subject to some multicultural diversity standard for TV news watching?
If these TVs had been turned exclusively to CNN (as they most undoubtedly were during the last Clinton term), would VandeHei have wasted McClellan’s time with his petty complaint? I seriously doubt it. In support of that, I invite you to find an instance when the press corps complained that CNN was the cable news outlet of choice in the past.
VandeHei’s reaction is additional proof that the left-liberal MSM sees its choices, preferences and worldview as “normal,” while conservative preferences and choices are aberrations. It can’t be just an unremarkable choice, you see, when conservatives choose Fox, as it is when liberals prefer CNN. VandeHei travels a lot, I’m sure. Has he ever noticed that nearly every airport television, waiting room television and most hotel cable lineups feature CNN and not Fox News?
In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Window on Washington blog on April 27, the reporter covering this story went out of his way to say: “Despite McClellans’ TV options, the record will show that other than when the movie of reporters’ choice is showing (and that frequently invites a gender-based battle over what to watch), Fox is showing on the screens in the press cabin of Air Force One.”
My response: So what?
In the early 1990s, when I began making my switch from lefty-liberal to conservative, I was the managing editor of a daily newspaper. When I was a very, very liberal reporter or editor there was never a complaint about my political views, even from conservative editors (there actually were some in the early ‘70s). Liberal was the normal thing to be in a newsroom.
However, after it became known, around 1993, that I had become an unapologetic conservative, some of the more left-wing reporters actually complained to our executive editor that they thought this was affecting my editorial judgment. My offense was decreeing that since we had always in our news stories characterized conservative groups as “conservative” that we must now begin characterizing liberal groups as “liberal.” Amazingly, this was very controversial.
After our local cable system began carrying Fox News in 1997 I would make a point of tuning one newsroom television to Fox News and another to CNN. This, too, was taken as evidence of my bias.
It wasn’t bias, though, on the evening of Nov. 7, 2000, when nearly all of our reporters and editors erupted in a spontaneous and unselfconscious standing ovation when the networks declared Hillary Clinton the winner of the New York Senate seat. No, that was just a “normal” reaction.
As a managing editor I, too, sometimes felt like Steve Martin.
Jon Ham is vice president of The John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.