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Fox News shows its real priorities; Jim Hinton; Beaver County Times; February 9, 2010.
I believe Mr. Hinton began his letter-writing last March with “We should keep an eye on Limbaugh.” Mr. Hinton also wrote a couple of letters (no longer on the Times website) during August 2009 supporting lefty positions.
Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.
“When President Barack Obama visited the Republican Conference, the event was covered by all the cable news networks.”
[RWC] As you will read, this letter tells us more about Mr. Hinton than Fox News. Also note Mr. Hinton turns a House Republican event into an Obama event. If you believe Mr. Hinton is complaining about a House Republican event not getting enough coverage, I have a bridge to sell you.
“It was interesting to see the president speaking to Republicans about the need for bipartisanship in Washington. ‘The American people don’t want us to worry about our jobs. They want us to worry about their jobs,’ he said.”
[RWC] “But I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.” - Mr. Obama on August 7, 2009, during a campaign speech for the Democrat candidate in the Virginia gubernatorial race. That doesn’t sound like someone who believes in “the need for bipartisanship in Washington.”
“He spoke for about 30 minutes and for the next hour took questions from the audience.
“Fox News carried only about one hour of the event. It then returned to regular programming. The other networks continued until the end of the questions.”
[RWC] Not exactly. FNC left about 20 minutes early to begin analysis coverage, not “regular programming.” Like it or not, a network breaking away early from political events in this way is common practice. FNC returned to cover the Republican response to Mr. Obama’s speech. FYI, I’ve seen FNC cover Obama events not covered at all by CNN and MSNBC. I missed the Hinton letters complaining about those situations.
“That evening, CNN and MSNBC rebroadcast the event. MSNBC rebroadcast it again over the weekend.
“Fox did not rebroadcast the event.”
[RWC] Given the horrible ratings of CNN and MSNBC relative to FNC, this was likely due to a lack of compelling programming.
Here’s a bit of speculation on my part. Had CNN and MSNBC not fully covered the event but FNC had, we’d likely be reading a letter from Mr. Hinton claiming FNC was giving House Republicans too much coverage. And what if Mr. Obama hadn’t attended at all? Was it an event worthy of coverage only because Mr. Obama attended?
“Is that ‘fair and balanced?’ And when it says, ‘We report, you decide,’ who is it kidding?”
[RWC] Does Mr. Hinton actually want us to believe Mr. Obama gets insufficient coverage on FNC?
Finally, have you noticed we didn’t get any letters from Mr. Hinton complaining about Mr. Obama freezing out FNC from interviews and constantly demonizing FNC? In one example, last October the Obama administration wanted to make the “pay czar” available for interviews to all members of the White House TV press pool, except for FNC. This act of intimidation failed only because all members of the pool agreed none of them would interview the “pay czar” unless they all could.
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