On Monday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Charles Krauthammer discussed the media’s recent handling of President Barack Obama, with Goldberg specifically trashing CBS News for its Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview with the president.
“It was a grotesque embarrassment for CBS News,” Goldberg said. “I think that this is the People magazine-ification of ‘60 Minutes,’ which historically was the news program that politicians were supposed to be most scared of. It is inconceivable that any of the journalists at Fox — if they had gotten an interview with George W. Bush or Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell — would have gone nearly, remotely [in the] same zip code as soft as ‘60 Minutes’ did.”
Goldberg said The New Republic, which recently published a friendly sit-down interview with Obama, is also guilty of letting partisanship get in the way of good journalism.
“The New Republic had more of an excuse — they’re a flagship liberal publication. But [it’s] funny [that] this editor of The New Republic, Chris Hughes, is a dot-com millionaire and a donor who used to work for Obama,” Goldberg continued. “He says in his letter to readers in the new issue — the same issue that has this interview — … how they are going to have no partisan bias. That they are not going to push a party line, that they’re not going to be biased toward one group or one party. And yet this thing was basically dictation from the president of the United States.”
In his interview with The New Republic, Obama specifically called out the Fox News Channel and Rush Limbaugh for supposedly making it hard for Republican politicians to publicly compromise with Democrats on important issues. The jab, according to Krauthammer, should be a source of pride for FNC and Limbaugh.
“I love to hear the president whine of Fox News and talk radio,” Krauthammer said. “I think we ought to be proud of the fact that we annoy him so much. If you look at the lineup on one side, the liberal media, you start with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, the elite newspapers, the one remaining news magazine, the universities, Hollywood — it doesn’t stop anywhere. On the other side: talk radio and Fox News. They can’t stand the fact that they no longer have a monopoly.”
“So, I think it ought to be taken as a compliment,” he continued. “And you know, what I have always said about Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdock: Their genius was understanding and locating a niche audience in broadcast cable news, which is half the American people — the half that suffered for decades by the fact [that] you get news presented from a single perspective over and over again. And finally, the fact that there is a new perspective, talk radio and Fox, and they can’t stand it. It is a source of pride, I would say.”