So it was no suprise to see him jump all over the poor job of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn -- taking on a wildly manipulative, media source defending, "media critic" Howard Kurtz -- over the issue of Fox "News."
Ridiculously, Zurawik then points out, as "evidence" for his position that Dunn is wrong and that the White House's claim that Fox asserts repeated falsities is itself a threat to journalism, that he "watched [Fox] every day last fall" and guess what? There were times that Fox was not talking about Bill Ayers or Acorn!
Memo to Zurawik: When Ms. Dunno chose to make the point about the lopsided emphasis on what were fairly trivial stories, she was speaking in hyperbole. She did not literally mean that Fox was the 24 hours, round the clock, non stop ACORN and Bill Ayers only Channel.
With respect to Howard Kurtz, he has become such a jaded, entrenched, media defender, that he can't even see the difference between legitimate news (which is hard to find these days); legitimate news with a bias; and an advocacy organization either designed or with the effect of coming across as far more persuasive than an outright advocacy station, by selling itself as "news" and throwing in little tidbits of apparent "balance" amongst a barrage of slant, misleading innuendo, misleading statements, and wildly relevant omissions.
Notice that Zurawik himself, as a fish repeatedly goes for a worm on a hook, takes just such little tidbits to be evidence of "balance."
Here is the inane line that he even uses to "prove" his point, with respect to some salient assertion by Fox Anchor Shepard Smith over how ridiculous "Joe the Plumber" was being on something (overlooking the question as to why he was even on "information news" in the first place):
I wonder if [Anchor Shepard] Smith was acting as an "arm" of the Republican Party on that one.Aside from the fact that someone can be a staunch Republican and disagree vehemently with some unlicensed plumber that doesn't know jack squat about policy or the facts, people need to communicate the following sentence, repeated from above, to Zurawik, and to others:
[Fox is] an advocacy organization either designed or with the effect of coming across as far more persuasive than an outright advocacy station, by selling itself as "news" and throwing in little tidbits of apparent "balance" amongst a barrage of slant, misleading innuendo, misleading statements, and wildly relevant omissions.
Zurawik has no clue, and serves up a classic example of exactly the type of poor reasoning skills, intense bias, and lack of information and objective analytical tendencies, that allow Fox to so successfully do what it does; namely, convince its audience that it is even being remotely "balanced," and convince much of the rest of America that it is a legitimate "news" station.
What Fox does is the biggest media story, by far, of the last decade and a half. Yet, Zurawik aside, famed "media critic" Howard Kurtz doesn't even see it, and it's sitting right in front of his nose. And this type of blindness by the rest of a somewhat acquiescing and itself increasingly poor media, only leads to further ignorance.
Although, we repeat: White House Communications Director Anita Dunn did not do a very effective job, either, of stating the case. Of course, she probably did to other Democrats, which is the problem. Democrats have to begin talking to more than just other, active, knee jerk Democrats. They won't start learning how to do this until they learn that they have to do it. In the meantime, they will continue to get bullied by the highly skewed and somewhat blindly asserted inanities of the likes of Howard Kurtz, and often, not even realize it.
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Update: Shockingly, the famous site Instapundit, missing the entire point (as does Zurawik), of course frames this as an Administration that is dangerous to press freedom.
We have already given examples of how InstaBS's profound political biases prevent it from viewing things remotely objectively.
Stating that Fox asserts falsities -- which Fox does repeatedly, and which has been proven on literally thousands of occasions (although Zurawik is probably so busy watching Fox and looking for those evidentiary nuggets of "balance" that he doesn't know anything) along with blatantly misleading on literally tens of thousands of occasions more -- is not a danger to an independent press. What is a danger to it, is the fact that the most watched "news" network on cable television constantly asserts falsities, serves as an advocacy channel masquerading as "fair and balanced" news, and yet is constantly being treated as yet another run of the mill, legitimate, news organization by the rest of the sheep in the media, and even by many Americans in relation to their own political biases or leanings.
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