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"Roger's Revenge"

by Mark Gisleson

Jim Romenesko's webpage is pretty much a haunt for newspaper people. I was a bit surprised then to see how quickly one of his letters page items has gotten around. Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer has some interesting things to say about his former employer.

[A]t Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to "be careful" how I handled the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ("You know how Roger [Fox News Chairman Ailes] feels about him."), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to produce should lean ("You can give both sides, but make sure the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.")

Editorially, the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance of management. The pressure ranges from subtle to direct. First of all, it's a news network run by one of the most high-profile political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC is, to a large extent, "Roger's Revenge" - against what he considers a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union, with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue motivation to please the big boss.

Sometimes, this eagerness to serve Fox's ideological interests goes even beyond what management expects. For example, in June of last year, when a California judge ruled the Pledge of Allegiance's "Under God" wording unconstitutional, FNC's newsroom chief ordered the judge's mailing address and phone number put on the screen. The anchor, reading from the Teleprompter, found himself explaining that Fox was taking this unusual step so viewers could go directly to the judge and get "as much information as possible" about his decision. To their credit, the big bosses recognized that their underling's transparent attempt to serve their political interests might well threaten the judge's physical safety and ordered the offending information removed from the screen as soon as they saw it. A few months later, this same eager-to-please newsroom chief ordered the removal of a graphic quoting UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as saying his team had not yet found WMDs in Iraq. Fortunately, the electronic equipment was quicker on the uptake (and less susceptible to office politics) than the toady and displayed the graphic before his order could be obeyed.

Fair and balanced, indeed.

* *

Josh Marshall continues to closely watch the goings on in Congress. His latest column in the Hill News has some regarding recent Republican efforts to blame the CIA for the mess in Iraq.

Why was the NIE so rushed and why was it produced when it was? An NIE is put together to assemble all the information in the intelligence community on a given topic. Normally, the point is to assist the executive — as well as the Congress — in the process of fashioning policy.

But that’s not what happened here.

We know that the Bush administration specifically resisted calling for an NIE until very late in the game because it didn’t want the results and findings getting in the way of the policy the administration had already decided on. The reason an NIE was finally pulled together is that Senate Democrats wanted some sense of what the evidence was for all the White House’s claims about Iraqi WMD and ties to international terrorism.

In other words, the NIE was only put together when the policy was being sold, not when it was being put together. So the administration could not have been misled or ill-served by it because it was never used to formulate policy. The administration only used it to sell the policy to a skeptical Congress.

The timing of the NIE points to another important conclusion. If you’re wondering why the document seemed so slanted in favor of alarmist judgments about Iraq’s WMD, it’s probably because it was produced for a White House that already had a policy in place. With the policy already decided upon, it was, shall we say, pretty clear how the White House wanted the report to turn out. And, unfortunately, the agency obliged.

[more]

* *

Lost in all the shuffle over Iraq has been Haley Barbour's recent Trent Lott like moment in the sun. Derrick Z. Jackson updates the record. I'll give Jackson credit. It's hard to follow Barbour's story without coming to the obvious conclusion that he's little more than a racist jerk, but Jackson contents himself with just present the facts. I think you'll find it hard not to agree with my assessment, however.

Barbour has blatantly appealed to the most racist elements in Mississippi by defiantly refusing to ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to remove his photograph from its website home page. The photo shows Barbour at a CCC-sponsored barbecue with five other men, including CCC field director Bill Lord.

The CCC grew out of the racist white citizens councils that fought integration during the civil rights movement. In yet another example of its hatred, the CCC home page features an article titled "The Racial Compact." The article proposes a South African-style apartheid in most of the United States reserved for the "Nordish-American population." African-Americans, who are referred to as "Congoid," would be shoved into what is now Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and north Texas. Latinos would be consigned to south Texas and New Mexico....

Barbour tried to play it both ways last week, saying merely that some of the CCC's views are "indefensible." Unfortunately, some African-Americans in the Republican Party, too timid to criticize the pandering, have afforded him some racial cover. But there is no defending in any way a group whose sole purpose is to glorify the most poisonous aspects of American history, from the traitorous Confederacy to calling immigrants of color "trash" to denunciations of Jewish Americans. Perhaps the problem is that it is unrealistic to expect Barbour to fully renounce the CCC if he has not fully renounced his own past. When he ran for the Senate in 1982, a New York Times report said:

"The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be 'coons' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."

* *

Via Atrios, this AP story presents a side to the war in Iraq you probably haven't heard much about: mercenaries, or, as they're now called, private contractors.

For over twenty years the military has been trending Republican. George W. is single-handedly reversing that trend. Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports on "Corps Voters" at the Washington Monthly.

Steve Gilliard has transcribed some recent comments by Robert Fisk, who was interviewed by Pacifica's Amy Goodman. "Well, I can tell you there are at least 200,000 foreign fighters in Iraq and 146,000 of them are wearing American uniform. You know, Americans in Iraq did not grow up in Tikrit eating dates for breakfast. The largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, a thousand times over anything Al Qaeda can do, are western soldiers. And we need to realize that we're maintaining an occupation there."

Retired Colonel David H. Hackworth has more on the Army's shameful treatment of our wounded troops.

And for those who've been wondering, Moja Vera is back in the States and doing fine. Updating his blog has taken a backseat to finding a civilian job. Drop me an e-mail if you know of any suitable opportunities in the Arizona area for former military satellite communications experts.

UPDATE: Gaius Publius sends us this link to an Aussie article, "Cheney's hawks 'hijacking policy.'" Good read.

For future reference, if you e-mail me about anything in this weblog, try to remember to slap a few ###'s at the front of your subject line. I'm getting over 600 spam a day, and this makes it a lot easier to spot your e-mail. And, for what it's worth, I think the "re:" tag is now worthless thanks to our "creative" spam corps.

Posted by at October 30, 2003 10:49 AM

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