Press On
LIKE I SAID, “BABY STEPS”
White House officials said they noticed a column by Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The Times, in which Jill Abramson, one of the paper’s two managing editors, described her newsroom’s “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” The Washington Post’s executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, had already expressed similar concerns about his newsroom.
White House officials said comments like those had focused them on a need to make their case that Fox had an ideological bent undercutting its legitimacy as a news organization.
UPDATE: E-mail: “In other words, their problem is not that Fox isn’t a real news organization, their problem is that it is.”
I think what happened today was extremely important, because in trying to ostracize and demonize Fox, the administration needs complicity from other news organizations. Otherwise it won’t work.
And what happened today was other news organizations — admirably and on principle — standing up and saying no. If you are not going to include Fox, we’re not going to go.
And that solidarity I think is important. We are all in the business together. We have different perspectives. Nobody enjoys a …holy objectivity. And what happened, I thought, was a confrontation between an overreaching executive and a free press — and the executive backed down.
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