Whenever possible, Fox News relishes being part of the story.
On CNN Sunday, White House communications director Anita Dunn outlined the Obama administration’s renewed war against Fox News. On Monday, following a report in the New York Times about the apparent “attack,” the network responded.
Like this.
First (via the always fair-and-balanced TVNewser) Fox News correspondent James Rosen delivered a five-minute report on the flap:
Then Glenn Beck weighed in:
And Bill O’Reilly, who devoted his “Talking Points Memo” and “Top Story” segments to Dunn’s jab:
O’Reilly called Associated Press writer David Bauder on the carpet, calling him “a dishonest reporter and has been for years.” (In an AP story on Monday, Bauder wrote that O’Reilly has been a strong critic of the Obama administration.)
O’Reilly also made a distinction between the network’s “hard news people [who] simply tell you what’s going on” and political commentators, such as himself and Glenn Beck.
But in a conversation with Brit Hume, O’Reilly underlined his hard news chops.
“Now Brit, you and I came up in the old school, where we were taught as a reporter you should be skeptical of everybody. … That does not in many quarters take place anymore.”
He was talking about NBC and CNN, but Hume felt the need to dig up an Abe Rosenthal anecdote to point out how far left the Times now leans:
Hume: “I can remember Abe Rosenthal when he was the executive editor of the New York Times telling me to my astonishment that he hoped when he was gone that it’d be remembered that he kept the paper straight. And I thought to myself ‘Well the New York Times has always been straight, it always will be. What’s he worried about?’ Well now we know Bill.”
O’Reilly: “It’s funny you bring up Mr. Rosenthal because before he died, he was very complimentary to ‘The Factor’ and the Fox News Channel when we started up.”
O’Reilly added that Dunn is “seeing the world through the prism of other media, like NBC and CNN," which “clearly favored” Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign.
