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Posted on 05/14/2003 3:12:12 PM PDT by WaterDragon
All hail FOX News's Neal Cavuto! Paul Krugman took at shot at Cavuto in his New York Times column Tuesday -- and now Cavuto has shot back with what can only be described as a generous serving of good old fashioned shock and awe. Krugman wrote,
"...both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told 'those who opposed the liberation of Iraq' — a large minority — that 'you were sickening then, you are sickening now.' Fair and balanced."
Richard Zimmerman, a FOX spokesman, told me that "Neal's statement was made during his daily 'Common Sense' commentary segment, and labeled as such." But Cavuto himself gets to the point just a bit more forcefully:
"Exactly who's the hypocrite, Mr. Krugman? Me, for expressing my views in a designated segment at the end of the show? Or you, for not so cleverly masking your own biases against the war in a cheaply written column? ...I'd much rather put my cards on the table and let people know where I stand in a clear editorial, than insidiously imply it in what's supposed to be a straight news story. And by the way, you sanctimonious twit, no one -- no one -- tells me what to say. I say it. And I write it. And no one lectures me on it. Save you, you pretentious charlatan. ...Now make I suggest you take your column and shove it?"
Cavuto could have rolled all the way to Baghdad. He could have -- and should have -- blasted Krugman for daring to preach about "codes of ethics" at a time when the New York Times' reputation has been shattered by revelations of pervasive negligence that permitted the journalistic fraud of its reporter Jayson Blair. And he could have -- and should have -- blasted Krugman for daring to preach about "blatant partisanship," when Krugman himself is easily among the most relentlessly partisan journalists in America.
Oh... and then there's that matter of Krugman's truthfulness, or lack thereof. Krugman began his column by stating that "during the Iraq war...many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view — something they couldn't find on domestic networks."
The truth is that during the war many Americans turned away from the BBC. FOX's Zimmerman provided me with A.C. Neilson's authoritative television viewership statistics, which show that BBC-America's primetime audience actually fell from 93 thousand households in February to 88 thousand in March. At the same time, FOX TV's audience nearly doubled from 1.7 million in February to 3.2 million in March.
It wasn't just American households either. Matthew Hoy reminds us that "The crew of the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal turned off the BBC and switched to Rupert Murdoch's Sky News." That's right, the same Rupert Murdoch whose News Corporation owns FOX. "According to a 'senior rating' on the Ark Royal: 'The BBC always takes the Iraqis' side. It reports what they say as gospel but when it comes to us it questions and doubts everything the British and Americans are reporting. A lot of people on board are very unhappy.'"
Krugman not only lied about the growth of the BBC's audience, he omitted to mention the decline in the New York Times' own audience. According to a recent report by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the Times' circulation has fallen 5.3% year-on-year for the six months ended March -- and that of its sister publication the Boston Globe has fallen 6.3%. For the same period, though, the New York Post -- yes, the newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch -- saw its circulation rise 10.2%.
Krugman's lies mask, in the short-run, the brute fact that the audiences are voting with their eyeballs. They're gradually beginning to turn away from the systematic liberal bias of the mainstream media -- and columns like Krugman's. But his long-run strategy is to take away the audience's right to vote, by converting media to state control like the BBC's. Here's his rationale:
"Through its policy decisions — especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation — the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't... Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party."
David Hogberg gets it right when he nails Krugman's twisted logic:
"The reductio ad absurdum of Krugman’s argument is a media organization that receives its funding from the government is freer from government influence than those media organizations that are merely regulated by the government. I’m not going to bother explaining what’s wrong with that as it should be obvious."
Yep. It's something only an Ivy League economist could have come up with. And something only the New York Times would be shameless enough to run.
Don't ever leave us NEAL!
Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my infrequent FoxFan list.
Yet ANOTHER reason to avoid her like the plauge!
I second the motion to move Mr. Cavuto to a more prominent spot on the FOX line-up. I wish him much deserved and continued success.
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