Susan Estrich pens a passionate defense of FOX News in the Christian Science Monitor. However there is one thing Estrich gets wrong in her piece…

Mr. Cavuto, a Fox News anchor, sat down to do an interview with George Bush last week on his business show. He didn’t discuss Iraq. Cavuto doesn’t cover Iraq.

That’s not true. Cavuto does cover Iraq. Not every day. But he’s had military analysts on Your World and he’s covered the run up to the War (and blasted France and Germany numerous times in the process). To imply that Iraq is a subject that is out of Cavuto’s domain just doesn’t square with history.

Estrich goes on to discuss the lack of Iraq questioning further…

As far as I know, he had nothing new to ask him, nothing new to add, and no important new question to pose. In fact, the president had nothing new to say on the topic. There was no news to be made on Iraq. So Cavuto didn’t use the opportunity either to beat up on the president or to let him say something we’d heard a hundred times. Instead, he asked him questions he didn’t know the answer to, where he might get an answer he hadn’t already heard.

Here Estrich is on stronger ground as there hasn’t been a lot of fresh news coming out of Iraq lately. However a case could be made that that detail doesn’t preclude the subject from being broached. Indeed, if FOX (or Cable News in general) waited until there was fresh details to revisit a particular story it would ignore cable’s great and dubious tradition of beating a story to death in the face of a news vacuum. This remarkable bit of self-restraint shown in not doing that here is either a) rather unique (and commendable), or b) a sign of something else. I’ll make no declarations as to which it is though because only FOX and Cavuto know the real answer.