Dueling Dick Cheney docs…
The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin compares FNC’s Dick Cheney special to PBS’ Frontline Dick Cheney special…
While neither Cheney nor his enormously influential legal adviser David S. Addington were willing to talk to PBS, the vice president welcomed Fox News’s Baier with open arms.
As Baier explained at the opening of his report: “Fox News has been given unprecedented access into the vice president’s world. We spoke at length with him, to some of the people that have known him the longest, and to the president himself. We shadowed Cheney in Washington, visited his homes here and in Wyoming and traveled with him on a mission to the Mideast.”
And yet the most interesting part of the show was not what Cheney had to say, most of which we’d heard many times before. It was what the president said. I don’t think Bush has ever faced so many questions about Cheney before.
Ha! I can’t even say I blame Cheney for not talking to PBS. At least Fox is fair - they report the good with the bad. (And yes, they report the bad. Carl Cameron broke the munitions story the week before the 2004 election.)
PBS’s documentary would probably come out highlighting his heart problems, Scooter Libby, Halliburton and the hunting incident as the sum of his career as VP.
Comment by Laurel — October 16, 2007 @ 3:48 pm
lol, I love when Fox’s defenders have to go back over 3 years to come up with an example of the news channel offering critical coverage of the Bush Administration.
Comment by Jay — October 16, 2007 @ 3:56 pm
Jay, there you go again. She went back to the final days of the last election to prove FNC wouldn’t withhold a story EVEN IF….. EVEN IF…. it could help a liberal President get elected.
Comment by Haile Welde — October 16, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
Jay, it’s quite obvious you don’t watch any significant amount of FNC. If you did, you would know that there’s been plenty of criticism of Bush on immigration, on spending, on the war, etc. There was plenty of coverage of the administration’s failures in handling Katrina, the wiretap controversy, the CIA leak controversy.
The difference is that opinion and commentary is labeled as opinion and commentary, and not passed off as hard news. Maybe that’s what you’re used to, but that’s just as biased, if not more so because it’s also dishonest, than what you’re accusing FNC of. Plastering the munitions story on the front page day after day, and then burying the part where Brett Baier’s coverage proves the weapons were not there when the troops got to Baghdad on page 22 or not mentioning it at all is also bias.
Comment by Laurel — October 17, 2007 @ 1:00 am