A full year and a half ahead of the presidential election, the Fox News Channel has suddenly become an issue in the campaign, even as the network tries to cover that campaign.
A Democratic candidates' debate sponsored by Fox News set for August from Reno, Nevada, was abruptly canceled on last week with a statement from the Nevada Democratic Party and Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader in the Senate.
But the reasons given for the cancelation -- anger over comments about Senator Barack Obama made the night before by Fox News chairman Roger Ailes -- give short shrift to an ongoing online campaign by activists at MoveOn.org and by influential blogs like the Daily Kos to have candidates shun the Fox News Channel, which they accuse of being too conservative and too closely allied to the Republican Party. Fox News, which vehemently denies the charges of bias made by its critics, sees itself as the wounded bystander in a Democrat-versus-Democrat battle.
The idea of a candidate, party, or even party wing running against a news outlet is hardly novel in the US, which began its history with party-controlled newspapers, said Mark Feldstein, who left CNN to become an associate professor at George Washington University. In fact, the notion of a news media outlet being open to candidates from across the spectrum is the relative rarity in the US.
With the action by the Nevada Democrats, however, the public may be witnessing the most direct sparring between a political party and a news outlet in recent years.
One of the liberal antagonists to Fox, Matt Stoller, of the blog MyDD, said, "The goal is not to get Democrats not to appear on Fox News." Rather, he said, "the problem comes in validating Fox News as a legitimate news source."
In a statement, the Fox News Channel vice president, David Rhodes, said the Nevada Democrats appeared "to be controlled by radical fringe out-of-state interest groups." A spokeswoman for the channel declined to add to those public comments.
During a speech on March 8, Ailes made a joke conflating Obama and Osama bin Laden. While many liberal bloggers seized on the comments as a slur, many in the audience, on the contrary, said they saw Ailes' comments as mocking US President George W. Bush's inability to capture bin Laden.
Before the cancelation, two candidates, former senator John Edwards and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson had already dropped out of the debate, though Richardson announced his decision hours before the Nevada Democrats acted.
Only two weeks ago, Tom Collins, the head of the state party, appeared on the Daily Kos to try to assuage the anger there over Fox News, saying: "Believe me, I am all too aware of the challenges associated with Fox. And this is not an endorsement of Fox."
He added, though: "Howard Dean has taught us through his 50-state strategy that it's best to stand up and fight everywhere, even in places and among audiences whose opinions may differ from our own."
According to analysts of the cable news world, accusations of bias cut two ways for Fox. On the one hand, it feeds the image of Fox News as besieged by mainstream media outlets and political enemies, which plays well to its loyal audience. Yet, these analysts said, being shut out of a debate denies the channel the ability to be above the fray and be perceived as a mainstream journalistic outlet.
William Mayer, a professor of political science at Northeastern University who studies presidential elections and the media, said that many conservatives consider the major broadcast networks biased in a liberal direction. But it was less of a problem for those outlets, he suggested: a "news organization that has a right-wing slant sticks out more because most other organizations lean the other way."
Feldstein, who is writing a book about Nixon's relationship with the press, said that a party-wide decision to shun Fox is "difficult to sustain -- there is a cost when you sustain a boycott, you lose the audience, and it can escalate to antagonize the entire press."
Of course, the campaign season is still early, and there are reports of discussions between Fox News and other organizations to sponsor Democratic debates.
And also, conservatives can play the same game. At the blog the corner, which is sponsored by the National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez, the site's editor, posted this comment: "If this becomes a tool of the blogosphere -- calling for boycotts -- the right will be making noise about an MSNBC/CNN debate any day now."
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS