Howell Raines, Fox News and Journalism Objectivity
March 18th, 2010
Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson
Former New York Times editor and Alabama native Howell Raines popped out of his Pocono Mountains retirement this week to take on Fox News in the editorial section of the Washington Post.
His point was that newspaper reporters should take on Fox News for the biased way the cable network has covered the health care reform debate.
“Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?” Raines asks.
Everything he says is true. It’s just that it comes a bit late in the game, long after Raines himself was in a position to do something about the kind of bad, corporate journalism that was already developing while he was still in it full time.
Some of us on the Web Press have been calling Fox biased and wrong for years.
Where was Raines in this fight when he ran the New York Times as executive editor in 2002 and 2003?
