"Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the GOP"

"The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological... what I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party."

I didn't even know there was a tea party thing on October 17. Did it make the news anywhere else?

Ican has always gotten pleasure at generating Acronyms. HE is a GOPAG (a GOP Acronym Generatist)

Of course by making this into an issue, it means that for other news organizations to cover it properly they will have to examine what it is Fox does. It might turn out badly for Fox before it is all over.

So what type of example did the Bush administration set? A few lowlights:

" The Pentagon had a secret program to use retired military analysts to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” Most of these analysts had “ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.” When the “message machine” became public, Perino defended the program as “absolutely appropriate.”

" The U.S. military was “secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.” The articles contained anonymous quotes from U.S. military officials " which may or may not have been authentic " and “read more like press releases than news stories.”

" The Education Department paid conservative pundit Armstrong Williams hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Even after the corruption was uncovered, the administration defended it as “a permissible use of taxpayer funds.”

" The Government Accountability Office found that the Bush administration violated anti-propaganda laws when it disguised two promotional ads " on federal drug policy and Medicare " as news reports. The “reports” aired on dozens of stations, and the GAO “faulted the administration for distributing seemingly independent, ready-to-air reports that did not inform viewers that they came from the government.”

Bush also called a New York Times reporter “a major league asshole” " and never apologized. In fact, Bush never gave the NYT a single interview throughout his presidency. The White House frequently went after NBC News, and Perino has admitted that they essentially froze out MSNBC “towards the end.”

THE BUSHES WERE NEVER CONSERVATIVES.

If your definition of "conservative" is Goldwater, David is right.
Bush is a prime example of today's conservative.
I doubt Goldwater would recognize today's "conservative" movement. I doubt Reagan would.

And you know it's funny Dana, I didn't do a thorough search, but I did do a little Google thing. The New York Times came out against it, The Nation refers to, says there's a word for what the President and his aids are doing and that's "whining" and refers to the President as the "Whiner-in-Chief", the Baltimore Sun thinks it's stupid, and the Newsweek column said that it is essentually un-American.

Newsweek called Obama un-American? Not only is that complete bullshit, it's backwards. The Newsweek article Doocy cites says that Rupert Murdoch is un-American for bringing the Australian-British-continental model of politicized media to the United States via Fox News. That's right, Newsweek is calling the very existence of Fox News un-American, not the White House for criticizing it.

The article is even called "The O’Garbage Factor. Fox News isn't just bad. It's un-American." How can you possibly **** up the meaning of that article? I guess when Doocy told Perino "I didn't do a thorough search", he wasn't kidding.

The Newsweek article in question can be found here, and below is the relevant excerpt:

What's most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence"that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in many other countries that do have a free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he's doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, "fair and balanced" is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media's role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes fair play. But it's a demonstrable deceit that no longer deserves equal time.

You know, I just don’t get the controversy over the Obama administration’s criticism of Fox News. For one thing, it’s entirely accurate: Fox does not approach its job the same way other organizations do. Most legitimate news organizations honestly attempt to purge their presentations of bias. I’d be the first to concede that all journalistic institutions sometimes fall short of that goal, but the point is, as professionals they try.

Fox doesn’t even make the effort, or even the pretense of an effort. At best, they make the pretense of a pretense of an effort. Bias is what they’re selling " they know it, and their audience knows it. So what’s the big deal about the White House saying out loud what everyone already knows?

Beyond that, though, I’m surprised to see the Washington media play this as some kind of new threat to the purity of media-political relations. It’s not. The Bush administration used to complain publicly and often about coverage from MSNBC and NBC. The Clintons were outraged at how the New York Times covered the Whitewater investigation, and they probably were right to be angry. In a speech back in the ’90s, Newt Gingrich fought back against critical coverage by telling Atlanta business leaders that they ought to institute an ad boycott against the AJC.

Most of the time, the publishers and news executives who field those kinds of angry threats from politicians don’t even bother telling their reporters about them, because the reporters don’t need to know. But sometimes the message is communicated directly. I once had a very influential Democratic state legislator " back when Democrats ran the Capitol " suggest to me privately that if the AJC edit board would back off an ethics reform crusade, legislators might look more favorably on funding a downtown multimodal station. (Note that no such station exists.) And Maynard Jackson, exasperated at criticism over his muni bond business, once informed a group of AJC editors that “I don’t work on Jay Bookman’s plantation.” That was a personal favorite.

The point is, it’s a rough-and-tumble relationship between the media and those we cover, and it always will be and ought to be. Politicians who feel under attack will return fire, and personally I think they have that right. What Harry Truman said is true of the media as well as politicians: If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.