Image via CrunchBaseThe New York Times vs. Fox News - Keach Hagey - POLITICO.comNew York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller has become the most prominent media figure so far to blame Fox News for the polarized discourse that has become such a hot topic in the wake of the Tucson shooting.
During an interview with Marvin Kalb in at the National Press Club in Washington Monday night, Keller expanded his complaint with Rupert Murdoch beyond the scope of the Wall Street Journal’s newspaper war with the Times, accusing Murdoch of poisoning the American discourse through Fox News.
“I think the effect of Fox News on American public life has been to create a level of cynicism about the news in general,” Keller said. “It has contributed to the sense that they are all just out there with a political agenda, but Fox is just more overt about it. And I think that’s unhealthy.”
Keller has made similar comments interviews before, telling NPR in September that Murdoch’s “major impact in American media has been Fox News” and that “that impact has been to introduce a level of cynicism into the public debate.” But on Monday he went further.
“We have had a lot of talk since the Gabby Giffords attempted murder about civility in our national discourse, and I make no connection between the guy who shot those people in Tucson and the national discourse,” Keller said. “But it is true that the national discourse is more polarized and strident than it has been in the past, and to some extent, I would lay that at the feet of Rupert Murdoch.”
Fox News did not reply to a request for comment.
These comments were a one-two punch for Keller, allowing him to indirectly smear a business competitor while going directly after one of the Times’s loudest critics. (Fox News’s top-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, calls the paper part of the “far left” and has called its editorial page editor a “dishonest loon.”)
Ever since Murdoch declared war on the New York Times by launching a New York metro section of the Wall Street Journal last April, the normally staid Times leadership has gamely played the part of Murdoch’s dueling partner.
It welcomed its competition with a sarcastic leaked internal memo reminding the Journal editors that the Dodgers now played in Los Angeles. A few months later, Keller told Vanity Fair that the Times leadership was breathing a sigh of relief that the Journal’s effort turned out to be “so amateurish,” saying, “you had the sense that the emperor has no clothes.”
The Journal, meanwhile, fought back by including a photograph of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s chin in a an article about feminine-looking men.
The volleys had the old-fashioned, cartoonish quality you’d expect from a big-city newspaper war. There was a sense that it was all good fun.
And indeed, Keller has proven to be more of a pugilist than his predecessors, ready with the snarky quote when necessary. (“I read the Journal little less now,” he told Vanity Fair. “I find that I can skim it in a way that I couldn’t before.”)
In part because of this, the Times’s damaging investigative reporting on the News Corp-owned News of the World phone-hacking scandal, which continues to resound through the media and political worlds in the UK, raised a few eyebrows, including some at News Corp.
After the Times published its story, Bill Akass, the managing editor of The News of the World, objected, accusing the Times of using its journalism to attack a business rival.
”It stretches credulity to believe the decision to devote such resources to investigate an old story was an impartial act, uninfluenced by competitive rivalry,” he said.
The Times’s public editor, Arthur Brisbane, devoted a column to the charges, in which Keller defended the story, saying he and the other Times editors knew that the paper would use “this dubious argument” as its first line of defense.
”It was at least in the back of our minds that because Mr. Murdoch has declared war on The New York Times, a story centered on one of his newspapers had to bend over backwards to be seen as fair,” Keller told Brisbane. “In my view, the process was thorough and scrupulous.”
A few Times insiders wondered whether an earlier incarnation of the Times would have charged ahead on the story so forcefully, since the accusations that the Times was acting in its business interest would be hard to avoid.
But in an email to POLITICO last fall, Keller pointed to the Times’ long history of aggressive media reporting, which was tough on Murdoch before he declared war on the Times.
A 2007 two-part series took a hard and not always flattering look at Murdoch’s attempts to break into the Chinese market and lobby for favor on Capitol Hill, for example. And a January 2010 profile of Fox News chief Roger Ailes made news with a quote from British PR guru Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law, saying, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”
With Keller’s comments on Monday, he put himself squarely in Freud’s camp, and among those who regard Fox News as the barbarians at the gate.
But there have been times when Ailes’s news judgment bested Keller’s, by his own admission. The most famous of these was the ACORN scandal, which Fox News covered early and often and the Times all but ignored in the early days.
The episode prompted a column from public editor Clark Hoyt containing mea culpas from both Keller and Times managing editor Jill Abramson.
Abramson said the Times had been “slow off the mark” on the ACORN story, and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Keller said they would assign an editor to monitor opinion media – particularly, we can assume, of the right-wing variety — and brief them on any scandals that they should be paying attention to.
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