Howard Kurtz interviews Fox News chief Roger Ailes for The Washington Post. Kurtz's piece is interesting and amusing, insofar as it lets Ailes fly: "I've never felt out of the mainstream in America. I've felt out of the mainstream at Le Cirque." But others, too, get their say.
And while Kurtz, who works, also, at CNN, can't resist making a dig or two at Ailes, referring to him as "paunchy" (would he write that about Teddy Kennedy? would such an derisive adjective survive the Post's p.c. editors?) he makes plain that Fox has, indeed, changed the mediavironment: "We have forced a dialogue in the news business that didn't exist before."
True enough. In most places. But not so much at The New York Times, where Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse continues to conduct herself as if she were working for the American Civil Liberties Union. In the same "Style" section of the Post today, Kurtz notes a controversy involving Greenhouse, who told an audience at Harvard in June, "Our government had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world. And let's not forget the sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism." Greenhouse defended herself by saying that everything she said in June was a "fact."
OK, got it. Liberal opinion is now fact. This might be a good time to note that another longtime Washington Post reporter, Tom Edsall, who recently took a buyout from the Post, told radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt that reporters were Democrats by a ratio of between 15:1 and 25:1.
Greenhouse would certainly fit into the left side of those ratios, and Ailes knows it. It bothered him, and it bothered a lot of people. But unlike most mere complainers, Ailes did something about it: He created Fox News. And the world has been different ever since.
