Everyone--and I do mean everyone, including Silicon Alley Insider, not exactly a Cable Game regular--professes to be upset over Fox News' apparent photo-altering of pictures of Jacques Steinberg and Steven Redicliffe. Those two employees of The New York Times, of course, are regarded as big enemies of FNC.
OK, fine. I don't recall liberal critics being so upset when Richard Nixon was being ripped and ridiculed, but that's another story.
The Cable Gamer is not here to argue the merits and demerits of the argument about whether FNC did the right thing or not in photo-shopping Steinberg and Reddicliffe. There's a long back story here--Redicliffe is a former News Corp. employee--and no doubt those two Timesmen will find a way to retaliate, soon, against FNC.
What I will point out, though, is that adjusting appearances is an ancient art of political commentary. Above, for example, see how Thomas Nast, probably the most famous and influential political cartoonist in US history, drew Boss Tweed in the late 19th century.
That's probably not the way that Tweed's mother would have depicted him, huh? But Nast didn't care. The First Amendment protected his right to mock Tweed, and the same First Amendment protects Fox's right to stick it to Steinberg and Reddicliffe.
You don't have to like it, I don't have to like it. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed in a Supreme Court opinion nearly a century ago, free speech isn't for the speech we love, it's for the speech we hate.
