By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON ― The United States it sometimes seems is swimming in a sea of vitriol. Turn on Fox News, and you’re likely to see and hear a cast of loudmouths shilling for the ``Tea Party” crowd and denouncing ``leftists” such as Nancy Pelosi or Paul Krugman. You don’t hear Fox talk about ``rightists,” though ``conservative” seems to be OK by those on the Fox side of what it calls ``fair and balanced” reporting. As for the ``liberals,” a word that’s only slightly less pejorative than “leftist” these days, they have a lot to say on MSNBC and elsewhere about the evils of the right, the conservatives, Christian evangelicals and right-to-bear-arms advocates.
In the midst of this cacophony of contentious caterwauling, you have to wonder what any administration in Washington should do to head off disaster. As the stock market plunged after Congress came up with a compromise to head off the disgracer of going into default, the temptation was to ask, ``What if?” What if, for instance, President Obama had said no to compromise, no to any bill that did not require a sharp increase in taxes on the rich-growing-richer? What if Obama had risked sending the United States into default for the first time ever by resolutely insisting on ending the tax breaks bequeathed the rich or merely well-to-do during the George W. Bush presidency? And what if the United States were now in default as stock markets plunged?
One thing is pretty sure. Obama would then have been criticized for placing the nation at risk. The critics would have bayed as heatedly as they’re excoriating him now for having appeared weak and yielding, for giving in to the conservatives and saying, OK, let’s get this thing out of the way for the sake of staying out of default, and we’ll go for higher taxes later. Could Obama have done anything to convey an impression of dynamism in the midst of the worst crisis of his presidency ― worse, if that’s possible, than natural disasters or America’s wars from Libya to Afghanistan?
The attacks on Obama from Fox, however, raise a question of a different sort. Wasn’t it just a couple of weeks ago that we were reading about a British weekly tabloid called the News of the World that was authorizing investigators to hack into celebrities’ phone lines? That story faded away as the financial crisis spread like wildfire around the world, but Fox and the News of the World do or did have one thing in common. That is, before Rupert Murdoch shut down the News of the World in the midst of the hacking scandal, he was the owner of one of the world’s most infamous tabloids and America’s loudest-talking TV news network.
It’s a safe bet, if Murdoch were ever called to the stand to explain how Fox gets away with insulting everyone on ``the left” for everything from facial appearance to intellect, he would say he it was all the handiwork of people he hardly knew. Wasn’t that his excuse for the News of the World listening in on phone conversations, and wasn’t that what the paper’s editors were saying until they were arrested, at which point they began referring all questions to their lawyers? Surely there must be other parallels ― some Fox equivalent, for instance, to the scary-haired Rebecca, the top editor who partied with a cast of potentates and got a prime minister or two to come to her wedding.
The funny thing about those who courted the editors of the News of the World is that none of them would have wanted to be caught dead reading the paper. In the stratified world of British journalism, British class rules reign supreme. The upper classes, the educated middle class, the chattering classes, read one or more of four or five up-market dailies and two Sunday papers. Murdoch plays both ends of the scale. Years before he got hold of the Wall Street Journal, he took over the New York Post, converting it from a leftist to a right-wing tabloid. In London, he acquired both the venerable Times of London and the tabloid Sun, Britain’s largest-selling daily. Oh yes, he also owns London’s Sunday Times, the antithesis, in class of readership, of the News of the World.
The class appeal of Fox is not so easily categorized. Liberals may scorn it, but the network’s yakking cuts across class lines. Viewers are pulled into those noisy gabfests in between bits of news about what’s actually going on. As malaise deepens, the right-left clash, the blame game and the insults are likely to reverberate over the air as never before. All of that makes the News of the World sound small-time. In my visits to London, I used to pick up the paper and read the scandals, but I can’t remember any of them.
Well, there may be one exception. My favorite News of the World story, emblazoned on page one, had to do with a British snooker player, a celebrity among the paper’s readers, on a holiday in Bangkok. News of the World gumshoes tailed him, discovering he had had a tryst with a Thai bargirl. It always seemed to me the real news would have been if he had ``not” had one such night in Bangkok. Somewhere in there may lurk a lesson for Fox commentators. I’m still trying to work it out.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, author, journalist and columnist, worked for tabloids in New York and Chicago, including the New York Post, years before Murdoch became America’s Citizen Rupert.