{"id":12825,"date":"2007-09-09T16:05:18","date_gmt":"2007-09-09T20:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12825.html"},"modified":"2007-09-09T16:05:18","modified_gmt":"2007-09-09T20:05:18","slug":"the-friendly-confines-of-fox-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-friendly-confines-of-fox-news\/","title":{"rendered":"The friendly confines of Fox News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Given that he&#8217;s working <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12824.html\">hand-in-hand<\/a> with the White House&#8217;s public-relations team, Gen. David Petraeus enters tomorrow&#8217;s congressional testimony as an advocate for the president&#8217;s policy, not a neutral and objective observer. To reinforce this belief, Petraeus has decided to spend some of his evening tomorrow night with the &#8220;fair and balanced&#8221; team <a href=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/2007\/09\/09\/petraeus-fox-pr\/\">at Fox News<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Tomorrow night, after spending the day telling Congress that President Bush&#8217;s Iraq escalation should continue, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will take their PR campaign to a more comfortable setting: Fox News.<\/p>\n<p>On Fox News Sunday this morning, host Chris Wallace announced the interview: &#8220;Now a special program note. Tomorrow night at 9:00 p.m. eastern on the Fox News Channel, Brit [Hume] will have an exclusive interview with General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about the state of the Iraq war and their testimony to Congress. Please be sure to watch.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t an entirely new concern. In July, Petraeus chatted with far-right activist and blogger Hugh Hewitt, prompting Andrew Sullivan <a href=\"http:\/\/andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com\/the_daily_dish\/2007\/07\/hoping-for-fail.html\">to note<\/a>, &#8220;There&#8217;s concern [Petraeus is] not a disinterested party in a critical debate. There is worry that by talking to partisans like Hugh Hewitt, he will only undermine his credibility.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Now, the next question is what <i>other<\/i> news outlets Petraeus may speak with tomorrow. When FNC claims to have an &#8220;exclusive&#8221; with Petraeus, that only means that Brit Hume will have a one-on-one discussion with the General. Petraeus can, however, have other &#8220;exclusive&#8221; interviews with other networks. In fact, given the interest in his perspective, Petraeus could probably get as much airtime as he&#8217;d like on <i>every<\/i> network.<\/p>\n<p>So, will Petraeus stick to the friendly confines of a partisan network, from which he can expect fawning questions, or will Petraeus seek a broader, more mainstream audience?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Given that he&#8217;s working hand-in-hand with the White House&#8217;s public-relations team, Gen. David Petraeus enters tomorrow&#8217;s congressional testimony as an advocate for the president&#8217;s policy, not a neutral and objective observer. To reinforce this belief, Petraeus has decided to spend some of his evening tomorrow night with the &#8220;fair and balanced&#8221; team at Fox News. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}