went along with the Bush administration’s drive for war<\/a>, neglecting the fourth estate’s responsibility to raise questions about the necessity and the timing of the invasion.<\/p>\nIn a CNBC interview with Tina Brown, Amanpour was asked if the administration effectively rolled over the media in advance of the war, as journalists accepted the White House’s rhetoric blindly and without skepticism.<\/p>\n
“I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled,” Amanpour said. “I’m sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did.”<\/p>\n
Amanpour is right on both counts. CNN saw that Fox News became the administration’s cheerleaders. This put the respectable network in the untenable position of being “unpatriotic” if it dared to question if the war was necessary, or worse, wise.<\/p>\n
“All of the entire body politic in my view, whether it’s the administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction,” Amanpour added. “I mean, it looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels.”<\/p>\n
It’s about six months too late for Amanpour to be admitting this publicly, but better late than never.
\n
\nEqually interesting for me was the response from Fox News Channel when it was asked for its reaction to Amanpour’s analysis. FNC never fails to amaze me and this was no exception.<\/p>\n
Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti said of Amanpour’s comments: “Given the choice, it’s better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda.”<\/p>\n
Perfect. Here’s the trouble with Fox News in a nutshell, captured perfectly by a network spokesperson in 19 words. <\/p>\n
Amanpour criticizing FNC for their ultra-biased, propagandistic coverage was, to be sure, a serious charge in professional journalism. Given the facts, I think it was justified.<\/p>\n
But for Fox to come back and suggest — in a formal statement in the press — that Amanpour sides with al Queda demonstrates just how low the network is willing to go. This is obviously a network that has no sense of decency and no sense of shame.<\/p>\n
Then again, what else should we expect from Fox News?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve always liked Christiane Amanpour; I’ve found her to be a talented and well-informed journalist with an impressive background in covering foreign affairs. This week, my opinion of her went up after she became the latest high-profile journalist to lament the fact that the media went along with the Bush administration’s drive for war, neglecting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}