Liberal Journalists Discussed Having Government Shut Down Fox News

21 Jul, 2010 by Dave Blount

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The Daily Caller has released more chilling revelations from Journolist, where establishment journalists let it all hang out, believing that no one who isn’t a militant moonbat can hear them. We’ve already learned that they conspired to suppress coverage of Obama’s close association will the rabidly anti-American, Caucasian-hating maniac Jeremiah Wright. Now we learn that some of them want the federal government to shut down Fox News à la Hugo Chavez:

When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws. …

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”

The first reason that comes to mind is that this is America. But for the totalitarian left-wing thugs who run the establishment media, this being America is the problem they went into journalism to fix.

Some of the propagandists were a little squeamish about the rising level of totalitarian sentiment:

Time’s [Michael] Scherer, who had seemed to express support for increased regulation of Fox, suddenly appeared to have qualms: “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

Double kudos to Scherer, for hesitating to plunge head-first into full-blown Stalinism, and for lightening the ominous mood with some comic relief. Someone from Time Magazine — a celebrity-obsessed left-wing outlet that has fawned over Obama from the beginning — looks down his patrician nose at Fox for being a “less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy.” Bwahahaha!

But Zasloff stuck to his position. “I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”

Scherer seemed alarmed. “So we would have press briefings in which only media organizations that are deemed by the briefer to be acceptable are invited to attend?”

John Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, came down on Zasloff’s side, the side of censorship. “Pre-Fox,” he wrote, “I’d say Scherer’s questions made sense as a question of principle. Now it is only tactical.”

Back when they had total control of the message, they could afford to have principle — or to pretend to.

Sean Hannity says that journalism died in 2008, when the mainstream media discarded even the pretense of professionalism and objectivity for the sake of installing an unqualified, ultra-radical community organizer in the White House. Judis’s words make a perfect epitaph for the headstone: