Bob Laurence: They Just Don't Like Fox News

h/t to Michelle Malkin who is initiating a blog burst on behalf of kidnapped journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. The two were working for Fox News when they were kidnapped by Palestinian gumen over a week ago and they haven't been heard from since.

This is, not only sick, it is incredibly stupid.

From BOB LAURENCE, TV critic, San Diego Union-Tribune: I'd like to offer a couple of possible reasons for the lack of attention given to the kidnapping of the two guys from Fox:

One is that, sadly, they are far from the first to be kidnapped, injured or killed. They are, alas, only the most recent two of many. The kidnapping or targeting of journalists in Iraq isn't the story it once was.

Excuse me? Is that from a media critic of the same media who cannot keep itself from counting up the American and Iraqi war dead, one by one over the years, making it always as big a story as it can? What of the car bombers in Iraq, the IEDs? Surely none of that is really news anymore given Laurence's standard of news-worthiness?

Anything that bolsters the MSM's continued desire to run down the Iraq War as failed, as another Vietnam, well, that never gets to be old hat, or hardly worth the mentioning. What an absolutely silly rationale for relatively little reporting on the kidnapped Fox journalists. Unfortunately, it gets worse.

Laurence suggests the real motivation of the media is because it's Fox. The only network I'm aware of Fox ever bickering with is CNN. And frankly, fewer people care about CNN than watch it these days. Either way, bringing such petty motivations into something like this is one of the most revealing displays of smallness of heart and mind I've ever seen. One can only imagine what type of individual would write this as a rationale for not covering the kidnapping of a fellow journalist, whatever the network.

Second, Fox has deliberately set itself apart from other news media. Starting at the top with Roger Ailes, the Fox sales pitch has been to deride other media, to declare itself the one source of the real truth, the sole source of 'fair and accurate' news reporting. As a result, there's not a reservoir of kinship or good will with Fox on the part of the rest of the news media. You can't keep insulting people and then expect friendship when you need it.

They've made it a policy to keep a distance between themselves and the rest of the media, far beyond the usual competitive spirit, so that's where they are: at a distance.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Malkin added the news that Laurence is a Howard Dean donor.