Is someone really going to blame the Mark Halperin remark-and-suspension on....Roger Ailes and Fox News? Yes, Los Angeles Times media reporter Tim Rutten did on Saturday:
Ever since Roger Ailes created Fox News as a low-budget, ideologically conservative televised version of right-wing talk radio — and swept the ratings table in the process — CNN and MSNBC have been consciously counter-programming their successful rival. One of the casualties of this competition has been legitimate political journalism. The Halperin incident is a natural outgrowth of the direction political reporting has taken on the cable networks, and that, in turn, is a consequence of treating political journalism as entertainment, as talk radio does — a trend that has turned out to be the ideologues' best friend.
Rutten also somehow thinks CNN balances out its ideolgues in an "illusory stab at fairness." It's natural that journalists don't like politicians becoming talk-show hosts...although this article is about cable, so he can't really talk about presidential aides becoming the host of Good Morning America. It continued:
MSNBC now programs for a Democratic audience, while CNN broadcasts ideologues from across the spectrum in a futile and, in fact, illusory stab at fairness. Increasingly, actual political reporters or analysts are replaced by campaign advisors and strategists from both parties. Fox has upped the ante by signing Republican politicians themselves — Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich — as on-air "commentators." The only losers are those who hunger for real reporting or analysis as opposed to partisan spin.
"Morning Joe" is as good an example of this process as any. Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Florida. He's essentially MSNBC's token conservative and a dependable personality in cable's impersonation of political journalism. His show has a delay switch because two years ago, he used an obscenity to characterize Obama's then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Last year, Scarborough was suspended for making contributions to Republican candidates. Yet there he is, every morning, egging his guests to take just the sort of extreme and, therefore, entertainingly attention-getting remarks that Halperin made.
