That fiercely independent journalism

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal "Best of the Web"

The White House's war on Fox News Channel has provided a great deal of levity, in particular because of the awkward position in which it has put liberal journalists. They seem torn between conflicting loyalties. On the one hand, they feel a professional solidarity with fellow journalists; on the other, an ideological sympathy with the people in power. So here we have Time's Joe Klein, in a blog entry defending Fox News:

Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

To be sure, that is Klein's "to be sure" paragraph. He goes on to make some perfectly reasonable criticisms of the administration, although in the course of doing so he repeats the McCarthyesque claim "that Fox News spreads seditious lies to its demographic sliver of an audience."

Then we have an NPR commentator who, as the Washington Examiner's Byron York reports, last week harshly criticized the administration:

On National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" Wednesday, NPR political editor Ken Rudin said the White House campaign against Fox News is a bad idea. "It's not only aggressive, it's almost Nixonesque," Rudin said. "I mean, you think of what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list and their attacks on the media; certainly Vice President Agnew's constant denunciation of the media. Of course, then it was a conservative president denouncing a liberal media, and of course, a lot of good liberals said, 'Oh, that's ridiculous. That's an infringement on the freedom of press.' And now you see a lot of liberals almost kind of applauding what the White House is doing to Fox News, which I think is distressing."

NPR listeners apparently flooded the network with complaints that Rudin had not just criticized their hero but likened him to one of their demon figures. The next day, Rudin published a groveling apology on his NPR blog, calling the comparison "boneheaded" as well as "foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately, embarrassing to me." And maybe the comparison was inapt. As far as we know, Nixon never managed to extract this sort of confession from one of his critics in the media.

A reader passes along a July 2006 article from U.S. News & World Report about the Russian media. "Given the current Obama administration attacks on Fox News," he writes, "I thought it was somewhat topical. And fun." Excerpt:

Before Putin took over in 2000, opposition voices were often heard on the three dominant television networks, particularly on the then privately owned NTV channel. There were hostile interviews with officials, merciless political satire shows, and investigations of what human-rights groups call Russia's dirty war in Chechnya. Today, NTV is owned by the state-run natural gas behemoth Gazprom, and its output differs little from that of the two big state-owned channels Rossiya and Channel One.
A typical news broadcast on all three channels consists of showing Putin and government ministers hard at work, feel-good reports on life in the armed forces, and historical features related to the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. Opposition figures are rarely seen. The Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, a leading Russian press freedom group, released a study in April that found that 91 percent of political news on Channel One was devoted to Putin and the "ruling powers." Nearly three quarters of that coverage was positive, a quarter neutral--none of it critical.

Fun it is (unless you're a Russian journalist), though the comparison doesn't really hold here either. In U.S. News's telling, Putin remade the media in his own image. Obama is dealing with media that are private, independent--and fiercely loyal of their own accord.

The US media is not really an Obama whore. At least so far they have not been paid, although some are suggesting that some money left on the nightstand would help pay the rent. They give it up for free.