‘Feeding Fox a Slice of Raw Denunciation was Like Dumping Gasoline into a Fire’

In the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal, columnist Thomas Frank opines about the White House’s feud with the News Corp.-owned Fox News Channel.

…no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America’s disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News’s lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.

Like others before him, Frank writes about how White House v. media 2009, is much like White House v. media 1972 with FNC founder and chairman Roger Ailes squarely in both fights. And Frank concludes:

…one wishes that the Obama administration had taken on Fox News with a little more skill. As cultural criticism goes, this was clumsy, plodding stuff. What the situation required was sarcasm, irony, a little humor. Simply feeding Fox a slice of raw denunciation was like dumping gasoline into a fire. It did nothing but furnish the network with a real-world validation of its long-running conspiracy theories — and a nice bump in its ratings.

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