OxBlog

# Posted 7:06 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

WHY SEAN HANNITY IS WORSE THAN DAN RATHER: Nice try, TNR, but you're just plain wrong. Here's the argument:

Dan Rather may have indeed been duped, but even if that is the case, his mistake was far less problematic than the offenses against journalism perpetrated daily by Fox News...[W]e ought to be much more concerned about the willful journalistic contortions of the latter than the alleged sloppiness of the former.

Fox reporters hide behind the conceit that they are opinion journalists, and media critics therefore hold them to a lower standard--as if being in the business of opinion journalism frees Fox from the obligation to deal in facts.

It should be clear from this week's torrent of commentary that Rather is held to very high standards by his critics... No one at the Post, the Times, ABC, or NBC is doing the same for Fox's journalists.

Since I don't watch Fox, I can't comment on its integrity. But that is exactly the point. Ten million Americans watch Dan Rather every evening and they trust what he says. Fox's audience is a fraction of that.

When Rather breaks a story, it goes straight onto the front pages of the major daily papers. When Fox comes up with something like a doctored photo of John Kerry with Jane Fonda, no one cares until independent sources validate its authenticity.

But that really isn't the point. No one thinks that CBS lies to its audience on a regular basis. The issue is whether Rather's transparently partisan decision to publicize the forged Killian memos indicates that one ought to interpret all CBS broadcasts as an extension of its correspondents' liberal politics, the same one way one interprets all Fox broadcasts as an extension of its correspondents' conservative politics.

As I've pointed out before, I'm not in any position to comment on the partisan content of either Fox or CBS broadcasts, because I don't watch them. The purpose of this post is simply to expose the false premise on which TNR's argument rests, i.e. that the focus of Memogate is Dan Rather's "alleged sloppiness" rather than the ideological biases that inform his broadcasts.

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