Topic: NewsBusters
When Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter author Thomas Ricks pointed out on Fox News that the attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Behghazi, Libya, "has been extremely political, partly because Fox was operating as a wing of the Republican Party" -- which caused Ricks' interview on Fox to end abruptly -- the Media Research Center, longtime apologists for Fox News, went into full spin mode.
That resulted in a Nov. 26 NewsBusters post by Jeffrey Mayer that offered his own, um, unique take on the incident:
It’s commonplace for a news organization to be attacked for failing to cover certain major news events. On the other hand, it is rare for a news outlet to be attacked for doing its job and reporting the news.
According to Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Thomas Ricks, Fox News’ extensive reporting on the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi is not only a waste of time but an example of how Fox is, “the wing of the Republican Party.” Appearing on Monday’s Happening Now, Ricks openly called out Fox News for its coverage of what he dismissed as merely a “small firefight.”The brief segment started off on the wrong foot immediately with Ricks’ first comments being a swipe at Fox News where he claimed, “I think that Benghazi generally was hyped by this network especially.”
Co-host Jon Scott did his best to challenge Ricks assertions by asking him, “when you have four people dead including the first U.S. ambassador in more than 30 years, how do you call that hype?” When Ricks failed to answer Scott’s question and instead repeated his ridiculous assertions, Scott cut the interview short.
Meyer made no effort to explain exactly what was "ridiculous" about what Ricks said. Fox does, in fact, have a long history of being a semi-official mouthpiece for the Republican Party and conservative causes, and it has ceaselessly hyped the supposed "scandal" surrounding the Benghazi attack, pushing numerous falsehoods and distortions in the process.
But Meyer doesn't care about facts. He wasn't done ranting and spinning:
Given that the liberal media has failed to adequately report on the terrorist attack on our Libyan embassy one would expect a well-respected journalist like Thomas Ricks to praise Fox for their coverage. Unfortunately, Ricks decides to not only smear Fox but to classify the terrorist attack as merely a “small firefight” showing the unwillingness of most journalists to objectively cover a major foreign policy failure of the Obama administration.
Again, Meyers fails to disprove Ricks' purported "smear" of Fox. Nor does he consider the possibility that the reason nobody else but Fox is covering this story because Fox is motivated by its right-wing, anti-Obama bias to portray it as a "major foreign policy failure."
