Give It up on All the Fox-Bashing

Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News? By Howell Raines Sunday, March 14, 2010; B05 One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history? Oh come now. Unprecedented? The ex-executive editor of the New York Times, suddenly having a professional conscience after all those years of Bush passes on his watch? In the words of another Raines (Claude, in Casablanca), "I'm shocked, Howard, simply shocked." . . .

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity th…