If Congress Slaps Rove with Contempt, How Will His Bosses at Fox and Newsweek Deal with It?

[babylonsister]

If Congress Slaps Rove with Contempt, How Will His Bosses at Fox and Newsweek Deal with It?

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted May 22, 2008.

The press is too busy employing -- and praising -- Rove to notice his mounting legal jeopardy.


If Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) holds true to his recent promise to slap Karl Rove with a contempt of Congress charge for refusing to answer questions about explosive abuse-of-power allegations and whether Rove unleashed the Justice Department on a prominent Alabama Democrat, it will be interesting to see how Rove's newfound media employers at Newsweek, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal handle the story.

It will also be worth noting how Beltway opinion-makers in the press, who in recent weeks have been praising Rove for his second act as a full-time pundit, deal with the messy development.

When Rove began lining up media jobs following his 2007 White House departure, there were howls of protest about such an obvious and controversial partisan being embraced by media outlets as a news analyst.

The politics-to-press revolving door is not good for journalism. (We need more reporters, not pundits.) But the trend is not going away, and history shows the media are far more willing to hire partisan Republicans than Democrats.

My beef with the Rove hiring, though, centers on two issues related specifically to him. The first is about the still-unfolding saga out of Alabama (more on that below) and the way Rove's new employers consistently downplay that troubling story. As do journalists now busy handing out kudos to Rove for his talking-head talent.

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, why is Rove being held up as a paragon of political analysis at the very moment the Republican president he helped mold, and the Republican Congress he helped steer, are both in complete free falls? I don't remember the mainstream media clamoring to sign up the political insights of Hamilton Jordan just as President Jimmy Carter plummeted in the polls.

more...

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/86099/?page=entire

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Story? What story?

Hey, did ya hear that God endorsed McCain yesterday?