Fox News' North Korea coverage: Blame Clinton, no progressives allowed

[NNN0LHI]

http://mediamatters.org/items/200607070013

Summary: In their July 6 coverage of North Korea's missile tests, Fox News' The Big Story with John Gibson and Your World with Neil Cavuto featured segments on whether former President Bill Clinton is to blame for the current situation in North Korea. Neither program, however, hosted any Democrats or progressives to discuss Clinton's alleged culpability, nor did they examine the role the Bush administration's policies on North Korea have played in the situation.

In their July 6 coverage of North Korea's missile tests, Fox News' The Big Story with John Gibson and Your World with Neil Cavuto featured segments devoted to the question of whether former President Bill Clinton is to blame for the current situation in North Korea. Neither program, however, hosted any Democrats or progressives to discuss Clinton's alleged culpability, nor did they examine whether the Bush administration's policies on North Korea in the past five years might bear some responsibility.

One view of the current North Korean situation is that it is the result of policy failures that arose in past administrations and have endured up to this point. As Media Matters for America noted, Gordon Chang, author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World (Random House, January 2006), remarked on the July 4 edition of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360: "But we have to remember that the White House wants to downplay this because they don't want to highlight the failure of American policy for the last five years. This is not just a Bush failure. This failure is evident from administration to administration. The United States is large and North Korea is small, but they always seem to be one step ahead of us."

On the July 6 edition of Your World, guest host David Asman led a discussion with right-wing pundit Ann Coulter and Charles R. Smith, columnist for the conservative website NewsMax, on the subject of whether Clinton and "liberals" in general are to blame for the North Korean situation -- a position both Coulter and Smith espoused. Asman offered little to challenge Coulter's and Smith's attacks on Clinton, asking Coulter if Republican administrations had been "appeasing" North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il just as Clinton had, and noting that the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page "chastised" Bush for "making the same kind of overtures to the North Koreans for bad behavior that the Clinton administration was doing." Coulter rejected both of Asman's suggestions. Throughout the segment, the on-screen text read: "Is President Clinton to Blame for North Korea Crisis?"

[Hugin]

1. I seem to recall 'seals' on the NK nuclear program when Bill...

left office.

Then Duhbullya violated any compromise and the NK responded by kicking out
the two UN monitors, ripping open the seals, and tearing down the cameras.

That's my liberal recollection.

[NNN0LHI]

2. Lou Dobbs had a guy on trying to explain that North Korea began...

...building its first nuclear weapons when old man Bush was still president and Dobbs went postal on the guy for trying to set the record straight. It was all Clinton's and this administrations fault. Especially Clinton's. End of story.

Don

[Hugin]

3. Just what are Anne "Horse Neigh" Coulter's credentials for talking?

Did she go to the Jeffery Gannon Correspondence School Of Nuclear Non-Proliferation?

[still_one]

4. funny how they undid all the progress clinton did

now they blame it on him, and what really cuts the cake, now they are going back to what Clinton was doing with bilateral talks, which is what they wanted in the first place:

U.S. offers bilateral talks with N.Korea

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060708/ap_on_re_as/nkorea_missiles

unbelievable arragonce

[Mr_Spock]

5. I guess Bush is simply considered too incompetant to deal with anything

It's been 5 years Mr. Bush - what have you done to deal with this issue?

[Lefty48197]

6. FOX just continues to lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie lie and lie

and 38% of the public continues to believe them.