FAIR Blog » Chris Wallace

Dick Cheney's Ho-Hum About Liberal Media Bias

Peter Hart — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:41:18 +0000

When Dick Cheney appeared on the Today show, at the conclusion of the interview a camera that shows the crowd outside the studio picked up this image:

That sign probably represented the harshest take on Cheney's record that TV viewers saw during the PR campaign for his book.

Unsurprisingly, it caught someone's attention over at Fox News, and on Sunday host Chris Wallace decided to use it in a question about liberal media bias. That's not surprising. Cheney's response, though, is worth a look:

WALLACE: What do you make of that? I mean, I somehow doubt that if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were speaking, they would have taken the shot and then suddenly have person with a sign would have been putting their pictures in. Simply, do you think there is a liberal bias in the mainstream media?

CHENEY: I think there probably is. But I don't spend time worrying it. I think those of us right-thinking conservatives find that there are a lot of outlets out there now in the media, on the Internet, that give us ample opportunity for our points of view to get across and to be heard.

You hear this every so often from powerful conservatives like William Kristol and Pat Buchanan. I guess it's hard for people who spend their lives pontificating on national television to faithfully recite their team's talking points about a media system that is apparently allergic to their point of view.

Strange Questions, Strange Journalism

Jim Naureckas — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:22:27 +0000

Steve Benen of Political Animal points out a couple of strange questions posed by corporate journalists--one to each of last year's major presidential candidates. In this post, Benen quotes an unnamed New York Times reporter (apparently either Sheryl Gay Stolberg or Steven Lee Meyers) basically red-baiting Barack Obama: "The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?" The same reporter, or maybe a different one--I guess they were speaking ex cathedra--later pressed Obama: "If you're not a socialist, are you a liberal?"

In a later post, Benen ponders Fox News' Chris Wallace asking John McCain, "You ever feel like saying 'I told you so'?" (McCain declined to do so, though he said, "I'm sure that would be a pleasant feeling.") As Benen notes, it's not clear what McCain told us, or what in the first six weeks of the Obama administration would cause us to reevaluate it. But as he says, the implication is clear: "Looking back at the presidential campaign, McCain was right about...something."

Fox sometimes points to Wallace to show that they're not out of the mainstream of corporate media. The scary thing is that they might have a point.

Chris Wallace and Why Watergate Worked

Jim Naureckas — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:46:25 +0000

At a screening of the film Frost/Nixon, Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace defends George W. Bush against the assertion--which doesn't seem to have been made by anyone present--that Bush's crimes were worse than Richard Nixon's (Salon, 12/2/08):

It trivializes Nixon's crimes and completely misrepresents what George W. Bush did. Whatever George W. Bush did was after the savage attack of 9/11, in which 3,000 Americans were killed, it was done in service of trying to protect this country. I'm not saying that you have to agree with everything he did, but it was all done in the service of trying to protect this country and keep us safe. And the fact is that we sit here so comfortably, and the country has not been attacked again since 9/11.

Of course, Nixon would have argued that everything he did was in the service of trying to protect America from enemies. (In fact, if I remember correctly, he does make this argument in the theatrical version of Frost/Nixon, which draws heavily from transcripts of actual interviews.) The enemies the U.S. faced then were much better armed than the ones it faces now--and they never attacked us, so, hey, Watergate must have worked!