It looks like FOX News is going to be a repository for former Clinton aides and lobbyists, failed CNN race-baiters, and disgraced journalists.
Fox News is expected to announce today the hiring of a new contributor, a veteran national security correspondent who has shared a Pulitzer Prize.
Her name is Judith Miller, and she is nothing if not controversial. Miller left the New York Times in 2005 after testifying in the trial of former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby that he had leaked her information about a CIA operative. Miller’s conduct in the case, which led to her serving 85 days in jail for initially refusing to testify, drew rebukes from the Times executive editor and some of her colleagues.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue, some of which were cited in a Times editor’s note acknowledging the flawed coverage. Miller, now with the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote when she left the paper that she had “become a lightning rod for public fury over the intelligence failures that helped lead our country to war.”
Miller will be an on-air analyst and will write for Fox’s Web site. “She has a very impressive résumé,” says Senior Vice President John Moody.
If FOX hadn’t lost Harold Ford, Jr. to MSNBC, things would be even worse. Of course, having the washed-up Ford Jr. partnering with retreads like Pat Buchanan doesn’t exactly make MSNBC up-to-date. And CNN still relies on dinosaurs like David Gergen, James Carville, and Paul Begala. Of the three networks, MSNBC is definitely the best-poised to assimilate to a new culture in politics. Their flagship programs, hosted by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, have a liberal lean and the kind of youthful, smart, cynicism appropriate for a new era of Democratic ascendancy.
If the polls are to be believed, the country is getting ready to close the book on the Reagan/Gingrich revolution, after having already ended the era of Clintonian dominance of the minority party. Yet, the cable news networks are not staffed-up to handle this new political milieu. Granted, these things take time, and the Republicans are in such disarray that they can hardly be expected to present a new face to the country. But if I were hiring on-screen talent at the cable news networks, the last people I’d be hiring are Clinton veterans, members of the DLC, race-baiters like Glenn Beck, and discredited journalists associated with Dick Cheney’s Iraq War propaganda.
The change in culture that an Obama presidency will bring is going to be disorientating to the people that have spent the last twenty years spouting ‘truisms’ about the basic conservatism of the American public. The fewer of those old hands you have on the teevee, the better and more appealing the coverage is going to be.
The punditocracy needs to clean house every bit as much as Washington DC.
