Fox News Watch Panel: Media Response To Libyan Action Falls On Partisan Lines
With the “kinetic operations” in Libya by American troops fully underway, the media is only beginning to comprehend how to evaluate our intervention in the struggle. The Fox New Watch panel analyzed the response to the invasion by the media in the context of President Obama as peacemaker, and were evenly torn between considering it a pure partisan issue or a matter of the media simply not having enough information to make a move.
Beginning the segment with President Obama’s acceptance speech after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, host Jon Scott went around the table asking for general evaluations of the response to the Libyan intervention. Jim Pinkerton saw it as a “pretty donkeys versus elephants” situation, going as far as to highlight the lack of loud objection on the left to “a great display of partisanship.” In this opinion he was joined by Judy Miller, although she later added that the problem the media has had in figuring out how to respond to the war is that “the left is split on this war”– to which the rest of the panel protested that it was still unclear whether this would pan out into another war.
While Pinkerton and Miller hovered around the same general opinion of the response to the invasion as partisan but still confused, Mary Katharine Ham and Kirsten Powers took those arguments to either corner– Ham arguing that the relative quiet in response to the decision to enter Libya proved liberal bias, Powers arguing that the partisanship exhibited in favor of the Iraq War during the Bush administration was the truer demonstration of subjectivity. “The media were cheerleaders and they were going along with the whole thing,” Powers argued, noting that she believed the response to Libya would have been the same regardless of President Obama’s party.
The debate via Fox News below:
