“They pretend to be a journalist, and at the same time they’re saying, ‘I’m not a journalist’ … they then state as facts things that aren’t facts at all.” That’s not a quote from Anita Dunn, who made similar claims railing against Fox News: No those are the words of pundit Bernie Goldberg two weeks ago.
But last night, Goldberg was back on “The Factor,” defending FNC against what Bill O’Reilly called the “White House jihad against Fox.” Along the way, he dropped the bombshell of a theory that (liberal) women and minorities in the newsroom were responsible for the death of traditional journalism — and O’Reilly partially agreed.
O’Reilly brought out the big guns last night to break down what he called “the White House jihad against Fox News” — Brit Hume, Juan Williams and Mary Katharine Ham all opined on White House Communications Director Anita Dunn‘s recent critique of the network. But it was O’Reilly’s regular media critic Bernard Goldberg who offered the frankest assessment. Namely, the WH attack on Fox was due in part to Rahm Emanuel‘s “fit of macho.” “Rahm Emmanuel turned on the TV Set in the White House one day. He saw one too many things on Fox that he doesn’t like, and in a fit of macho, he declared war on Fox News!” But Goldberg was just getting started.
In a discussion about the death of traditional journalism and the rise of opinion journalism to take its place, Goldberg posited that the sudden rise in “opinion media” — that is, the very thing Anita Dunn criticized Fox News for practicing — is due to the “diversification” of the news room:
“Once upon a time the newsrooms were overwhelmingly populated with white men. Some of them went to Princeton, some of them never went to college. Blue collar, white collar … but white men. As diversification took over we got African-Americans in the news room – a good thing. We got women in the news room — a good thing … Hispanics … But you know what we wound up with, really? We wound up with white liberals in the newsroom and black liberals in the newsroom. We wound up with male liberals, and female liberals. We wound up with Hispanic liberals and Asian liberals. All these groups that never existed in the old newsroom tended to be more liberal than the white males. And as we got diversified in the newsroom, we got more liberal. And that liberal-ness, if you can call it that, created a situation that was an unforeseen consequence.”
>>>Next: O’Reilly agrees, but dodges a bullet. Plus, video.
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