Fox News’ James Rosen Calls Bill Burton’s Priorities USA ‘Left-Wing Super PAC’
While Fox News’ roster of opinion shows has earned the network a large, elsewhere under-served audience and the enmity of liberal media watchdog groups, the network has long maintained that their conservative opinion culture does not bleed through the wall that protects its “hard news” programming. In yet anpther example to the contrary, Fox News reporter James Rosen, reporting on former White House spokesman Bill Burton, referred to Burton’s Priorities USA Action as a “left-wing Super PAC.”
Rosen, reporting on Bill Burton’s controversial remark about Democratic donors viewing Mitt Romney as a “clown,” told Special Report‘s Bret Baier that “Bill burton, the former Obama White House aid, running a left-wing Super PAC, Priorities USA, sought to explain why the Obama-Biden team has not met its own fundraising goal.”
A search of the TV Eyes transcription database reveals that, of over 4,600 mentions of Priorities USA in the past three months, no other TV news organization has referred to the organization as a left-wing Super PAC (most call Priorities a “Pro-Obama Super PAC”), nor has Fox News referred to any conservative committee as a “right-wing Super PAC.”
To Fox’s detractors, who associate the entire network with the firebreathing conservative likes of Sean Hannity, this might seem like a discovery you would make about bears and the woods, but Fox News has taken great pains to promote the idea that there is an impenetrable wall between opinion and their ostensibly unbiased, “Fair and Balanced” hard news coverage.
In fact, there are many journalism pros at Fox News who play it down the middle, a fact that we’ve noted many times on this site, and until recently, I included James Rosen in that category. It’s entirely possible, though, that he was reading someone else’s copy.
That’s the real significance of this, because this appears to be a new thing, which means media watchdogs should stick a pin in this to see if it becomes a trend. Media Matters has documented several instances in which Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon has directed hard news staff to use language like this. It remains to be seen if Fox News reporters and/or editors are being directed to refer to Priorities USA as a “left-wing Super PAC,” but if the phrase becomes commonplace in the network’s news programming, we’ll have the answer.
It’s also possible that the conservative culture at Fox News’ opinion programming has simply had an influence on Rosen, just as the anti-Obama culture at The Daily Caller led Neil Munro to heckle the President in the Rose Garden. In any case, such comments from reporters severely undercuts Fox News’ claim to Fairness and Balance.
Here’s the clip, from Fox News’ Special Report:
