The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Out on a Limb
“Wisconsin Democratic Senators May or May Not Return Soon”–headline, MyStateline.com, March 7
Snob Appeal
The top editor of the New York Times’s news pages is complaining about Fox News Channel again. At a New York Press Club question-and-answer session last week, Yahoo! News reports, Bill Keller “snarled” that “I think if you’re a regular viewer of Fox News, you’re among the most cynical people on planet Earth,” and that “I cannot think of a more cynical slogan than ‘Fair and Balanced.’ “
When you run a newspaper whose slogan is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” you open yourself up to ridicule by making fun of other news organizations’ slogans. Remember in 2009, when the Times was embarrassed by its torpid response to stories that embarrassed the Obama administration–the scandals involving Acorn and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the extreme views of Obama aide Van Jones?
As we noted at the time, the paper did eventually get around to these stories, but in each case it was many days behind Fox. …..
Clark Hoyt, then the Times’s “public editor,” reported that Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson had said “that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.” The man on the bubble beat was to work in secret: “Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.” As far as we know, that’s the last that was ever heard of this idea.
Our colleagues at Fox News seem to have gotten under Keller’s skin recently for some reason. As we noted last month, at a National Press Club appearance in Washington Keller responded to a question about The Wall Street Journal by changing the subject to Fox, which he blamed for ruining “the national discourse.”
But last week’s comment added something new. Keller framed it as an attack not just on Fox but on its viewers: “If you’re a regular viewer of Fox News, you’re among the most cynical people on planet Earth.” That is not even comprehensible. If you think that “Fair and Balanced” is a deceptive slogan, it would follow that Fox’s regular viewers are deceived by it–that they’re gullible, not cynical.
By putting down Fox viewers, he would appear to be engaging in an awfully odd marketing strategy. It’s normal to try to persuade consumers that a competitor’s product is inferior. Insulting the competitor’s customers, by contrast, seems an excellent way of ensuring that they stay away from your product.
Keller’s comment makes sense, though, if you assume that its purpose is not to win over new customers but to keep the existing ones. His message to Times readers is that they are superior to the rubes who watch Fox News Channel. No doubt he preferred the status quo [before] Fox [news channel was launched], when those rubes had few alternatives but to get their news from networks that let the Times set their agendas. But those days are over, so he has to settle for marketing the Times via snob appeal.
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