The New York Times‘ Jeremy Peters writes about the hyper-partisan world of cable news.
There is a lot of familiar territory there for regular readers of this site, including the Pew studies that show that MSNBC favors Democratic politicians while Fox News favors Republican ones. There are references to the pointless time-filling segments where politicians of the “other” party are diagnosed as being mentally ill; and there are references to NBC News journalists distancing themselves from MSNBC, and Fox News feeling like the Obama Administration isn’t fair to them.
Nonetheless, Peters explains the world of partisan cable news in an easy to digest way, and paints a broad picture of the way things currently stand.
Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren took to her blog, and used Peters’ article as a jumping off point to complain about how Fox News is treated by the President. Van Susteren says that FNC was excluded from a pair of State Department briefings on the situation in Benghazi:
I believe that Fox is getting punished for doing its job. We simply persistently ask pointed questions about the murder of 4 Americans. We didn’t buy the Obama Administration’s silly story (video/protest) and so now they seek to punish us with exclusion. Frankly, the exclusions from these two media wide briefings only make me more suspicious the Administration is hiding something. People who are telling you the truth don’t try and punish you like this.