LA Weekly

The successful bloggers’ campaign to dump Fox News from cablecasting the Nevada Democratic presidential debate on August 14 in Reno exposed serious problems on the left and the right. On the left, as interviews with campaing organizers Adam Green and Robert Greenwald reveal, there is a serious streak of hyperpartisan censorship. On the right, at Fox News, there’s a serious problem with poking Democrats in the eye — regardless of circumstance.

Next January 19, five days after things kick off in Iowa, Nevada holds the second-in-the-nation Democratic presidential contest. That, and California’s new February 5 primary, give a new Western cast to the presidential race.

Nevada, and much of the mountain West, once reliably Republican, are increasingly in play. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is from Nevada, played the lead role in moving the Nevada caucuses to the front of the pack, and he strongly backed the August debate to be aired on Fox. Reid declared, when the debate was announced in February, that it was “about reaching out to new voters. I strongly believe that a Democrat will not win Nevada or the West unless we find new ways to talk to new people.”

Even so, MoveOn.org and other elements of the lefty “Net roots” — a nickname blending “grass roots” with “Internet” — quickly launched a campaign against the debate, and Daily Kos told his followers in typical style that they had to pressure “the Dim Wit Nevada Democrats.”

The Fox News TV network comes off as fairly anti–Democratic Party in general, but critics were particularly upset that Fox aired an untrue Internet report of Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s having attended a radical Islamist school. They were also miffed by a 2004 Democratic debate in which Fox talking heads referred to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat” party throughout — a sophomoric rhetorical ploy used by some Republicans to suggest that the Dems don’t have a special claim on being more “democrat-IC” than the GOP.

Now the bloggers have prevailed, defying state and national Democratic leaders in Nevada who wanted Fox to air the August debate. One of the principal organizers of the effort for the California-based MoveOn.org, Adam Green, and well-known Hollywood filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who produced a video attacking Fox for its presidential-campaign coverage as part of MoveOn’s effort, tell the L.A. Weekly they plan to pursue an ongoing campaign against Fox News.

MoveOn.org spokesman Adam Green is insistent: “The Democrats realize they made a mistake legitimizing Fox News. It’s not really a legitimate news outlet... This is not just bad journalism on their part some of the time. It is a constant pattern of intentional deceit and smearing.”

Green claims that when it comes to Obama, “Fox is constantly denigrating his name and race . . . This is not really a gray area,” he insists. “There is no journalism there. They are part of the Republican spin machine.”

He says there are “three places the Republicans go to get their dirt out. The Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.”

Of course, there are places the Democrats go to get out their spin as well.

“The Democrats have realized their mistake,” Green claims at first. When it is pointed out to him that Democratic leaders did not in fact agree that they were wrong about the news legitimacy of Fox News, he says that MoveOn and its allies could ratchet up the pressure — especially on wayward Nevada Democratic officials. “They haven’t even begun to get phone calls.”

MoveOn had a fallback, compromise position, he says: “No Fox News [allowed in the broadcast of the August debate] unless it is balanced by a left-wing outlet.” The idea was to have the struggling Air America radio network co-host and air the debate on the radio.

When asked what he thinks of the view of his counterparts on the right that there are major legitimate news outlets that are liberal to left in their political bent, Green is having none of it.

What about The New York Times? “The New York Times is not a liberal newspaper,” he says, something that would surprise many Times readers. He reiterates that Fox News does no real journalism.

None at all?

“Its Anna Nicole Smith stories are on par with the rest of media,” he allows.

Isn’t it a matter of free speech for news organizations to also have points of view?

“It is not a matter of free speech,” Green insists. “It is a matter of fact, not opinion, that Fox does not do news.”

Although many of his counterparts on the right would say the same thing about at least some of the mainstream media, Green says, “It’s like global warming. Conservatives can claim that it isn’t happening, but when you have the vast majority of scientists, you know it is true.”

Green and his colleagues are not scientists, however, but avid and partisan political activists, in many cases with no credentials other than their opinions and their keyboards. Green makes light of the notion that Fox News is the nation’s No. 1 cable-news network — which it is, with viewership greater than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined — by pointing out that the audience for cable news is relatively small.

But the calculation made by Democratic leaders who wanted Fox News to broadcast the debate was that it would be aired by Fox News Channel and also receive special coverage on Fox affiliates around the West, such as Los Angeles’ Channel 11. The Democratic leaders’ idea was to combine the cable network and the broadcast affiliates to reach important viewers in a region that could play a serious role in choosing the next president.

Greenwald — director of the camp classic Xanadu — produced a three-and-a-half-minute video to make the case for dumping Fox. “Fox Attacks Obama” garnered nearly 300,000 viewings on YouTube. It focused on the Obama madrasah canard and showed talking heads speaking in disparaging tones about him.