Fox News Pentagon correspondent Jennifer Griffin has weighed in on the war of words between Fox News and CNN regarding Griffin's false report that CNN news crews were used as human shields by the government of Libya. According to MediaBistro's TV Newser, after CNN correspondent Nic Robertson inveighed against the "lies and deceit" of Fox News' report, Griffin responded: "I just think this has gotten ugly. ... Frankly, CNN should be focusing on getting more scoops and not attacking Fox News. They should get back to reporting and stop this petulant behavior."
I see... a Fox News reporter chastising CNN for their "petulant" attacks on Fox News. Griffin's complaint rings a bit hollow given Fox News' long history of petulant -- and often false -- attacks on CNN and other rivals.
After the September 12, 2009, Tea Party march in Washington, DC, Fox News ran a newspaper ad accusing every other major broadcast and cable news station of ignoring the event. The ad featured photos of the crowd on the National Mall and asked: "How did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN miss this story?" The accusation was flagrantly untrue -- every network covered the story, including CNN, which "provided live coverage of the rally in Washington on Saturday, dispatching more than a dozen personnel, including multiple camera crews and the CNN Express Bus." Perhaps most significantly, one of the photos of the rally Fox News used in their ad accusing CNN and others of ignoring the story was snapped by CNN's tower camera.
Before that there was this ad from 2008 accusing CNN of being "partisan" after a Pew Research Center study found that 51 percent of CNN's regular viewers self-identified as Democrats, compared to 18 percent who were Republicans. And, of course, there's the frequent sniping from Fox News' communications shop, which has derided CNN as a "fifth-place news network" and even described one of their prominent reporters as "a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."
So don't be too quick to break out the tiny violins for Fox News. They're experts at dishing it, so it's about time they learned how to take it.
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