News - Opinion

Friday, Nov. 06, 2009

Obama has Fox; Truman had Time

Harry Truman could’ve taught Barack Obama a thing or two about how to deal with a hostile press — basically, by ignoring it.

Obama’s core argument is that Fox News is biased, unfair and fraudulently branded. In the words of a top Obama aide, Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news,” and therefore the White House has no choice but to lash out in response.

This is where a little historical perspective might be valuable.

It’s absolutely valid to complain that Fox is opinion journalism masquerading as news. But so what if it is? Sixty years ago, the Truman administration was consistently harassed by a faux news operation that was far more dominant in its day than Fox could ever hope to be.

In the late 1940s, when TV had yet to become a mass medium and print still ruled, the most influential information organ was Time magazine. Time spoke for the American mainstream and shaped mainstream opinion. Most important, Time had branded itself as a “newsmagazine,” when in fact it was nothing more than opinion journalism masquerading as news. And in Time’s opinion, the Democratic president was a corrupt wimp who was soft on communism.

Time had a unique process. The reporters in the field sent their journalistic dispatches to New York — where the editors rewrote them so that they hewed to the conservative predilections of Time’s legendary proprietor, Henry Luce. Nobody in today’s fragmented media world wields Luce’s kind of clout. He was a high-profile power broker in the Republican Party, which he liked to call “my second church,” and he used his magazine to make or break careers.

His top mission, during the Truman era, was to tell Time’s readers that the president and Secretary of State Dean Acheson were willfully surrendering China to the communists. The truth was actually quite different. Luce’s own reporters in China wrote in their dispatches that the anticommunist army ineptly commanded by Chiang Kai-shek was wasting the weapons and money sent East by Truman and Acheson, and that the communists had far more grassroots support.

That’s how Chiang’s American military advisers saw the situation. The senior adviser, Gen. David Barr, warned Washington that Chiang was doomed because of “the complete ineptness of his high military leaders and the widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces.” The journalists on site saw the same ills.