Ann Coulter does the honors:
I did not realize how devastating the midterm elections were to liberals until seeing the Great Gray Lady reduced to starting a catfight with Fox News Channel. It has come to this. The New York Times was in high dudgeon this week upon discovering that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes sent a letter to the Bush White House nine days after Sept. 11. As the corpses of thousands of his fellow Americans lay in smoldering heaps, Ailes evidently recommended getting rough with the terrorists.Rooting for America! The horror!
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I assume it's superfluous to mention that there is nothing illegal about Ailes giving advice to the president - though admittedly, I have not consulted the "living Constitution" in the past 24 hours to see if a new penumbra specifically about Fox News has sprouted. But the Times was a monument of self-righteous indignation because hard news men are supposed to stay neutral between America and terrorism.
Of course, the Times hasn't been reticent in giving the president advice on the war. (Surrender now!)
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But this was more than the media's usual insane point that they - the least impartial industry in America - must maintain absolute neutrality between George Bush and the terrorists. The Times went further to imply that by supporting his own country in the war on terrorism, Ailes had unmistakably marked himself as a "partisan conservative."
If Ailes had written a letter recommending a tax hike, blathering on and on about Ailes' conservative bias wouldn't have made sense. Instead, he had recommended the harshest measures possible against the terrorists. As far as the Times was concerned, this was the smoking gun of partisanship. The paper railed that Ailes purports to be an "unbiased journalist, not a conservative spokesman." Fox News is "the self-proclaimed fair and balanced news channel." But now the Times had caught him red-handed, pursuing "an undisguised ideological agenda." Ailes is secretly rooting for America!
