Press Group Awards GOP Propaganda Outlet Fox News Prime Seat in White House Briefing Room

Talk about clueless inside-the-Beltway thinking! The smoke has not yet cleared on Fox News’ complicity in race-baiting and deceptive reporting in the Shirley Sherrod scandal, its entirely fake New Black Panthers non-story and the network’s role in taking down the anti-poverty group ACORN by broadcasting yet more deceitfully edit footage when the supposedly nonpartisan White House Correspondents Association awards this Republican Party in-house organ a prime seat in the front row of the White House briefing room — a spot that was restricted, until now, to representatives of legitimate news organizations.

Here’s how WHCA’s blunder was reported in the Guardian in London:

Fox News has joined the three main TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, cable station CNN and news agencies AP and Reuters, in the coveted front row of the room, where daily press conferences are held. The seating arrangements are more than symbolic as it helps to determine who is called by Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s press secretary, to ask questions.

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It marks something of a coming of age for the channel, which was formed in 1996 and has succeeded in shaking up the world of television news with its mix of highly partisan rightwing commentary and often heavily editorialised news. The channel has increasingly been making inroads against its competitors, notably the more politically moderate CNN.

Opponents of Fox News drew comfort from the fact the channel did not gain its preferred position: the central front-row seat it had sought. That seat, previously occupied by veteran reporter Helen Thomas, went to the Associated Press.

Two prominent liberal grassroots campaigns, Credo Action and Moveon.org, had organised a petition against Fox News being given the central seat. Credo Action said almost 500,000 people had backed the protest.

The group’s political director, Becky Bond, said: “We want people to understand that Fox News is not a real news operation but an important part of the rightwing noise machine in the US. It’s more a propaganda machine than a news channel.”

The decision about how to shuffle the chairs fell to the White House Correspondents’ Association, a self-policing organisation of reporters. The board said the decision was very difficult but it had ultimately been persuaded by Fox’s “length of service and commitment to the White House television pool.” One of its board members, Julie Mason of the Washington Examiner, dismissed the Credo Action petition as “smearing our colleagues.” The new seating arrangement was preceded by weeks of back corridor lobbying by news agencies. Ed Chen, a reporter for Bloomberg, described the jockeying as being like “musical chairs in elementary school except it has the cut-throat viciousness of a snake pit.”

Liberals are “smearing” Fox? What does Julie Mason of the Washington Examiner, an online publication, think Fox did to Shirley Sherrod and the good people who worked at ACORN?

Time and time again, Fox News has proved that it has an agenda in support of one political party that, in a just world, would disqualify it from participating in daily briefings at the White House. What this decision says is that WHCA is not really focused on journalism. It’s a social club and the Fox News “reporters” are their buddies. This is truly an outrage. Because Fox News both reports stories in a false way and conceals the truth when it might hurt the GOP, its powerful position is a threat to American democracy. It should be shunned and treated like the pariah it is.

Here’s the link to the contact form for the the White House Correspondents Association. Please take a second and let them know that they have trashed their credibility over this decision.