In accepting the 11th annual Eric Brenidel Award named after the great journalist who died tragically at age 42, Charles Krauthammer paid fulsome tribute to Fox News (7:46), as to how the Rupert Murdoch creation broke the monopoly of network news. Those of us over the age of 40 well remember how 90 percent of American viewers got their nightly news diet from the Big Three networks. When Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War in 1968, it marked the beginning of the end; when "The Most Trusted Man in America" decided, in 1970, that the Big Story was cutting the defense budget, and in 1972 that the Big Story was the growing Watergate scandal, these news stories gathered vital momentum.
Along with Rush Limbaugh's "Dittoheads" who transformed talk radio in a vibrant outside the Beltway medium, Rupert Murdoch's creation transformed TV coverage. Krauthammer is a worthy recipient of the award, but his voice, as CK fully recognizes and so stated, would be a far smaller one in reach (though no less eloquent) but for Fox. Which is why the "Hush Rush" law Congressional Democratic leaders want is so dangerous. Stay tuned--and informed.
Krauthammer continued his brilliant commentary with a new evisceration of the moral equivalence in Obama's Cairo speech:
Not that Obama considers himself divine. (He sees himself as merely messianic, or, at worst, apostolic.) But he does position himself as hovering above mere mortals, mere country, to gaze benignly upon the darkling plain beneath him where ignorant armies clash by night, blind to the common humanity that only he can see. Traveling the world, he brings the gospel of understanding and godly forbearance. We have all sinned against each other. We must now look beyond that and walk together to the sunny uplands of comity and understanding.
After giving several examples--such as 44 equating discrimination against women in America with stoning them in Iran, hurling acid in their faces in Afghanistan, etc.--CK concludes:
For all of his philosophy, the philosopher-king protests too much. Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He's showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.
Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one's own country.
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