Fox News VS CNN and the White House

So, the White House is playing the childish name calling game with Fox News. Fox News is scratching their heads, wondering why the White House isn't focusing their energy on things like, I dunno, running a country. National Review Online:

The White House communications director, Anita Dunn, contrasted Fox News with CNN: Fox News is just a Republican opinion outlet, she said, while CNN is a real news network. Of Fox, she said, “Let’s not pretend that they’re a news network, the way CNN is.” She said this on CNN, of course. (In the 1990s, conservatives used to refer to it as “the Clinton News Network.”)

I got to thinking. Fox has some opinionists, such as O’Reilly and Beck. Fox also has news anchormen and correspondents.

CNN has those, too. One of the CNN anchors is Anderson Cooper — he’s their star, as I understand it. The hurricane guy. When the “tea party” protests got going earlier this year, Cooper interviewed David Gergen. Gergen said, “They [Republicans and conservatives] still haven’t found their voice, Anderson. This happens to a minority party after it’s lost a couple of bad elections, but they’re searching for their voice.”

Then Cooper said, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.” He said this smirkingly.

He was referring to a sexual practice defined by the Urban Dictionary as follows: “the insertion of one man’s sac[] into another person’s mouth.”

Would a Fox News anchor ever, ever say anything like this — ever? Can you conceive it? But that is what CNN anchormen do, apparently. When people tell you that CNN is a real news network, whereas Fox isn’t — I would just smile at them.

P.S. It was Anderson Cooper, the mainstream news anchor, who started the derogatory references to anti-Obama protesters as “teabaggers.” Democratic pundits and politicians quickly picked it up. (I wrote about this in a recent issue of National Review.)

P.P.S. Another CNN anchorman, Rick Sanchez, spread racist quotations allegedly from Rush Limbaugh. These quotes were fabrications, meant to damage Limbaugh. Do Fox anchormen engage in slander and defamation?

P.P.P.S. Anita Dunn tried to pass off her tribute to Mao as something she once heard from Lee Atwater. Has Lee Atwater become the Democrats’ standard — the arbiter of Democratic discourse? What an interesting turn of events.