Fox News

Monday, Jun 16, 2008 09:21 PDT

Lanny Davis joins Fox News

Davis, a special counsel to the president in the Clinton White House and a dogged surrogate for Hillary Clinton, becomes a contributor to the network.

By Alex Koppelman

Fox News has picked its newest official contributor, and the choice shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who follows the network. The new hire? Lanny Davis, who worked as a special counsel to the president in Bill Clinton's White House and who was a prominent surrogate for Hillary Clinton this spring.

Davis has been trending Fox News' way for some time now, first as a supporter of Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman during his reelection fight in 2006 and then as a Clinton surrogate this year. During one appearance he made on the network in May, under prompting from conservative radio host Laura Ingraham about allegations of bias against Clinton, Davis said he "now know[s] what it feels like to be a Republican" and added that, in his view, Fox was the most balanced of the cable networks. Separately, Davis told the Politico's Michael Calderone that one appearance he made on rival CNN was "the worst experience I ever had on television."

And Davis fits with the general pattern of Democratic guests on FNC. In an article I wrote last year about so-called Fox News Democrats, who often seem to be picked by the network to make Democrats look bad, I discussed Davis' general attitude on the network, where he often appeared as what I termed an "enabler." This category of guest, I noted, is "on-screen to prove to viewers that even Democrats agree that a radical left wing dominates the Democratic Party, not to mention the media." Davis was a prime example of this phenomenon.