Salon.com > Sandy aftermath http://www.salon.com Mon, 20 May 2013 03:44:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Fox News: Can we blame Sandy on Obama? http://www.salon.com/2012/10/30/fox_news_can_we_blame_sandy_on_obama/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/30/fox_news_can_we_blame_sandy_on_obama/#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 23:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13058044 Watching Fox News all afternoon, on the day after Sandy made its devastating landfall along the Eastern seaboard, was like entering an alternate dimension — but not the one you’re thinking. No, this was the dimension where the unfocused anger, the slow-boiling subsurface paranoia that drives so much of the coverage on Roger Ailes’ news network, has miraculously drained away. Fox on Tuesday afternoon was not just a real news network as well as a genuinely “fair and balanced” one — it was actually a pretty doggone decent one.

One of the info-nuggets revealed in the bright yellow crawl across the bottom of the screen, sometime around 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, read like this: ROMNEY CAMPAIGN TOLD TO RAMP DOWN CRITICISM OF PRESIDENT OBAMA. Whether for moral reasons or purely tactical ones, that decision had apparently spread, top-down, throughout the Fox News operation. If the discomfort and difficulty of this undertaking was palpable at times, there are quite a few people, even at Fox, who are trained in actual journalism and can pull it off for short periods. So what we saw across Megyn Kelly, Shep Smith and Neal Cavuto’s successive afternoon shows was largely straightforward reporting on the damage in New York City and along the New Jersey shore, most of it handled with aplomb.

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