NPR's Ken Rudin Apologizes for Parroting Karl Rove

If you were listening to last week's Talk of the Nation on NPR, you heard Ken Rudin twice call the Obama administration's push-back against Fox News "Nixonian" and even compared to Nixon's infamous enemies list.  It went a little something like this:

"Well, it's not only aggressive, it's almost Nixonesque. I mean, you think of what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list and their attacks on the media; certainly Vice President Agnew's constant denunciation of the media. Of course, then it was a conservative president denouncing a liberal media, and of course, a lot of good liberals said, 'Oh, that's ridiculous. That's an infringement on the freedom of press.' And now you see a lot of liberals almost kind of applauding what the White House is doing to Fox News, which I think is distressing."

The linked article does not mention this, but Rudin again pushed this comparison during an interview with Helen Thomas in the same segment.

NPR and Rudin generally do a decent job of covering this sort of thing, but this characterization was simply divorced from reality.  To his credit, and probably also due to people like me who expressed their distaste for his mistake, Rudin has issued an apology:

"Comparing the tactics of the Nixon administration --which bugged and intimidated and harassed journalists -- to that of the Obama administration was foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately embarrassing to me," wrote Rudin. "I should have known better and, in fact, I do know better. I was around during the Nixon years. I am fully cognizant of what they did and attempted to do."

That Rudin realizes he was off-base and has apologized for his error in judgment illustrates one of the chief differences between an organization like NPR and an organization like Fox News.  I guarantee you'll hear no such retraction from Fox and Karl Rove, who happens to know a thing or two about what is and isn't Nixonian.

And that's an interesting point in all of this.  Rove, like Fox News high mucky-muck Roger Ailes, is a product of that very Nixon team under the tutelage of Lee Atwater.  What's so fascinating to me about all of this is that, as Joe Conason recently pointed out, it's actually Fox News that is Nixonian.  And not even just in technique, getting out ahead of your opponents by accusing them of doing what you're doing being a chief example, but in pedigree.  This is so astoundingly obvious if you have any sense of who and what Fox News is that to see the mainstream Washington press come to the defense of Fox is utterly surreal.

As Conason reminds us, in Nixon's era the White House was pitted against organizations like the Washington Post.  Now, the Nixon boys are running media organizations instead of the White House.  All the White House has done is call a spade a spade.  Fox News is objectively an opposition organization and not the slightest bit loyal.  Surprisingly, even organizations like NPR have fallen into the trap of carrying water for the dirty tricksters in the ensuing fallout.  It's an interesting reflection of the how the power dynamic between the press and the White House has changed in the decades since Nixon ruled the roost.