The thrust of this segment on “Fox & Friends”: The media is piling on the News Corp. phone hacking scandal; there are huge problems in the country, so why all the attention on News of the World? “Fox & Friends,” of course, is a program on the Fox News Channel, a News Corp. property.
We expect a light touch when News Corp. (sort of) covers News Corp.
But at least get the logic right! Here, “Fox & Friends” invites a very sympathetic guest onto the show — Bob Dilenschneider of the Dilenschneider Group. This guy says this:
Why are so many people piling on at this point? We know it’s a hacking scandal. Shouldn’t we get beyond it and really deal with the issue of hacking? Citicorp has been hacked into. Bank of America has been hacked into. American Express has been hacked into. Insurance companies have been hacked into. . . . So we have to figure out a way to deal with this hacking problem. That’s what we have to do.
Facile stuff there. If you’re only paying cursory attention, Dilenschneider sounds pretty reasonable. Of course, his attempt to suggest equivalency among Citicorp, Bank of America, and American Express falls victim to an inversion: Those entities were the victims of hacking; News Corp. is the alleged perpetrator of hacking. Not a good example of effective scandal suppression.
