PressEthic

We've been talking and reading about bias so much lately that I'm seeing it everywhere. It's like when you learn a new word and then you start hearing people say it.

This past Sunday, former President Clinton got visibly upset in an exclusive interview on Fox news. The reason: the percieved bias of interviewer Chris Wallace and Fox news in general.

Clinton agreed to be interviewed on Fox to publicize the amazing fundraising success of the Clinton Global Initiative. This humanitarian NGO raised an astonishing 7.3 billion dollars in contributions over the past week.

This wonderful achievement is something that should be applauded on both sides of the aisle, and Clinton himself deserves some of that applause. Moreover, I was impressed that Clinton would agree to be interviewed on Fox news about this. It seemed like an olive branch was being offered, like finally here was something that transcended partisan squabbling, something everyone could be positive about.

How sad it is that I was dead wrong. After only a few minutes of discussing the Clinton Global Iniative, the interview degenerated into an argument.

It began when Wallace randomly asked President Clinton to comment on assertions that he did not do enough while he was in office to stop Osama bin Laden.

Clinton quickly grew heated and answered:

OK, let's talk about it. Now, I will answer all those things on the merits, but first I want to talk about the context in which this arises. I'm being asked this on the FOX network......And I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans, who now say I didn't do enough, claimed that I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush's neo-cons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much — same people.

The speed with which Clinton went from his usual charming demeanor to pointing his finger in Wallace's face and leaning towards him menacingly makes me think he was ready for an attack. How could he not be? He was in enemy territory.

Clinton held the floor for the next several minutes, speaking forcefully and with a look of indignation.

Among other things, he said:

So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.

You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch's supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you'd spend half the time talking about — you said you'd spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7-billion-plus in three days from 215 different commitments. And you don't care.

What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now, I've never criticized President Bush, and I don't think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one-seventh as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and Al Qaeda with that sort of dismissive thing?

And you've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever. But I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it. But I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could.

It went on like that for a while.

I've got to say, I'm siding with Clinton on this one. He was there to publicize a soundly positive thing - 7.3 billion dollars of non-government money to contribute to a wide variety of projects dedicated to no less than the betterment of humanity. Fox news, being the partisan organization that it is, couldn't give him a simple interview and a "good job" on the way out. Wallace had to pull an attack out of right field and then play coy and act confused about why Clinton was getting so upset. It's like slapping a guy and then acting like he's the jerk for getting angry about it.

It's demoralizing that so much of our media is dedicated to childish finger-pointing. It's just not civilized.