BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. | There’s a new attack dog at Fox News Channel, and, no, it’s not recently hired contributor Karl Rove.
It’s Chris Wallace, the onetime mild-mannered moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” now host of “Fox News Sunday,” who bared his fangs at the liberal media during a panel this week to promote the top-rated cable news channel’s upcoming election coverage.
To set the scene, sitting right next to Wallace was Bush’s brain himself. And next to Rove was Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton’s lead spokesman during her recent presidential campaign and another new addition to the Fox News team.
And next to him was John Moody, the channel’s executive vice president and author of those bare-knuckle morning memos made notorious by filmmaker Robert Greenwald in his anti-Fox News video, “Outfoxed.”
For a half-hour the TV critics had been peppering Rove with questions. Several were requests for political analysis and revealed Rove’s always-interesting mind at work. Here, for instance, is what he had to say about TheNew Yorker magazine’s notorious cover featuring a cartoon of fist-bumping Obamas:
“I don’t understand why (New Yorker editor) David Remnick put this on the cover. I mean, you have 3 percent of the American people to 8 percent of the American people who think he’s a Muslim, which he’s not.
“This is not healthy for the system. I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for the right (wing) blogosphere to harp on this.
“The voters who are up for grabs in this election — if somebody goes out and makes this kind of sustained argument, (they) are going to respond badly to it, that is to say, they’re going to reject it and reject John McCain.”
But the critics also pressed Rove on two other subjects: Why did he ignore a subpoena last week to appear before Congress? And what exactly is his role with the McCain campaign?
Regarding the subpoena, Rove said it was a matter “between the White House and Congress.” As for McCain, “I play no official (campaign) role, no ongoing role, but, yeah, I do get phone calls.” That didn’t sound very clear, so I followed up with Moody.
“Is Mr. Rove on the honor system regarding his conversations with Steve Schmidt and other people high up the McCain campaign?” I asked. (Schmidt is a Rove protégé.) “Have you discussed a certain line that he won’t cross?”
“I don’t think Karl would cross an ethical line like that,” Moody said — and laughter was heard throughout the room.
That seemed to irk Wallace, with whom I’d had a nice one-on-one conversation before the session. (Among other things, he confirmed that his 90-year-old dad, Mike, who had not been feeling well, was much improved and “talking with producers about doing stories” on “60 Minutes” again.)
“The fact is that MSNBC has just hired Mike Murphy, who, with all respect to Karl, has a much closer relationship with John McCain than Karl does,” Wallace said. “I’ll be curious to see whether you ask NBC about the fact that they’ve hired Mike Murphy, and whether that somehow is a wise hiring of an interesting Republican analyst or whether that somehow compromises the journalistic integrity of MSNBC.”
In his next breath, Wallace chastised the group for probing into the subpoena business. “I don’t understand for the life of me … why that in any way should affect how an independent news organization decides to conduct its business.”
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