“Coming soon: the Republican primary, bought to you exclusively by Fox News. “

If you think that this sounds like an all-too-obvious satirical article, it’s closer to the truth than you think: currently, every single major potential Republican candidate for President in 2012 except for Mitt Romney- Palin, Gingrich, and Huckabee- is on the payroll of Fox News as a commentator. And if you’re concerned about the quality of coverage that these candidates will be put under, you have a right: their employer has given them a get-out-of-Katie Couric-free pass, as they have repeatedly denied interviews on other news channels by citing Fox News policy. Obviously, this presents a problem.

Traditionally, the vetting of presidential candidates have been done through interviews and debates with news channels such as CNN, NBC, ABC, and other such generic-brand alphabet soup news channels that attempt to objectively press hopefuls about their qualifications for President. It’s through these venues where the public can see for themselves how a candidate acts under pressure, and can sample what promises they’re going to break what their presidency would be like. We get a sense of whether we would like a candidate as a president: what their economic policies will most likely be like, how they will conduct foreign policy, whether we could live with a VP who can’t name a magazine, etc.

But by being on Fox News, Republican candidates can avoid the vetting done by the obviously biased “liberal lamestream media.” While Democrats get grilled on “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation”, Republicans get to stay on “Fox and Friends” and get more softballs tossed at them than at a girls’ Little League friendly match. As a result, we don’t learn much. Interviews would rarely progress beyond, “how’s the weather today?” and “just how is Obama going to turn America into a socialist hellhole swarmed by illegal immigrants and bearded terrorists?”

So what should be done? The 1990’s incarnation of Pat Buchanan puts forth a solid suggestion: declared presidential candidates should not be employed by any news organization. Every candidate needs to go through a thorough vetting by a majority of media organizations, or the only ones we’ll get are Bill O’Reilly discussing family values with Palin, or Chris Matthews’s leg getting more thrills up his leg than a roller coaster ride while interviewing President Obama. The voting public deserves to know how their prospective leaders will handle the tough issues of the day, not just how effectively candidates are at unleashing verbal sledgehammers upon one another. Biased as the media may be, if the candidate can’t survive that level of hostility, we can’t count on him/her dealing with Israeli-Palestinian crisis #238749.

What Fox News comes dangerously close to doing is creating a media-political complex where power and media are intertwined in a symbiotic relationship: the politicians get a friendly, mass-audience communications arm, while the news network gets star power in their competition with other networks. For all the fear Republicans espouse about a government takeover of media, they seem to be perfectly happy if the government instead partners with them for PR purposes. And just as with government control, truth and transparency lose out in this arrangement.


(Photo: New England Secessions)