Howell Raines Takes on Fox News

In a new op-ed for the Washington Post, Howell Raines, the former executive editor of The New York Times, demands that honest journalists call out Fox News for their “overturned standards of fairness and objectivity.” Raines says Fox News chief Roger Ailes has made his network a propaganda machine masquerading as a real news channel. Fox’s health coverage in particular irks Raines, who says that Fox has continued to claim that the American people don’t want health-care reform despite the fact that the results of elections for the past 60 years indicate they do. The former editor accuses his fellow journalists of being too scared of Ailes’ notoriously aggressive attacks on any critics to confront the network, and being too intimidated to draw rational conclusions based on good reporting. Fox’s “news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism,” Raines writes.