Why An Obscure Media Reporter Named Gabriel Sherman Must Answer Serious Questions About His Near Obsession With Fox News And Roger Ailes
Personal note: Even if Fox News rubs shoulders with Neocons and RINOs, I’ll go to bat for them in this regard. They should be allowed to have their say without being “shut down”. Leftists have a long history of trying to infringe on the 1st Amendment rights of organizations they don’t agree with. Back off and let everyone have their say, wannabe tyrants.
Unless you work in New York or Washington D.C. media circles, you have probably never heard of him. Gabriel Sherman is a New York based writer who might appear to some to be obsessed with Fox News and Roger Ailes. His bio states that he’s an editor for New York Magazine. Sherman’s own Twitter stream reveals just how much time he spends talking about and watching Fox News (see Twitter hashtag graph below). Sherman is not yet nationally but, he intends to become so. On a power ranking of print and online reporters complied by Mediaite, Sherman ranks 193’rd out of 300. But, Gabriel Sherman is about to be welcomed to shows like NBC’s The Today Show and CNN’s Piers Morgan. Because Gabriel Sherman has received a grant from the New America Foundation to write a book about Fox News head and its head executive, Roger Ailes, which will be published by Random House in 2013. What is not clear is whether Sherman is writing a book, or participating in an effort to isolate, demonize of when shut down Fox News. Sherman can clear that up by answering the questions laid out, below.
Is Gabriel Sherman writing a comprehensive book about Fox News and Ailes or is he writing a book that will target Fox News and Ailes? If Sherman is writing comprehensively, how has he managed to avoid writing about Media Matters, Think Progress and the people at the intersection of media and politics calling for Fox News to be shut down? If Gabriel Sherman is writing a book that is targeting Fox News and Roger Ailes, how likely is it that a New York based reporter targeting Fox News would not consult Media Matters and groups intent on destroying a cable news channel in America? It was, after all, a Random House affiliate that published the book by Media Matters and the audio version leftist donor George Soros, a man who funds both Media Matters and The New America Foundation.
For all of his writing about Fox – he often goes so far as to tweet about what Fox runs on its on screen scroller – Gabriel Sherman has shown a steady pattern of remarkable omissions for a man betting his career on becoming the expert on all things Fox and Ailes. Gabriel Sherman seems to have nothing to say people and organizations who want to shut Fox News. Could that simply be an editorial blind spot of the young writer? Perhaps. But, judging by his reactions to even minor critiques of his work on Fox and Ailes, it is exceedingly rare for Sherman to remain silent on anything related either. For instance, Sherman immediately reacted to this piece on Breitbart with this tweet. But, Gabriel Sherman has remained remarkably silent about the networks most committed, powerful and vocal critics … even as they state outright that Fox News should be shut down by the FCC or simply demonized and cut-off.
There are a number of left leaning media and political figures who have expressed that desire – the Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan, factions of the hacker group, Anonymous, and Senator Jay Rockefeller who actually said he wants the FCC to shut down Fox News and MSNBC.
Why has Gabriel Sherman not written extensively on this topic? Sherman’s Bio on the New America Foundation Website seems to indicate this is exactly the topic on which he is meant ti write, it states: “He [Sherman] is particularly interested in documenting how large, complex institutions work, with a focus on the country’s largest media organizations.” Is there a better case study of the intersection of politics and media and the working of large organizations than a desire of people like Andrew Sullivan and Robert Kennedy to demonize a media network, if not completely shut it down? Why has Sherman not covered the rising volume of calls to shut the network down?
Silence is not complicity, of course, but, choosing to remain utterly silent in important topics on which your are otherwise focused every day–if not every minute–is, to say the least, provocative. Imagine Rush Limbaugh choosing to remain silent about, to make something up from thin air, President Obama’s staff discussing a plan to outlaw radios in cars.
The desire of people working in media to destroy Fox News is not a new phenomena. But, in the past few years, that desire to end the free speech of a media outlets in America has simply moved into the open from where it was being expressed in the private emails of left-leaning journalists. It is difficult to believe that Sherman is not familiar with the rumblings in their current phase or, in their earlier phase. In 2008 and into 2009, members of the infamous Journolist, a private discussion group of young journalists started by Ezra Klein, which degraded into a well documented case of left-leaning journalists literally working together to elect Senator Barack Obama President. Members of that group spoke, via Klein’s private discussion group, about their desire to see Fox News shut down. Was Sherman unaware of Journolist? That would seem unlikely, given its known members who are, according to John Lott’s Website, at the very least, in Sherman’s professional, if not ideological network? Matthew Yglesias with The Center for American Progress, Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and The New Yorker (where Sherman is a contributor), Eric Alterman of The Nation and Media Matters for America and Michael Cohen also with the New America Foundation. A longer list can be found here. How would Gabriel Sherman, the self-appointed Fox News watchdog not have sniffed out what was happening within the Journolist discussion group as regards to Fox News, especially since the emails are now public? Is it not newsworthy that American journalists regularly discussed their desire to shut down an American journalism entity?
Beyond writers talking about their desire to see Fox New shuttered, the second obvious area where Gabriel Sherman keeps an unusual silence is in regards to the well funded – and powerfully connected – leftist group called Media Matters, which appear to have, at the core of its mission, the goal of destroying Fox News. Sherman’s decision to remain silent on that particular angle of the Fox and Roger Ailes saga is, given Media Matters documented allies in a “large, complex organization” called The United States Justice Department, much more provocative. Yet, ignore it he has. While Gabriel Sherman was writing about the wife of Roger Ailes a Freedom of Information Act document dump seemingly proved that Media Matters was coordinating with the Justice Department of President Barack Obama. According to a collection of coverage from media outlets including National Review and The Christian Post, emails obtained by the conservative site The Daily Caller (Tucker Carlson, the Chief of The Daily Caller, is a Fox News contributor) show that Media Matters helped the Obama administration’s DOJ attack critics of President Obama.
Does anything better describe the intersection of media and politics and complex organizations as the left-leaning group funded by George Soros who, according to Discover The Networks, has also funded the New America Foundation cooperating with the Obama administration’s Department of Justice? If Gabriel Sherman’s beat is Fox News, his interest is “large organizations and, especially media companies”, why has Sherman not addressed the fact that Media Matters, which could be considered the number one enemy of Fox News, was working hand in hand with the Obama administration, which, according to the L.A. Times (hardly a right-wing publication), had declared “war against Fox News”?
Could a personal element be driving some of this hyperfocus of Sherman’s? Since he writes for New York Magazine, it should be pointed out that Murdoch once owned that publication after the founders Clay Felker and Milton Glaser were forced out in a hostile takeover. According to the AP:
When publishing titan Rupert Murdoch forced Felker and Glaser out in a hostile takeover in 1977, New York’s staff walked out in solidarity with their departing editors, leaving an incomplete issue three days before it was due on newsstands.
Is this retribution?
Gabriel Sherman has a right to obsess over Fox News and Roger Ailes, Random House has the right to add Sherman’s books to the books of George Soros and Media Matters to what they release and Sherman also has the right to choose to ignore key parts of the liberals versus Fox News narrative. Americans–even liberal Americans who are anti-Fox–have the right to know why Gabriel Sherman has ignored an ongoing discussion, a series of demands and even a well funded organization that appears to have at the center of its mission the destruction of Fox News.
Speaking of that obsession, here’s a little graph of Sherman’s Twitter attention:
345 tweets with the #foxnews hashtag. Do any of Sherman’s media contemporaries exhibit the same obsession with #foxnews on Twitter. We couldn’t find any.
Again, the questions that Sherman should answer if his Random House book on Fox and Ailes is to be seen balanced and Sherman as a journalist rather than a journolist.
Is Sherman writing a comprehensive book about Fox News and Ailes or is he writing a book that will target them?
If Sherman is writing comprehensively, how has he managed to avoid writing about Media Matters, Think Progress and the people at the intersection of media and politics calling for Fox News to be shut down?
If Gabriel Sherman is writing a book that is targeting Fox News and Roger Ailes, how likely is it that a New York based reporter targeting Fox News would not consult Media Matters and groups intent on destroying a cable news channel in America?
