You-know-where has apparently frozen over. Fox News has sent the presidential campaign of Republican Sen. John McCain a cease-and-desist letter. the Politico reports:
Fox News sent a cease and desist letter to the McCain campaign today over a new ad that includes the voice of correspondent Major Garrett, according to a letter obtained by Politico.
From the letter sent to Trevor Potter, general counsel for the McCain campaign….
“We demand that you immediately remove Mr. Garrett’s voice from this ad. As Mr. Garrett is a non-partisan news correspondent covering the Obama campaign for Fox News, it is highly inappropriate, among other things, of your campaign to use him in your ad.”
Fox is wise. No network that aspires to do actual news would allow a political campaign to use its broadcast personalities’ clips in a political campaign. Fox is showing that it has journalistic standards.
The larger issue is that the news coming from the McCain campaign the past few weeks almost all been negative — negative assertions, negative reaction to the assertions, and stories about the negative reaction to the assertion and the veracity of the assertions. It’s difficult to believe McCain will pick up coveted swing voters when even the most GOP-friendly cable news organization is now telling his campaign that it has crossed the line and that, in using Garrett’s image, it needs to back off.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.