By: Michael Calderone

To preface what’s even more of a meta blog post than usual: I’m a media reporter, with a media blog, writing about David Carr’s media column describing Fox’s PR team (who I deal with often), and how the network went after NYT television reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe for a critical — but in my opinion, fair — ratings story.
 
That said, here’s Carr:

At Fox News, media relations is a kind of rolling opposition research operation intended to keep reporters in line by feeding and sometimes maiming them. Shooting the occasional messenger is baked right into the process.

As crude as that sounds, it works. By blacklisting reporters it does not like, planting stories with friendlies at every turn, Fox News has been living a life beyond consequence for years. Honesty compels me to admit that I have choked a few times at the keyboard when Fox News has come up in a story and it was not absolutely critical to the matter at hand.

But it cuts both ways: Fox News’s amazing coup d’état in the cable news war has very likely been undercovered because the organization is such a handful to deal with. Fox is so busy playing defense — mentioning it in the same story as CNN can be a high crime — that its business and journalism accomplishments don’t get traction and the cable station never seems to attain the legitimacy it so clearly craves.

What Carr takes particular offense at is the altering of Steinberg’s photo on Fox & Friends, which he described as a "technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda." In Carr’s opinion there was "something anti-Semitic about the description," and fellow television columnist Bill Carter agreed. Steinberg didn’t comment because he still has to cover Fox.

However, Fox’s communications head Brian Lewis said that Carr’s description was "vile and untrue," and explained the motivations behind the PR shop.

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