Oxymoron

Somehow I think giving the First Amendment Leadership Award to the Chairman of Faux News is something like an oxymoron:

We mentioned on January 16 that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes is slated to receive the First Amendment Leadership Award from the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF). On March 8, Ailes will join past recipients such as Katherine Graham, the Washington Post publisher who presided over the paper’s Watergate reporting; First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, who helped defend the New York Times when the Nixon administration attempted to quash the publication of the Pentagon Papers; Ted Turner, who founded CNN and brought a new world of extended news coverage to the country; and Don Hewitt, who originated 60 Minutes, the first and for many years the finest major network investigative news magazine.

... You might want to contact the RTNDF and ask them what First Amendment benefits accrue from Ailes’s success at debasing both the concept and the practice of television news, and whether or not those benefits really elevate Ailes to the stature of Graham, Abrams, Turner and Hewitt. You can contact RTNDF president Barbara Cochran by email here, or by telephone at 202.467.5205. If you do contact her, please don’t sink to Ailes’s level.