Any regular reader of this column knows the contempt I hold for Fox News Channel, the cancer of cable news. In less-than-polite circles, it is known, correctly, as Faux News Channel.
Not that anyone with an IQ above that of an average plant should expect anything remotely resembling news to come from a cable channel owned by tabloid sleaze king Rupert Murdoch and run by former Nixon flak Roger Ailes.
Fox’s “star,” if you can call anything that resides in their muck such, is Bill O’Reilly, king of the schockmeisters, a phone-sex freak who likes to talk dirty to his female producers and calls anyone who doesn’t agree with his fantasy view of the world “liar” in a loud voice that doesn’t impress anyone except the rapid right-wing morons who think such behavior is acceptable.
Even worse was the network’s employment of Geraldo Rivera, self-promoting blowhard extraordinaire, the so-called “journalist” who told us O.J. Simpson was innocent and who claimed Michael Jackson is getting a raw deal. Fox sent Rivera to Iraq, where the military booted him out of the country for revealing the locations of our troops to the enemy.
Fox, of course, is the darling of conservatives but conservatives wouldn’t know news if it bit them in the ass. Like all partisans, conservatives look at life through a narrow, biased view of the world and expect everyone else to share their hypocrisy.
And Fox wears its conservative bias proudly, while laughingly claiming to be “fair and balanced.” Its reporters are, by and large, right-wing hacks.
Like Fox correspondent Brian Wilson (no relation to the Beach Boy), who shoved his way last week into a photo op featuring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean,.
Wilson opened his questioning of Dean with a subtle question of “do you hate white Christians?” Dean, as he should, ignored the jibe but Wilson kept shouting questions that showed a clear Republican agenda. This led Washington Post reporter Mark Leibovich to ask Wilson, who was hearing no press credentials, just who he was and who he represented.
“Who the fuck are you?” Wilson screamed back as he stormed out of the press conference, leaving some to wonder if the ghost of Jeff Gannon had returned to the Washington press scene. Others at the event report Wilson screamed obscenities as he stalked down the hall from Reid’s office.
Leibovich confirmed the conservation when contacted by Columbia Journalism Review.
“Yeah, I can confirm it,” he told CJR Reporter Brian Montopoli. “It involved Brian Wilson of Fox News — not of the Beach Boys. And he was not giving out good vibrations.” Wilson, Leibovich added, wasn’t holding a notebook, and, “for all I knew he was Jeff Gannon, based on the tone and insistence of his questions.”
Wilson later bragged to CJR that he was “Not in the habit of identifying myself to complete strangers, I did return his question with a now widely quoted question of my own.”
What is it that Fox says in its promos? Oh yes, “we report, you decide.”
Fox didn’t report the behavior of one of its own but others did. That helped us decide. They remain a bunch of assholes.
