White House official: Fox News is the "scene of the crime" on health care "falsehoods and myths"
March 18, 2010 10:23 am ET by Karl Frisch
Fox News is the "scene of the crime" on health care "falsehoods and myths" an unnamed White House official told Politico's Mike Allen in the lead up to President Obama's sit-down interview with the conservative network last night:
A White House official: "Many of the falsehoods and myths about health reform gained traction with Glenn Beck and others on FOX, so the President is returning to the scene of the crime to make the final sale. As we have said, we will work with Fox where it serves our communications interests, and this does."
Baier tried really hard to prevent the President from addressing those lies. Typical Fox "interview." Ask a question and then interrupt and talk over the guest in order to prevent an answer. Completely unprofessional. [I know, it's done on other networks . . . it's unprofessional on those networks, too.]
First off, interviewers typically give a President more leeway to control how long he takes to answer a question.
Secondly, it was an hour long interview, not a couple of minutes. There was certainly time to allow him to fully answer without interrupting him.
Lastly there were several times when it should have been clear to any cognizant person (including Baier himself) that after Baier tried to interrupt Pres Obama, Obama was NOT going to stop answering the question. Rather than recognize that Obama was NOT going to allow himself to be interrupted, he was going to continue on, yet Baier would CONTINUE to try to interrupt him.
It was a TERRIBLE job of interviewing the President.
And, when you think about it, Baier is supposed to be a straight news guy, not a Fox Opinion person!
Propaganda is indeed a crime under federal statutes in the United States.
Why is that?
Because they can't win on a debate of the facts. At least 80% of the current healthcare reforms are things that they have LONG supported. They can't legitimately argue against them. Reform needs to happen, but they didn't do it when THEY had control. We had to wait until we have 60 votes, a Supermajority, because THEY have been so uncooperative.
Ignoring the REASON that FoxNews is the source of the lies, distortions and omission of relevant info (not saying that MMFA is guilty of ignoring the underlying reason) is a mistake we can't afford to make.
Just like we have trolls here who try to derail threads BECAUSE they don't want us talking about the subjects in the article, because we have trolls that make personal attacks when they can't debate the facts, we should all already know this stuff too.
It hurts our goals when people continue to feed the trolls - it hurts the discourse here. And it poisons our national discourse when we let the nonsense from FoxNews spew out without challenge. We have to continue to work to stop other news media from giving too much credibility and attention to FoxNews and other rightwingers in the media.