Earlier this morning, the crew of Fox & Friends replayed the clip of President Obama telling NBC's Matt Lauer that he wants to “know whose ass to kick” regarding the Gulf oil spill. No great shock there -- Fox News has been playing the clip regularly for the past couple of days and using it as yet another cudgel to attack Obama. This time around, however, Fox & Friends bleeped out the word “ass,” apparently because this mild profanity from the president was just too shocking for their viewers' delicate sensibilities.
Fox & Friends is, of course, free to bleep and not bleep whatever they want, but I find it interesting that their concern for maintaining a PG atmosphere has arisen only now that the mild profanity in question is coming from Obama's lips.
Just this past February, the Fox & Friends crew interviewed Andrew Young, former aide to John Edwards, who said during that interview that his former boss is an “arrogant ass.” Fox & Friends didn't bleep out that mild profanity, nor did they bleep it out later in the show when they re-aired the clip.
Also, a quick Nexis search turned up a whole bunch of examples of Fox News personalities dropping the a-bomb themselves, like when Glenn Beck said this on his April 15 program:
BECK: Almost half of every dollar spent on all military expenditures the entire globe, we spend 47 percent of it. The next is Europe. That, by the way, is not a country, that's a whole collection of countries, 20 percent. $289 billion is what they spent on military-related expenses -- $289 billion for everything.
We spend $250 billion protecting their ass and fighting the war we're supposed to be partners with. For our defense?
Don't tell me we can't afford to cut back because we can. And when we're in a situation like Afghanistan, you know what? Why are we still there? Why do we have our troops -- show our troops up here.
Why do we have these guys, the best -- the best trained, you telling me these guys can't kick the ass of the people in the caves? Come on! We're getting ripped off.
Put simply, people say “ass” on Fox News all the time. But they seem to find it objectionable only when Obama says it.