Fox & Friends' softball treatment of Angle is just business as usual

Written by Terry Krepel

Published

Following Fox & Friends' whitewashing of Republican Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle's views on Social Security, falsely suggesting it's “not true” that Angle wants to “get rid of” the program (in fact, it's very much true), Nevada journalist Jon Ralston and the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas both assailed the show's softball treatment of Angle.

But that treatment was not unusual at all: Fox & Friends regularly provides a friendly, non-challenging forum to Republican candidates. Here are some recent examples:

  • Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade performed a similar whitewashing job on Florida congressional candidate Allan West, stating that West's “personal enhanced interrogation tactic” got him “essentially a forced retirement” from the Army. Kilmeade didn't mention that West's resignation came after he admitted that he “threatened to kill” an Iraqi detainee in his custody, after which West, according to military prosecutors, fired a pistol near the detainee's head, and four soldiers in West's battalion beat the detainee. West was also curiously not identified as a Republican.
  • Steve Doocy, Fox & Friends' chief softball-tosser to Angle, asked Kris Kobach, a candidate for Kansas secretary of state, to respond to “misconceptions” about Arizona's immigration law. At least two of the “misconceptions” Doocy asked Kobach about exactly tracked “major criticisms” of the law Kobach sought to “rebut” in a New York Times op-ed a few days earlier.
  • Kilmeade plugged New York congressional candidate Gary Berntsen by claiming: “He knows how to get things done.”
  • Kilmeade introduced Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio as “soon to be senator, according to some.”
  • When New York Senate candidate Joe DioGuardi appeared on the show, Kilmeade sympathized with him about how “it's going to be hard” to run as “a Republican in New York,” and he and co-host Gretchen Carlson asked questions about the career of DioGuardi's arguably more famous daughter, American Idol contestant Kara DioGuardi.

Nobody should be surprised that Fox & Friends treats Republican candidates with exceptional deference -- after all, Fox News is the communications arm of the Republican Party.