Amidst the flutter of right-wing misinformation and accusations of President Obama siding with terrorists following Obama's statement that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” Fox's Chris Wallace did something that stuck out among his colleagues: he told the truth.
In an appearance on Fox and Friends Friday morning, Wallace correctly pointed out that despite Steve Doocy's suggestion that Obama's statement was “a diss to Israel,” this approach “has kind of always been the unofficial idea for the basis for an agreement.”
Wallace was right. Indeed it had been more than the “unofficial idea”; the framework Obama laid out had been embraced (with different language) by then-President Bush, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Not even a full weekend had passed, however, before Wallace changed his tune. On his program, Fox News Sunday, this morning, he dutifully echoed the skepticism of his Fox colleagues and on the right regarding the 1967 border issue. While posing a question to former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), Wallace passed on the opportunity to re-state the facts, and instead presents the controversy as a “he-said, she-said,” dispute, stating, “The White House says there is no practical difference between what the president formally proposed here and what the basic policy had been under President Clinton and under President George W. Bush.”
Wallace later falsely suggested that Obama never said that the 1967 borders are not going to be the final borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state. Bayh corrected Wallace on that point. From Fox News Sunday:
WALLACE: The White House says there's no practical difference between what the president formally proposed here and what the basic policy had been under President Clinton and President George W. Bush. They also say that they're trying to offer the Arabs something, because the Palestinians are headed to the U.N. in September to have a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, and they're trying to head off that vote. Does any of that make sense to you?
BAYH: I think a lot of it makes sense, Chris. Nobody believes that the '67 lines are going to be where we end up. Everybody knows you have to take the realities on the ground into consideration. That means the settlements --
WALLACE: So why didn't the president say that?
BAYH: Well, he, he did, in one way. He said there are going to be “land swaps,” that we're going to have to take the realities into consideration, so look, a lot of this is just nuance and semantics, but it has been focused on, and that's unfortunate. I think you put your finger on a very important point. There is this vote in the U.N. coming up, and unless we're willing to stand alone -- if we have to, we'll veto the resolution, but we need to try to get some support for avoiding that, and we also had the unfortunate case a couple of weeks ago of Palestinians coming across the borders. The Israelis had to shoot them. We have to have some process in place that gives these people some kind of hope so we don't see a repetition of that. So there were practical reasons to do this, even though I agree with Paul, the circumstances right now for successful negotiation are very slim because of the presence of Hamas in the Palestinian government. [Fox News, Fox News Sunday, 5/22/2011]
Perhaps when it comes to Fox News personalities (even those who supposedly report “straight news”), it's simply too much to ask them to stand by their truthful comments when they appear at odds with the conservative movement.