The CEO of the Tides Foundation, Drummond Pike, has taken the gloves off following a sustained campaign against his organisation by Glenn Beck, and the subsequent arrest of Byron Williams, who was on his way to gun down Tides’ employees after seeing Beck’s chalkboard assisted ranting. Pike is urging companies that advertise on Fox to cease buying time on the channel (over a hundred companies have already pulled adverts from Beck’s show).
As Pike says, the next wingnut might get through. He stresses that “no-one ... wants to see another Oklahoma City”, in a reference to domestic terrorism, something maybe forgotten yesterday on Fox And Friends by host Brian Kilmeade, who asserted that “all terrorists are Muslims”, which might interest a number of Governments across Europe.
Fox’ Bill Shine has responded that Kilmeade will return to the subject on Monday, the next airing of the programme, but that means his assertions will remain unexplained and unanswered for almost 72 hours, which is a long, long time in today’s 24/7 news cycle. That’s not good enough.
And another Fox host whose behaviour has not been good enough this week is Bill O’Reilly, who caused a furore when he guested on ABC’s The View last Wednesday. Following a full and frank exchange of views on the proposed Islamic Centre at 51 Park Place with co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, O’Reilly then asserted that “Muslims attacked us on 9/11”.
This was too much for Goldberg and Behar who walked off set. They only returned after Bill-O apologised. O’Reilly later explained his actions on his own show, but his comparison with Pearl Harbor and the Japanese is total guff. There isn’t a country called Islamland which has declared war on the USA.
But there is a disturbing coincidence of hate speech coming out of Fox.
1 comment:
Nielsen ratings? :-)
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