Fred Weinberg: It's Time for Fox To Drop 'Fair and Balanced' and Drop Juan Williams with It
Given my view of the world, you are more likely to see Fox News on my office wall than any other news outlet.
But it’s time they, too, start paying attention to the real world.
Let’s discuss “fair and balanced.” Those two terms are these days often mutually exclusive.
Jessica Tarlov, Marie Harf, Richard Fowler and Juan Williams don’t balance anything. What they do is generally lower the intelligence quotient of otherwise good panels.
Ask any of them a question and then match their answers against the daily Democratic talking points.
It’s as if the aforementioned leftist establishment talking heads have them directly injected each morning.
Donna Brazile I have a little more respect for since she once emotionally noted that it took a conservative Republican president (George W. Bush) to appoint our first black female secretary of state. But Donna also has a tendency to slide down the Democratic slope when she’s inspired.
Maybe “fair and balanced” made sense in 1996, but I really don’t care what Richard Fowler has to say about anything. What the hell does he actually know about anything? He’s a 33-year-old child who thinks that being black and openly gay are qualifications for something. That doesn’t work for Chicago’s mayor and it certainly doesn’t work for Fowler.
Same for Jessica Tarlov. Why would I care about the opinions of a 36-year-old kid whose real claim to fame is a father who produced some movies that made him enough money to send his daughter to the London School of Economics.
Is she supposed to show us how little about economics she learned in London? Most of the time, she reliably embarrasses her alma mater by both her lack of economic sense and her complete lack of understanding of the real world.
Truth be told, she adds less to the conversation than my 13-year-old cowdog — and I don’t mean to insult Major.
Marie Harf was John Kerry’s flak at the State Department. She got picked up by Fox and then left for Seth Moulton’s campaign in 2019. She’s baaaack … and asking her about the Trump administration is like asking Black Lives Matter about Portland. Her answers are meaningless and a waste of my time.
Juan Williams always conveniently forgets why he is at Fox.
His first choice of “media,” National Public Radio, fired him after he said on Bill O’Reilly’s show, “Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Said NPR, “His remarks on The O’Reilly Factor this past Monday were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”
Gee. Government-funded editorial standards and practices. Who knew?
So now he’s Fox’s token Trump hater.
Here’s an idea:
We who watch Fox are of a fairly homogenous demographic. Unlike the left, we already know what we think and are not inclined to apologize.
If Fox wants to keep us as a profitable audience, stop apologizing for our viewership by giving these clowns a platform.
You may find this surprising, but we already know what we believe and these quislings only serve to annoy us.
If they actually had anything to contribute, that would be one thing.
But their biggest contribution to any conversation is a waste of electrons. We already know that anything the Democrats want to say comes at the expense of common sense.
Back when Fox got started, Bill Clinton was president and maybe they thought they needed the shelter of “fair and balanced.”
Today, this makes about as much sense as Clinton lecturing Trump on using the Oval Office after he used it for an affair with Monica Lewinsky.
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