Excuse the pun but an old British proverb reminding us that “a fox should not be of the jury at a goose’s trial” certainly applies to a recent controversy surrounding Fox News. One of my favorite Yahoo News bloggers, Michael Calderone, reports that during Fox’s most recent installment of “I’ve Never Met an Obama that I like,” Fox News threw a tantrum over a recent children’s book written by the President to his daughters.
The book “Of Thee I Sing: Letters to my daughters” is Obama’s praise of values, ethics, and gifts that he sees within his children. The President then introduces his daughters to historical figures that he perceives as having the same qualities of character. The headline writers over at Fox News website find this completely unacceptable.
You see, it appears that besides plotting a communist, fascist, Muslim jihadist, black nationalist takeover of America (with a side of health care) – Obama has committed the unforgivable sin of mentioning American indigenous leader Sitting Bull within the same pages as Revolutionary War general and first president, George Washington, Holocaust survivor and scientist Albert Einstein, and African American baseball player and civil rights leader Jackie Robinson.
Fox was outraged that the President would praise an individual who had killed a U.S. General. However there was a problem brewing over at Fox. According to U.S. historians, Sitting Bull never took part in the battle that killed Custer. Sitting Bull’s only apparent crime was the audacity of dreaming that General George Custer would fail in an 1876 military assault on Cheyenne, Lakota, and Sioux nations.
Fox News is now surprised at the virtual 5-minute timeout it’s been given by the American public over its latest public relations nightmare. Like a five-year-old caught in an untruth, the news channel hurriedly changed its headline from “Obama Praises Indian Chief who Killed U.S. General” to the, also not quite accurate, “Obama Praises Indian Chief who Defeated U.S. General.”
While Fox News is still concerned that Obama would praise Chief Sitting Bull, perhaps it’s time for the news service to heed the Italian proverb which says, “Let every fox take care of his own tail.” That tail would be nightly “political pundit” Glenn Beck and Fox News spends countless hours and resources promoting him. If Fox News’ latest attack on President Obama is to be seen as anything more than unprincipled, Fox should first clean out its own den.
According to Media Matters, a research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media, Beck utilizes Fox News as a vehicle to promote individuals with hateful agendas; one who calls gay relationships “an abomination,” another who attended Nazi Party meetings, and a third who spoke to groups who believe that Jews are the children of Satan and that people of color are subhuman.
Fox News shows its hypocrisy in its latest contrived attack on President Barack Obama perhaps forgetting the most American of proverbs: that those living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.