Bad American

HuffPo

For a few seconds Chris Wallace must have been channeling his dad and thought he was working for CBS News in its heyday.

Well so much for that.

Last Friday, “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace appeared on “Fox & Friends” and railed against the show for what he called “two hours of Obama-bashing.” Almost immediately, he knew his position was unpopular, calling into host Brian Kilmeade’s radio show to discuss how mad the other hosts — and Fox executives — were towards him.

In an interview with the New York Observer’s Felix Gillette, Wallace goes further, admitting,

“I didn’t have any second thoughts about the substance because I still believe what I said was right,” said Mr. Wallace. “But after the fact, you do think to yourself–on a professional level with colleagues I very much like and respect–should I have done that off camera?” “It’s a close call,” said Mr. Wallace. “I’m not sure I’d do it again.”

“I know a lot of liberal critics like to snicker at the slogan ‘fair and balanced,’ but, in fact, we take it very seriously,” he added. “My feeling is that a lot of time ‘fair and balanced’ means giving the conservative point of view because that doesn’t get reflected in the mainstream media. In this particular case, I thought ‘fair and balanced’ meant giving more of an explanation of Obama’s point of view.”

Wallace also admitted that an unnamed Fox News executive sent him an email after the “Fox & Friends” appearance to say, “isn’t this the kind of thing we should be talking about off camera, not on camera?”

I bet a lot more was said and communicated  to Wallace by Fox honchos than what he’s admitting to. One might ask: so wouldn’t some other network pick him up if Fox had fired him over this?

The answer is perhaps, perhaps not. There is no such thing as a ‘liberal media’ anyway unless people believe that NBC News, for instance, is as liberal as their parent company, the giant defense contractor General Electric, wants them to be.

But the main problem is that Wallace spoke against the product on the air. Remember what Howard Beale said about TV news in the movie Network - at core, they’re selling soap. You don’t critique the product being peddled on the air even if you’re right! That’s a lesson I learned while I was on radio. Truth doesn’t matter at all - truth is what the general manager decides is truth. The days of some kind of ’sacred trust’ that on the air people had to their audience is long gone if it ever existed at all. And that goes for print as well, unfortunately.

Perhaps only a real titan like Walter Cronkite or Ed Murrow could speak speak out and tell the truth on TV - Cronkite about Vietnam and Murrow about Senator Joe McCarthy. Now the careerists (Wallace included) that populate the greasy pole of TV news know exactly what they are - whores.

And what is particularly odious about this incident is that Wallace knew he had to do more than just a simple make good for his bosses - he actually had to defend the ‘fair and balanced’ slogan which anyone with a room temperature IQ knows is total bullshit.

I wonder if had to excuse himself and throw up afterwards.