I will spare you any pretense of mock surprise that Fox News is ridiculously biased against the Kerry campaign. But it’s one thing to know it and another to get such a blazing and undeniable example of it as a story with fabricated Kerry-bashing quotes put together by the Fox News reporter covering the Kerry campaign.
(Carl Cameron, the reporter in question, according to Fox spokesman Paul Schur, is Fox’s ‘chief political correspondent’.)
But it brings up a point raised in an article by Howie Kurtz a few days back.
On Monday Kurtz discussed a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs that showed that Fox News coverage of Kerry was overwhelmingly negative.
Kurtz got these quotes from Cameron’s boss Brit Hume …
Brit Hume, Fox’s Washington managing editor, whose “Special Report” was examined by the study, says he’s surprised by the anti-Kerry findings. “Our day-in, day-out coverage by Carl Cameron has been extremely fair to Kerry, and the Kerry campaign has recognized this,” he says.
“We did a lot on the Swift Boat Veterans. We thought it was a totally legitimate story and found it an appalling lapse by many of our competitive news organizations that were treating that story like it was cancerous.” But even there, Hume says, “we were abundantly fair to John Kerry’s side.”
“Extremely fair” to Kerry? “Abundantly fair” about the Swift Boat stuff?
The same reporter who made up these ‘Kerry quotes’?
“Women should like me! I do manicures.”
“Didn’t my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!”
“I’m metrosexual â [Bush’s] a cowboy.”
Kurtz could do us all a favor and get Hume on the horn to see if he’s still willing to call Cameron “extremely fair to Kerry.”
