It should surprise no one that Fox News isn't devoting a whole lot of time or resources to covering the seismic phone hacking scandal that's threatening to rip its parent company apart and put its owner on the receiving end of criminal charges. True, if Fox were an actual news outlet it'd have a responsibility to report on the mess, and in fact there'd be at least a few journalists within its newsroom chomping at the bit to use their privilege as insiders to get the story that maybe no one outside the four walls of the castle could. But of course, Fox News isn't an actual news outlet. Feel free to argue with that, but you're an idiot if you do.
Still, it's one thing to ignore the story as best as possible -- it's another thing entirely to do what perpetual company cheerleader Doocy the Clown did this morning on Fox and Friends. You really need to see this to believe it. Doocy brought on a guy no one's ever heard of, who has nothing at all to do with anything going on at News Corp, to basically agree with him that the rest of the media is "piling on" poor Rupert Murdoch and that since, well, we already know that this is a hacking scandal, we really should just "get beyond" that obviously trifling little part of it. Nothing to see here, folks. Doocy and guest say that the bigger story here is the ease with which the victims' phones were hacked, and they likened the whole thing to the hacking of Citicorp and Bank of America -- which would be a worthwhile comparison were it not for the fact that News Corp employees are the ones who did the hacking in all of this.
The argument is basically like saying, "Okay, so I shot a guy, and that's terrible -- but what's done is done. The real issue here is how easy it was for me to shoot him. Oh, and by the way, people get shot all the time. Why is the fact that I shot somebody such a big deal?"
It's such a hysterical and nakedly shameless bit of misdirection that it actually kind of surprised me. And I didn't think anything Fox did could surprise me anymore.
You've gotta hand it to them -- they've got chootspa.
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