Fox News: Can we blame Sandy on Obama?

[Douglas Carpenter]

Wednesday, Oct 31, 2012 09:45 AM +1000

Amid the crazy commercials, conspiracy theories and Mittmentum, an afternoon watching Fox. It's almost journalism!

By Andrew O'Hehir


Clockwise from top left: Megyn Kelly, Neil Cavuto, Shep Smith, Bob Beckel

Watching Fox News all afternoon, on the day after Sandy made its devastating landfall along the Eastern seaboard, was like entering an alternate dimension — but not the one you’re thinking. No, this was the dimension where the unfocused anger, the slow-boiling subsurface paranoia that drives so much of the coverage on Roger Ailes’ news network, has miraculously drained away. Fox on Tuesday afternoon was not just a real news network as well as a genuinely “fair and balanced” one — it was actually a pretty doggone decent one.

One of the info-nuggets revealed in the bright yellow crawl across the bottom of the screen, sometime around 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, read like this: ROMNEY CAMPAIGN TOLD TO RAMP DOWN CRITICISM OF PRESIDENT OBAMA. Whether for moral reasons or purely tactical ones, that decision had apparently spread, top-down, throughout the Fox News operation. If the discomfort and difficulty of this undertaking was palpable at times, there are quite a few people, even at Fox, who are trained in actual journalism and can pull it off for short periods. So what we saw across Megyn Kelly, Shep Smith and Neal Cavuto’s successive afternoon shows was largely straightforward reporting on the damage in New York City and along the New Jersey shore, most of it handled with aplomb.

Veteran Fox reporter Rick Leventhal, better known for jingoistic flak-jacket stand-ups from Iraq or Afghanistan, trudged through the sand-choked streets of Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., describing the terrifying night he had spent there as the town flooded. Another reporter whose name I didn’t catch successfully intercepted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo coming out of a limousine in lower Manhattan, just outside the entrance to the flooded Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. It was a cordial and entirely professional interview, even if Cuomo ducked the question — of great interest to me and several million other people — of when New York’s subways might reopen, and how much. (Partially, he said, and “over the coming days.”)

Only here and there did the bizarre, unbalanced combination of rage and illness that customarily animates Fox News and its audience poke through – and I’m mostly talking about the commercials. Dubious-sounding law firms from Waco, Texas, urging you to sue someone about your hip replacement; one-time “Knots Landing” star William Devane, piloting his private plane in a painfully awkward pitch for a gold brokerage (always the grumpy-Gus investment of choice); a stick-on portable light bulb – which you can see for yourself at InstaBulb.com — getting the hard sell from some cheerful voice-over Australian. Basically, you can use the InstaBulb to illuminate your secret trove of gold bullion in the closet – but it’s so damn hard to get in and out of there after that botched hip replacement!

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http://www.salon.com/2012/10/30/fox_news_can_we_blame_sandy_on_obama/