"What's so crazy is when you give interviews to reporters that don't really care too much for you, basically what they're going to do is write what they want to write and discredit you. They're going to write and say what they want to say, no matter what you tell them." Floyd Mayweather, American World Champion Boxer
January 27, 2016
By: Linda Case Gibbons
"Experts" abound. Tempers are short. Opinions are unbridled.
It is the "Journalism of Speculation and Innuendo." No facts, just opinion. It's what passes for news coverage nowadays.
Panels of "experts," three-deep, are invited to speculate along with the TV network hosts, resulting in a veritable potpourri of "What If's."
FOX has become very good at it, especially when it comes to Donald Trump.
He can't do much that's right with this GOP Establishment-leaning network. Curiously, FOX has become much like its rivals, CNN, MSNBC and the mainstream media.
The "What If's" practice the equivalent of negative novenas, and, like its liberal rivals, hope and pray something will trip Trump up.
He can't win. They won't let him. Even when he's winning, they say he isn't.
You could say it's a little unfair and unbalanced.
It's not clear why FOX's sole mission has become to protect one of their reporters, mostly from herself, and to blackball one presidential candidate.
It's not clear why.
The reporter is not especially good at her job, certainly not as terrific as CEO Roger Ailes says she is, and she is more interested in the length of her own hair and the sound of her own voice than she is in the news she's supposed to report.
But Ailes is fiercely protective, allowing her to ignore her journalistic mission and to make herself the news.
And cracks are showing all the way down the line at the network.
The formerly centered and always respected Charles Krauthammer is abolutely apoplectic in his hatred for all that is The Donald.
Baby-faced Bret Baier has jumped onto the anti-Trump bandwagon with a childlike vengeance, and the a.m. news show, FOX and Friends isn't as friendly toward Trump as they once were when he wasn't running for president.
Chris Wallace is still Chris Wallace, intolerant of Republicans. Only Greta and Hannity stick to the news.
It wasn't always that way.
We always knew what to expect from CNN, so when we see Chris Cuomo barely able to contain his ire when speaking about Republicans in general, and Donald Trump in particular, we don't like it, but we expect it.
It comes as a surprise, however, to see FOX News transformed, using the power of the tube to create a "Virtual Outcome" for someone they want to take down and out of the presidential race.
Historically there was always a lot of respect for Ailes. He, like Trump, was known for his bold stands.
We knew he was a media consultant to Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani. We knew he was a Republican. But we also knew him as a David to the left's Goliath, hiring Juan Williams after National Public Radio fired him, hiring Lou Dobbs after CNN fired him, and taking the controversial Glenn Beck under his wing when he washed up on FOX's shore.
Since then Ailes has changed and so has FOX. Both have become staunch GOP Establishment cheerleaders and are acting childishly.
It hasn't always been that way.
After years of going toe to toe with President Barack Obama, challenging his policies, it would seem sensible that any one of the 2016 GOP presidential candidates would meet with FOX's approval.
Every one of the candidates stand for everything Obama isn't.
But FOX has been harder on them, its comments more extreme than liberals could ever be.
And rather than being a journalistic Switzerland, most recently FOX issued an official press release, which Trump called a "wise-guy press release," which belittled him, and which he said was "inappropriately antagonistic and childish."
It was.
In an unprofessional misstep, the FOX statement said network officials, "Had learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him, if he becomes president," adding that Trump "has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings."
It's the stuff girls do.
Undoubtedly FOX was licking its wounds after Trump snubbed their Kelly-Here-We-Go-Again GOP Debate. They were crying in their beers, unable to handle that this non-GOP Establishment candidate had the audacity to tell them "No."
Just so you know, when you watch FOX remember, if Trump's ahead in the polls, FOX will minimize it and ask if Jeb will rebound...from 3 percent.
And if Trumps ahead in the polls, FOX will showcase Marco Rubio and his "skyrocketing poll numbers"...at 13 percent.
It's hard to figure out.
Who would have thought FOX would eat its own?
Hold the line, America.