More Fox noise. What Sound does a Fox Make?

What Sound does a Fox Make?
Guest Blogger: George Harvey
There is no debating the amount of criticism given to President Obama by Fox News. The network is rife with it, and even more so in the wake of the several terrorist beheadings of late. Numerous Fox analysts and correspondents are criticizing the president for being too soft and cautious while dealing with the ISIS threat, including Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Former Vice President Dick Cheney also weighed in on the issue over at Fox, calling the president “weak and ineffective” and stating “there is no question… he is viewed as perhaps the weakest president in my lifetime.”

One may say that Fox News is and should be entitled to discuss and critique a president in the way that they want to, and that that is the beauty of our country’s freedom of speech. However, in this case, Fox blaming and finger-pointing says less about our country’s freedom of speech and more about Fox’s own backwards rhetoric. Let us take a look backwards in time, about ten years. 

It is 2004, and a very similar situation to what we are experiencing now is happening. Two American citizens, Nick Berg and Paul Johnson, were kidnapped while in the Middle East and beheaded by Islamic terrorists. In this contemporary world of blaming the president for our misfortunes and troubling times, one would expect the blame to fall on President Bush, and one would expect a level of criticism on par with that received by Mr. Obama today. However, expectations do not equal reality in this case.

Fox’s own Sean Hannity demonstrates hypocritical partisanship if one were to examine his stance towards terrorist beheadings in 2004 compared to 2014. Hannity, who seems completely at ease criticizing the president’s handling of the ISIS beheadings, does not take it as well when Democrats were criticizing President Bush over the 2004 beheadings:

“Are we taking limited resources and the president and his cabinet have to spend all that time fighting politically when they ought to be focused in on World War III? It’s time that we now unite a country, using this as the latest example that we have been warned.”

Apparently for Hannity, there is nothing wrong with criticizing (read: “fighting politically”) Obama and blaming him for the beheadings, but it was unacceptable for Democrats to attack President Bush for his own mishandlings of the 2004 beheading situation.

Bill O’Reilly offers his own flavor of bias and flip flopping when comparing his stance to the beheadings in 2004, in which he called for unity of purpose amongst the American people, to his stance now. In his June 18, 2004 show, he offered his own two cents on the beheadings and what they mean for Americans:

“We’ve got to stop with the partisan garbage, because that’s what it is, and we’ve got to stop with the selfishness and understand that this is a war. This is something we have never faced before. And stop the grand standing. And the politicians who exploit this for partisan benefit on both sides have got to be voted out of office. We have got to unite.”

It’s hard to miss the irony when he mentions those “who exploit this for partisan benefit,” especially when compared to how he feels now, calling on the president to “stop his confused posture, his stammering, stuttering,” as he has recently said on his September 5 show. The stance taken by O’Reilly and others over at Fox News to me seem exactly what O’Reilly called against back in 2004: the exploitation of a situation for partisan benefit. Thus, we see the glaring disconnect between the rhetoric of Fox ten years ago and today. Blameless was Bush in the face of two beheadings, and he was glorified enough by the Stupidparty to be able to get away with a quick public statement addressing the beheading of Paul Johnson before catching a flight to a Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign rally in Nevada. President Obama does not have the luxury of support from the Fox crew. Fox, in its own desperate measures to unhinge the president as an effective head of the country, has no scruples with altering its stance towards the responsibilities of the president with relation to terrorist threats. It would not be surprising if in ten years time, another several beheadings of Americans occurred under a Republican president and Fox News wouldn’t dare see this as anything other than a positive call for unity of partisan causes. Perhaps it is easy for someone behind a computer to criticize people like Bill O’Reilly for his changes in attitude, but when dealing with a shift in stance so blatantly drastic, it is an utmost disservice to the nation not to.