Mother Davis checks her own nails as she tells the following true story:
Conservatives have been giving CBS a hard time for accepting fake documents describing George W. Bush’s poor service with the National Guard. CBS deserves some criticism, of course, but what conservatives hate to mention is that their own favorite news network, Fox News, tells outright lies all the time.
In just the latest example, Fox News was caught making up a story about presidential candidate John Kerry. In the hours after Kerry’s triumph over George W. Bush in the first debate of the season, the Fox News political team was pretty angry, so their chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, wrote a story criticizing Kerry.
Cameron’s story was about how John Kerry had declared himself a “metrosexual” and fawned over his own manicure. The only problem with the story is that it was completely false, having come from nowhere but Cameron’s own mind. In short, Fox News made it all up, and then told its viewers that it was very true.
Making up “news” stories is bad enough, but what’s particularly despicable is the form that Fox News’s deception took. Because the Fox News political team could not find any substance upon which to criticize John Kerry, they chose to appeal to one of Americans’ worst prejudices: Anti-gay bigotry.
Our own writer, J. Clifford Cook, describes the Fox News fake article as “an underhanded suggestion that John Kerry is gay. You see, Fox News reporters know that their audience is not culturally informed enough to realize that metrosexuals are for the most part very heterosexual. That, and the references to John Kerry’s supposed manicure, were supposed to make Kerry look like the Republican’s worst nightmare: A powerful poof.”
Checking her own nails, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that,
Mother Davis
