Critics of the Fox News Channel regularly complain that the network beats up on Democrats and takes comments out of context. Usually, though, those critics are not Fox anchors.
On Friday Chris Wallace, host of the weekend political talk show “Fox News Sunday,” took the hosts of “Fox & Friends” to task for their conversations about Senator Barack Obama’s comments about race. His complaint — which created both a tense moment and some must-see TV — was that his colleagues were taking those comments out of context.
On Tuesday, in a speech that dominated the week’s news, Mr. Obama referred his white grandmother, saying that she had felt nervous passing black men on the street. On Thursday, while trying to clarify his remarks, he called his grandmother a “typical white person.”
On Friday, the “Fox & Friends” hosts questioned whether Mr. Obama’s remarks about his grandmother had been offensive — a process that involved playing the “typical white person” quote over and over again — and two of the three hosts seemed to say that they were. Mr. Wallace came on during the third hour of the program to say that the hosts had too often clipped the quote and played it in isolation.
“It seems to me that two hours of Obama-bashing on this ‘typical white person’ remark is somewhat excessive, and frankly I think you’re somewhat distorting what Obama had to say,” Mr. Wallace said during his regularly scheduled segment on the normally lighthearted morning show.
At the end of the segment, Mr. Wallace tried to change the mood by saying, “Thanks guys, I still love you.” But the host, Steve Doocy, acted genuinely annoyed at being chastised, and told Mr. Wallace that if he still loved them, he had “an odd way of showing it.”
The fuss started well before Mr. Wallace’s comments. Brian Kilmeade, a host of “Fox & Friends,” had walked off the set amid a heated exchange about Mr. Obama’s comments. David Brown, the show’s executive producer, said in an e-mail message that Mr. Kilmeade had been kidding, although some bloggers didn’t get the joke. One blog sarcastically referred to an outbreak of the “the truth virus” at Fox.
A blogger for Mr. Obama’s Web site said that the campaign had “appreciated Mr. Wallace for doing his job as a tough but fair journalist on a network that has been deeply irresponsible over the last week in its unrelenting and sensationalistic coverage” of the candidate.
So maybe Mr. Wallace will finally land an interview with Mr. Obama? On March 16 Mr. Wallace introduced “The Obama Watch,” a countdown clock borrowed from the Fox drama “24” (complete with the tick-tock noise) that displayed the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds elapsed since Mr. Obama had apparently promised to appear on “Fox News Sunday.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/business/media/24fox.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin
