Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove and The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!
The lunacy in the Imperial City continues; now House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) is demanding that a Fox news reporter reveal why a certain story involving the President and a porn star wasn’t run in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election. It should be noted that the proper response to this demand need be nothing more than “go fuck yourself” but Fox is going to (sadly) show a little more professionalism than that. Excerpt:
While Democrats are quick to say that Fox News was trying to “burry the story” to protect President Trump, former Fox News executive Ken LaCorte said the story lacked any credible evidence. LaCorte wrote a piece in Mediaite, explaining his decision to put a lid on the story (emphasis mine):
Two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, as the editorial head of Fox News online, I reviewed a draft news story that said porn actress Stormy Daniels had confirmed having an affair with Donald Trump a decade earlier. The only problem was … Stormy hadn’t said that.
Daniels and her associates were playing a bizarre cat-and-mouse game with Fox News and other outlets, trying to get their story out without fingerprints and, ultimately, without enough proof to publish.
We and others practiced solid journalism. Now, that’s being spun in an effort to prove the opposite.
On October 18, I got my first look at the Stormy Daniels story written by Fox reporter Diana Falzone, who primarily covered celebrity news for print and video. It wasn’t a detailed investigative piece as the media has portrayed this week, but a 9-paragraph story that sorely needed backup.
It included: a two-word confirmation – “it’s true” – from an unnamed Daniels “spokesperson,” an anonymous quote from a friend who said she’d dropped off Daniels to meet Trump at a hotel, and quotes from The Dirty owner, who said that he had spoken to Daniels in 2011 and she had confirmed the affair.
It lacked: any mention of payments, a hush money contract or any corroborating evidence beyond the two secondhand accounts.
Now, while LaCorte’s reply is interesting and certainly lays out plainly why he didn’t think the story was worth running, all of that explanation is irrelevant.
The fact is, the very idea of an Imperial apparatchik demanding an explanation from a privately owned news network why they did or didn’t run a particular story, or why they made any particular statement about another political figure, is absolutely chilling. It reveals a very troubling attitude by that hack Cummings, that he thinks he can just demand such answers from the media, and it’s important to note that he made this demand of a network that is one of the few to not be generally seen as an arm of the Democratic Party.
I’d purely love to see LaCorte give Rep. Cummings (Horse’s Ass, MD) the reply he richly deserves. But I suppose he sees it as better for his network and his career to maintain more composure than that.
Too bad.
