http://nitpicker.blogspot.com/2007/03/dance-foxholes-dance.htmlIn the light of Fox News scrambling to maintain the thinnest veneer of "balance" after Democrats refused to lend them respectability, I thought it might be time to point out something I witnessed first hand as a public affairs sergeant in Afghanistan. I call it the "Fox News Two Step."
You see, because my position was apolitical, very few of the journalists knew of my personal political leanings. I was, to them, just the guy who would get them on flights (and sometimes travel with them) to distant forward operating bases. When I wasn't in the field covering my own stories, I served as sort of a liaison between journalists and field units, getting writers, photographers and broadcasters on the ground to write about the war and answering their questions when they called. In other words, about half my job was to be a info source and/or travel agent for journalists.
On more than one occasion, I worked with Fox News producers and reporters. Once, in Herat, I saw one of the Foxholes approached by a couple of soldiers. One of the soldiers said he was glad they could finally talk to a "conservative" reporter. The reporter laughed and said, "Someone's got to balance out the liberals." But, later, I ran into that same reporter in Bagram. He wanted an interview with some soldiers and,
when I grabbed one at random to ask if he wanted to talk to Fox News, the soldier--an Army captain--said he didn't, because, as a Democrat, he wasn't a fan of the network's politics. The reporter, shaken up, said that was ridiculous. The network had no politics, but only told the truth. "Whatever," said the captain and walked off. The reporter, after a few beats narrowed his eyes at the soldier's back and quietly hissed, motherfucker.Just before Thanksgiving, 2004, a Fox News producer with whom I'd worked a number of times in Kabul and Bagram showed up on Bagram Air Field to shoot what military PA people call "Hi Moms"--the little snippets of video of service members saying "I'm Corporal Bill Jones from Paducah, Kentucky and I want to say 'Happy Thanksgiving' to my wife, Sheila and my parents Don and Lorraine in Louisville." I was confused about why he would be doing this. My unit--and every PA unit--shot hundreds of these every year for holidays, the Super Bowl, the Army/Navy game, etc., and provided them free of charge to all who asked for them. When I asked the producer why he had come, he said he'd had the same question when he was told that he should know better. It was "part of (his) contract," he said, to get on his knees "and give Bush a blowjob" every month or so.
I don't think it's necessary to rat these guys' names out--though they're written in my notebook alongside where I scrawled what they said--because one of them I thought was a pretty good guy, but these are just two of the instances of clear bias on the part of Fox. Many of the questions they asked seemed designed to lead to soundbites declaring everything in Afghanistan just wonderful, while other reporters seemed to want to tell a story well and thoroughly--CBS's Lara Logan, CNN's Ryan Chilcote and Newsweek's Tim McGirk deserve special attention. (Only once did I meet a reporter with a clearly anti-US, anti-military bias: Carmela Baranowska, who treated US bases like free hotels, ate up more than her share of MREs, once washed her dainties with the Marines' limited drinking water at a FOB and then, when she was finally kicked off the bases for being useless, disappeared. After we scrambled the OHSHIT scouts to track her down, she popped back up on the radar, complete with a convenient and completely bullshit story about Marines terrorizing Afghans. I can't and won't go into all the reasons her career-enhancing documentary is ridiculous, but you'll just have to trust me on this.)
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