An audio recording has surfaced from a 2009 Mediterranean cruise in which Fox News vice president and Washington coverage chief Bill Sammons admits to starting the rumor that Barack Obama is a socialist back in 2008. “Takes credit for” might be a more apt rendering of his demeanor. But, Sammon adds, he didn’t actually think it was true. Thank god, right? As long as the programming directors of the most popular 24-hour news network in the country don’t believe the descriptions of events they present to the public, someone will still be in a position to make decisions for the American people. It just won’t be, you know, us. Ain’t-I-a-dickens Sammon quote after the jump.
Speaking to a group assembled by Hillsdale College, Sammon said:
Last year, candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and first let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to ‘spread the wealth around.’ At that time, I have to admit that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.
Ah yes—the “mischief” of using your national media outlet to slander a candidate for the presidency. If your ear is telling you that Sammon does not feel entirely contrite, it is correct.* While Sammon says that, at the time, he “considered it kind of a remarkable notion that we would even be having the conversation,” he has since been vindicated by the way it took off. Sammon marveled at the way Obama’s ostensible socialism became “a main point of discussion on all the channels, in all the media” and said he is now “astonished by how the needle has moved.”
I consider it kind of a remarkable notion that Sammon was surprised to “even be having [a] conversation” that he himself initiated. That cable news executive Bill Sammon couldn’t believe the way cable news networks ran with his own baseless speculation tells us something about the psychological mechanisms he employs to keep being Bill Sammon without cutting himself. We can also learn something from this quote, in which he examines whether he feels what emotionally whole human beings call guilt:
Now imagine my surprise when this year, I witness President Barack Obama standing in the cross hall of the White House and having taken over the American car industry, look into the camera, and announce to the nation essentially, that he would personally vouch for the warranty on your car’s muffler. All of a sudden, the debate over whether America was heading for socialism seemed anything but far-fetched…The debate over whether America is headed for socialism seems all too real, especially to those who still believe in capitalism.
Imagine his surprise when, a year later, the thing he thought he was making up turned out to be true in the context of the hyperbolic discussion he started by making that thing up! Notice that, to Sammon, the question “Is Barack Obama a socialist?” is not what determines whether what he originally said was true. Nor does his own personal understanding of the accuracy of that statement. No, what vindicated his claim is that “the debate over whether America is headed for socialism” seems real, especially to people “who still believe in capitalism.”
Go ahead and substitute “who hysterically accuse any government service or tax of being a form of socialism” for that last phrase, and the snake sinks his fangs securely into his own tail. Sammon’s decision to start a false news story turns out to be the right one, in his assessment, because the story really took off. This is like saying it’s okay that you cheated on your wife because she turned out to be a real bitch at the divorce arbitration. To Sammon, though, he’s clean.
“Have I said things where I take a conservative view? Give me specifics,” he said to reporters last year, when a memo he circulated urging Fox staffers to call the public option “government-run health insurance” was leaked to the press. I’ll forgo giving the specifics here; you can read them in the Daily Beast article, or in virtually anything else a Google search of Sammon’s name turns up. Or we can just let the man himself come up with a list while he’s trying to fall asleep tonight.
We live in a world where traditional journalism is yielding way to news reporting that has a political function. Not just from blogs but also big networks. As long as you saw Outfoxed back in 2006 like the rest of us, the only news here is that students at the Hillsdale Academy may or may not have access to a discount Mediterranean Cruise with shitty entertainment.
So many arguments against 24-hour for-profit news networks. The fact that some are so shameless is just sickening. It’s obvious that, for the movers and shakers among the repubs, the ends justify the means. Jerks.