Tag Archives: Fox News Channel

Newt Gingrich: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner At Tiffany’s To The Tune Of $500,000?

Greta Van Susteren, host of the Fox News progr...

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Now I get it.  A “real” fiscal conservative like Newt Gingrich considers himself suitable to run the country’s budget, finances and economy yet the sky is the limit on his personal Tiffany& Co. jewelry store debt.  I figure you would have to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at Tiffany’s to accumulate the time it would take to spend $500,000 in a couple of years. I know Tiffany’s is pricey and it would depend entirely on purchases but Gingrich and his third wife Callista sure don’t practice fiscal conservatism in their “real”  life.  Don’t they know they can pick up perfectly good fake Tiffany jewelry on any New York City corner or Mexican resort town?

The ex-Congressman and Speaker of the House who has thrown his hat into the Republican Presidential nominee ring on various changing platforms like family values (he has been married three times and divorced a wife who had cancer) and of course fiscal conservatism. The Tiffany story broke yesterday by Politico’s  Jake Sherman.  It immediately made the rounds of all the usual places but Gingrich and his camp have been busy “no commenting” on his revolving charge at Tiffany’s with an extraordinarily high debt ceiling.  Interest rate? Unknown.

Shockingly, Greta Van Susteren somehow mustered up the nerve (Gingrich was until recently a Fox contributor) to ask him on her show last night about the Tiffany & Co. bill.  She of course, backed down immediately when he said “I’m not commenting on stuff like that.”  Fox has long had this love-affair with Gingrich and his political analyst skills (quite the joke to me).

So, I’m wondering if Gingrich the professed candidate does not want to comment on “stuff like that,” what exactly is he willing to comment on that just might be of interest to potential voters?  Are we really supposed to believe that he is in touch with the masses?  Or that he can be fiscally conservative with our money in Washington?  Does he think  for one minute that just because the wimps at Fox News back down from asking him questions that the rest of the media will too?  This guy is so far out of touch with real people that I can’t even believe Republicans will end up standing for whatever it is he says he stands for. The reality is Gingrich stands for the elitist, business-as-usual, good-old-boy image that even the Republicans are trying to shake.

I’m going to go out on a very short limb here and say that Newt Gingrich is toast. He’ll never win the Republican nomination and he will keep rubbing everyone  (including his own party) the wrong way until the only show he will be wanted on is Fox. That’s how you know you are toast.

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Donald Trump To Join Fox & Friends News Chatter

Donald Trump at a press conference announcing ...

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As if Donald Trump doesn’t have his plate full enough what with Celebrity Apprentice, business mogul-ing (Is that even a word?) and maybe, possibly, it depends…running for president next time around,  he is now set to be part of the Fox & Friends “news” show.  It seems Fox & Friends will make room on their couch for Trump every Monday morning, cleverly dubbing it “Mondays with Trump.”

I saw some of the stellar promos for Trump’s segment with such lines as: “The Donald now makes his voice loud and clear on Fox.” Boy, they must have gotten some huge powerhouse agency to think that one up. While Fox has never been one to shy away from controversial  on-air people,  I can’t quite get a handle on what Trump can bring to the news table. Unless it is just basically Trump wanting face time in case he decides to run for president and Fox wanting more ratings for their coffee klatch with Steve Doocy, Gretchan Carlson and Brian Kilmeade.

I don’t watch the trio on Monday mornings or any other morning but the idea of listening to Trump with my coffee first thing in the morning is not my idea of a good wake-up call. Most presidential candidates are distancing themselves from their pundit or “news analyst” roles on TV stations so as not to show any conflict of interest. Newt Gingrich stepped down from his Fox Perch when he supposedly became a presidential candidate. This whole thing leads me to believe that Trump isn’t going to try to run for president at all but is just more of his usual blowhard, look-at-me PR stuff.

Trump however is not any kind of analyst or commentator or pundit but a mere contributor without a  contract that will just be on Fox on Mondays, indefinitely or probably until the regular news crew gets sick of him or the viewers can’t take looking at his hair in the morning or his Celebrity Apprentice show gets higher ratings. Or until some Fox focus group tells him he doesn’t have a chance in hell of running a country if he couldn’t run a casino, and running on a platform that President Obama wasn’t born in the USA just isn’t going to cut it.

At least he doesn’t have to worry about being fair and balanced or politically correct or even accurate about anything he says, after all , it’s just FOX.

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O’Reilly to Juan Williams; “I’ve got your back”

I really hate to beat a dead, already signed by Fox News horse but…I keep thinking about the Thursday night Bill O’Reilly and Juan Williams love fest where O’Reilly told Williams; “I’ve got your back” and then Williams told O’Reilly; “You know what, you are a standup guy”. When Williams uttered those words on O’Reilly’s show, I knew he had been bought by Fox News, hook, line and sinker.  Of course as we all know now, by the next day (Friday) Williams had a $2 million contract with Fox. It was like the mutual admiration society of these two spawned a new reason for living. Plain and simple; NPR bashing.

I like Juan Williams and you can tell by sifting through my blog archives that I am not in the O’Reilly or Fox News fan club.  I have already noted in my Thursday blog that I felt NPR’s firing of Williams was done in an unprofessional, and thoroughly distasteful manner, so no need to re-tread that.  Not many of us would get the opportunity to bash our ex-employers in a public setting but hardly anyone gets the national platform to do so, lucky him.  I found myself amazed that Williams was  so totally hyped up on O’Reilly’s show Thursday (with a ton of prodding from O’Reilly) that he appeared to gleefully relish knocking an employer of 10 years (an employer that helped make him pretty famous by adding to his credibility). 

While I understand that he was upset with his firing, as anyone would be, I didn’t really notice the calm, classy, voice of reason that I had come to expect from him over the years.  When O’Reilly’s Friday show hit the airwaves and Williams was pitch-hitting for an absent O’Reilly, much of the show was about the Williams and NPR continuing saga as everybody and his brother was dragged out to be “shocked” and “horrified” by what Williams had been subjected to. It seemed quite weird to me that Juan Williams was doing a show about Juan Williams.  Pushing his case, bashing NPR, explaining away and dissecting his Muslim statement as if we had all not heard it 100 times in the last 48 hours.

It was as if in the blink of an eye, the flash of a lost job and the promise of $2. million , Williams fell quickly into Fox mode. Journalism be damned, I’m a Fox pundit now for real, no more treading lightly as an “analyst’.  So, welcome to the “Fair and Balanced News” Juan Williams, and oh yeah, watch your back.

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NPR Juan Williams dillema; Fox pundit or NPR journalist?

I’m watching Fox News right now as Bill O’Reilly is threatening National Public Radio (NPR), his words; “NPR will rue the day”. This is all in response to the firing of Juan Williams, a NPR political analyst who has been with NPR for 10 years.  Williams spends a lot of time on Fox News, as a matter of fact, he got fired for something he said on Fox News Monday night on O’Reilly‘s show.  It appears his joblessness will be short-lived, he was fired on Wednesday and Friday he will be pitch-hitting for O’Reilly on his show on Friday while O’Reilly is “on assignment”.

On Fox News this week Williams stated “I mean, look Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kinds of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But, when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

 This is the statement that evidently got the firing ball rolling but it seems to have been a long time coming.  According to O’Reilly on his Thursday night show, Williams was told in 2009 by NPR that it did not want him to be identified with Fox News and did not want him stating that he was an NPR analyst when on Fox news.  I understand the views of NPR on that issue, but I don’t understand why they did not go to Williams much sooner and tell him; Look, It’s us or Fox, take your pick. Be an opinion giver or a journalist.

I always thought it was weird to see Williams on Fox News which is more or less the opposite of everything NPR stands for but I thought maybe he was a free agent and didn’t have an NPR contract. I was wrong, he had one. I was in the news business at a time when a more definitive line was drawn in the sand regarding opinion and news. Today in the news, it’s hard to tell.  A true journalist is not an analyst, or a commentator, or a pundit or whatever other names the media can come up with to cloud the issue.  A journalist (sometimes called a reporter) is supposed to report the news in the most unbiased way possible and let the chips fall where they may. It is then supposed to be up to the public to form their own opinion after receiving all the facts.

While I don’t think any NPR journalist should be masquerading as a Fox pundit, it is hard in today’s world to even utter the word Muslim without all hell breaking loose.  I don’t think Williams meant to be insensitive but he was. TV cameras thrown into our faces tend to make us think that our feelings and opinions must be important.  But if you are a journalist, they are not.

NPR is going to feel the shock waves of this more than they can ever imagine. While I don’t agree that Williams could have continued to play both sides against the middle, his NPR bosses fired the guy over the phone without even a face to face encounter. He will now get to blast NPR all over cable news and has already garnered the sympathy of many.  “All Things Considered,”  NPR better round-up their troops for some stellar PR moves and the first priority should be to tell NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller , to find someone to help her tone down  her terse and foolish on-air statements. Or better yet,  let her keep blabbing and lose more public and privately funded money.

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