Excerpt
Introduction: Not Necessarily the News
It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats.
They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.
—a former Fox employee
On August 2, 2009, on board the “Six-Star Luxury Liner” Crystal Serenity, somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Fox News’s Washington, D.C., managing editor, Bill Sammon, rose to address supporters of Hillsdale College, a conservative institution located just over one hundred miles west of Detroit. His audience had paid between $11,800 and $37,600 per couple to listen to an all-star lineup of conservative journalists and scholars as they traveled from Venice to Athens, via Istanbul. Sammon was the featured speaker. He began with some joking remarks, speculating that conservative political consultant Mary Matalin, who was on board the ship simply on vacation, might have “mischievously arranged” to have her husband, liberal James Carville, along to “save his ideological soul.” Then Sammon made a startling admission:
You know, speaking of mischief, 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, quote, “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.(1)
At the time Sammon made these “mischievous speculations,” he was Fox News’s Washington deputy managing editor, and it was his job to oversee the reporting of the news on one of our country’s major cable networks. Yet here, in front of a friendly audience, on a luxury cruise an ocean away from the United States, he was candidly, nonchalantly admitting to consciously misrepresenting the ideology of a presidential candidate to Fox’s audience days before an election.
E-mails we obtained from that time, written by Sammon and a Fox producer, show that this calculated smear against Obama was not an on-air slip but part of a coordinated campaign of deception. Not only had Sammon personally appeared on the network to make these charges against Barack Obama, but he had also sent an e-mail to journalists who worked for him, encouraging them to cover the Democratic candidate’s “racial obsessions” and supposed connections to Marxism.
From: Sammon, Bill
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 1:02 PM
To: 069 -Politics; 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com)