Yes We (Still) Can by Dan Pfeiffer

Author:Dan Pfeiffer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Fox (and Friends) Is Destroying America

“Oh, come the fuck on.”

That was my response to the reporter who called my cell phone to earnestly ask if I had heard about a piece of blockbuster, campaign-altering news.

I had been working on Obama’s campaign for less than two weeks when the phones started to ring off the hook. We were still operating out of a windowless temporary office in DC. My “desk” was a card table that was designed to fit two people, but had three people. The quarters were so tight that we had to take turns typing to avoid elbowing one another.

I turned to my office mates, Robert Gibbs and Bill Burton, to tell them what I had just heard.

“Guys…”

But they were both on the phone having the exact same exasperated, heated conversation that I had just had.

The source of this media firestorm was a report on Fox & Friends, the network’s morning show. The hosts had discussed—with the palpable enthusiasm of kids on Christmas morning—a vaguely sourced report on an obscure right-wing news outlet that “researchers for Hillary Clinton had uncovered the fact that Obama had been educated in an Indonesian madrassa.” One of the hosts, Steve Doocy, who makes Brick Tamland look like Edward R. Murrow, declared with clown-ish enthusiasm that “this is huuuge”1 as he repeated the false report without ever once questioning its veracity.

Doocy said that madrassas “teach this Wahhabism which pretty much hates us,” then declared, “The big question is, why was that on the curriculum back then?” At one point a caller said of Obama, “Maybe he doesn’t consider terrorists the enemy.” And how did the hosts respond to the suggestion that a United States senator was sympathetic to Al-Qaeda?

“Well, we’ll see about that.”

Gibbs, who unlike Tom Hagen in The Godfather is a wartime consigliere that every candidate needs when the shit hits the fan, sprang into action. Within minutes, he was on the phone with anyone and everyone at Fox News to raise holy hell. It’s safe to say that people two blocks away could hear Gibbs forcefully make his argument in his trademark Southern drawl.

The senior executive in charge of news at Fox eventually got back to Tommy Vietor, Gibbs’s deputy, with something more akin to an excuse than an apology. He said that he couldn’t control Fox & Friends, one of their most watched shows, because it was “entertainment programming” and the normal editorial rules didn’t apply there.

It’s worth taking a moment to absorb that statement: the morning show was entertainment, not news. He promised to take steps to make sure this didn’t happen again, which we took as seriously as O. J. Simpson’s pledge to find the “real killers.”

Eventually the hosts submitted to public pressure and delivered a particularly insincere and unenthusiastic clarification; everyone moved on, but the damage had already been done. Fox News had taken a scurrilous, racist, unsubstantiated rumor and injected it into the middle of a presidential campaign. This was no garden-variety journalistic mishap; it was

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