It’s been making the outraged rounds in some quarters, but there’s been nary a peep (that I’ve read, at least) from any more conservative blogs about this particular journalistic scandal.
The following showed up on the Fox News website for some hours last Friday.
Rallying supporters in Tampa Friday, Kerry played up his performance in Thursday night’s debate, in which many observers agreed the Massachusetts senator outperformed the president.
“Didn’t my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!” Kerry said Friday.
With the foreign-policy debate in the history books, Kerry hopes to keep the pressure on and the sense of traction going. Aides say he will step up attacks on the president in the next few days, and pivot somewhat to the domestic agenda, with a focus on women and abortion rights.
“It’s about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures,” Kerry said.
Kerry still trails in actual horse-race polls, but aides say his performance was strong enough to rally his base and further appeal to voters ready for a change.
“I’m metrosexual he’s a cowboy,” the Democratic candidate said of himself and his opponent.
A “metrosexual” is defined as an urbane male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.
Go here to see a capture of the (now-vanished) the news blurb.
The Kerry quotes in the story are, of course, utterly fictitious. And Fox got rightfully called on it.
Comparisons to “Rathergate” are obvious, though not directly analogous. Fox pulled the story as soon as complaints came up, apologized for it, and the journalist involved was at least “reprimanded“; CBS and Rather continued to back the faux documents far too long and too defensively, and, so far as I know, there hasn’t been a slap on anyone’s wrist for going with a story even Michael Moore declined to go with.
That aside, it’s still inexcusable, and, frankly, I fail to understand why the reporter, Carl Cameron, still has a job (let alone still being assigned as the Kerry campaign point man for Fox). (I don’t understand why Rather has a job, too, but that’s a different tale). Even if, as the Fox apology has it, it was all a matter of “fatigue” and “bad judgment,” they should still fire his ass, and let him work his way back up through the bush leagues (so to speak). It’s the sort of black eye to journalistic integrity for the organization that Fox cannot afford.
And overlooking this story is the sort of hypocritical myopia that the “Right” cannot afford, either.
(No, I don’t think this was some great Rupert Murdoch-inspired conspiracy. It’s so ludicrous on the face of it, that the only people likely to believe it were the folks who already think Kerry is a supercilious metrosexual fop, and the obvious cost to the news organization, even one with a slant to the Right, to have something like this retracted is far higher than any benefit that could accrue. I think Cameron noodled around with the story, adding in some funny quotes, to show some people, and either posted it intentionally as a very bad joke, or posted it inadvertently as a very bad lapse of judgment. It makes no difference — even in the most charitable light, Cameron should be off pounding the Fairbanks beat for a while. And whoever had editorial oversight of the pages where it showed up should be banished to the Fashion section for a while.)