was on fox on many programs day after day. but bill then jumps to the conclusion, can you imagine that, that i think the story is bogus or phony or illegitimate. not true. i think it s an actual news story and i said the new york times and washington post each published a belated article on the controversy. belated. they were too slow. the question isn t whether there should be any coverage of a former justice official s charge but the case was tainted by racial politics. it s how much coverage is too much or too overheated. in fact i haven t been shy about saying the mainstream media have avoided and made mistakes in avoiding some stories unearthed by fox. when glenn beck was pounding away at inflammatory statements by van jones i wrote in my washington post column there was little question traditional media had botched the story by the time they caught up, jones had resigned. last week there was o reilly bringing up a column published that sunday morning by the washington po
language, although people who were on this thing defended it as not being a conspiracy, not coordinated, just a bull session where people were debating and gossiping, but that kind of language is kind of troubling. it is. absolutely. you re talking about journalists conspiring to say let s cover up the reverend wright story. and not only that, let s unfairly, in order to change the subject, accuse a conservative of racism. that is a very serious accusation. and the worst part is it s not just coming from people from, say, left of center websites but you have people from mainstream sites like politico and bloomberg and time magazine also taking part in some of these discussions. taking part but not writing the most inflammatory stuff. jane? i think that it s reprehensible to say we should call anybody a racist. and it s just the flip opposite of what we just talked about. however, i think there s a difference between a site that included mostly commentators that were angry about
walsh, the editor-in-chief of salon.com. and joan, obviously, the abrupt firing of shirley sherrod was a story. but how much responsibility did the tv networks bear for running that misleading video snippet before knowing the full story? i think they bear a lot of responsibility. you know, i want to give cnn credit because i believe cnn was among the first to search out shirley sherrod and find out that there was a very different story than the one that was being told. the atlanta journal-constitution i believe was also very quick to go to sherrod. how fox news or anybody else could run a story and not seek comment from a person that they were calling a racist, it s quite extraordinary. and you know, a lot has been made about fox didn t do fox isn t the cause of her firing. i m going to stipulate that. let s say that that s true. but fox played a much bigger role than people want to admit. that story, the breitbart version of the story, ran on foxnews.com all day monday. o reilly
cane. he d hurt his foot in some way or had some foot surgery. so he was hobbling around on this cane. and then they sent me up to capitol hill to cover some news conference. the next thing i know here s dan schorr with a cane but just pushing his way through to get up next to the microphone and kind of using the cane to clear the way. you couldn t stop him. rain, snow, a bad leg. he would go after that story. and he could always ask the question that would give you something different that nobody else had. right. and some of the challenging that dan schorr did of government came at a time before we all take it for granted now that there s this very tense, adversarial relationship between the media and people in power. but he seemed to have lived that way in earlier decades, before that became before watergate sort of changed the culture. you know, he kept cbs news in the game when watergate happened. we got out to a slow start on that. dan got into it, and he kept us
discovering that bp altered photos of its oil spill crisis center filling in blank screens with photoshopped images. nice catch and another brilliant pr move by the company. i made clear that i didn t like espn s special on lebron james picking a new team. well, the nut workers ombudsman agrees. they say espn gave upped tore yal control, should never have allowed lebron s folks to pick jim gray as the interviewer and here s the smam dunk. no matter how convoluted the intellectual gymnastics, espn paid for exclusive access to a news story. well, we got 15 minutes of free publicity on the o reilly factor and i m moved to make a couple of observations. pushing the story. here s a memo to howard kurtz. o reilly teed off on yours truly for saying fox news was pushing the controversy over the obama administration, all but dropping that voter intimidation case involving the new black panther party. i said that because the story