Howell Raines Lets Fly His Hatred for Fox News
Posted by: Clay Waters
6/22/2006 10:22:36 AM
The always modest, always charming Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, has a new autobiography out, “The One that Got Away,” a sequel to his 1993 memoir “Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis.”
Dipping into his latest book on his love of fly fishing, we find Raines still rising to the conservative-bashing bait.
On page 189, he lets fly with thoughts about liberal bugbear Fox News: “Fox, by its mere existence, undercuts the argument that the public is starved for ‘fair’ news, and not just because Fox shills for the Republican Party and panders to the latest of America’s periodic religious manias. The key to understanding Fox News is to grasp the anomalous fact that its consumers know its ‘news’ is made up. It matters not when critics point this out to Foxite consumers because they’ve understood it from the outset. That’s why they’re there. Its chief fictioneer, Roger Ailes, had been making up news in plain sight for a half century.”
When it comes to "making up news," Fox has nothing on Raines, who before he was ignominiously drummed out of the Times' top slot editor slot three years ago, constantly pushed a ludicrous personal crusade to get women admitted to Augusta National Golf Club (home of the Masters golf tournament) even while the country prepared for war in Iraq.
He puts down his fishing rod and picks up his brass knuckles to go after Fox again on page 242: “Fox Television showed us the future -- outright lies and paranoid opinions packaged as news under the oversight of Rupert [Murdoch], a flagrant pirate, and Roger Ailes, an unprincipled Nixon thug who had assumed a journalistic disguise in much the same way that the intergalactic insect in Men in Black shrugged into the borrowed skin of a hapless hillbilly.”
More quotes from Raines’ pompous new autobiography tomorrow.
|
