Fox News finally addressed their parent company’s hacking scandal head on this morning, with Fox and Friends launching a comically sycophantic and pathetically inaccurate defense of News Corp. Host Steve Doocy and guest Robert Dilenschneider, a media consultant, agreed News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch has done “all the right things” and argued that the scandal is way overblown. “For some reason, the public, the media, keep going over this, again, and again, and again” the guest said. “It’s too much,” he added, “We should move on.” Doocy agreed, scolding the media for not devoting its time to covering more important issues. (His show later featured a segment on actress Mila Kunis and a performance by second-tier boy band Lifehouse, popular in 2001.)
But their defense of News Corp. really got embarrassing when Dilenschneider and Doocy engaged in some stunning subject/object slight of hand, comparing News Corp. to companies that have been hacked, while failing to note it was News Corp. that did the hacking in this case. “We know it’s a hacking scandal, shouldn’t we get beyond it and deal with the issue of hacking? We have a serious hacking problem in this country,” Dilenschneider reminded us. Listing several companies like CitiGroup that “have been hacked into,” Dilenschneider asked, “Are they getting the same kind of attention for hacking that took place less than a year ago that News Corp is getting today?” “Right,” Doocy said, before noting the Pentagon was also recently hacked.
Prior to this morning, Fox News has done a fairly decent job of covering its parent company’s hacking scandal, giving the story just enough coverage to avoid being accused of ignoring it. According to a Media Matters report, while the network mentioned the story far less than CNN or MSNBC, it did cover it 30 times in the past two weeks and has generally disclosed its relation to News Corp. But this seems to be the first time the network has offered a vigorous defense of the company.
“It’s really very, very scary, and I think we should be very concerned as a public about our privacy and about people getting access to what we have,” Dilenschneider added. Indeed, starting with News Corp.
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