Neil Cavuto Implies the USA Today NSA Phone Spy Story is False
Reported by Melanie - May 16, 2006
At 4:41 p.m. ET this afternoon (May 16, 2006), Neil Cavuto broke into Your World with a Fox News Alert. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, "Fox News Alert - Verizon Denies it Was Asked by NSA for Phone Records" while Cavuto urgently said:
You remember when this USA Today story made all the buzz last week that maybe millions, tens of millions, of phone call and phone records were being, ah, sort of investigated by the NSA? NOW, Verizon Communications is denying it was ever asked by the National Security Agency to provide customer phone records or call data of ANY sort. Ah, this is after Bell South had said the same thing. Qwest had said, in the same story last week, the long distance carrier, that it was asked but ah, denied it. In other words, didn't give the government the right to look at these records.
So, by my math, that leaves only AT&T ah, out there, which wasn't commenting last week on the story. So, if this is true, and you've got Verizon, Bell South, and Qwest saying essentially nothing of the short happened, ah, makes you wonder. (Emphasis in original.)
Cavuto then introduced a roundtable panel and turned to one of the guests and said,
Scott, there might not be any there there.
Comment: "Sort of investigated." Don't ya love that?
Hopefully Cavuto's audience will bear in mind that Qwest couldn't have denied the government "the right" to look at its records without it having made a request to do so in the first place.
Beyond that, there is an interview with Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of Fox News, in the current issue of WorldScreen.com. In it, Ailes is quoted as saying:
We divide our programs into two different types: hard news, and we donât add anything to that; and then we do news analysis, which every cable network does.
Pretty funny Roger but now it's all starting to fall into place. Your World w/Neil Cavuto is an "analysis" show and nothing said there should be taken as fact. Of course, I knew that already but thanks for confirming it. Oh, and by the way, one of these days you should tell the audience, and Cavuto too. He keeps calling it a "business news" show.
