On Fox News, the brink of a potentially nuclear catastrophe with North Korea was no reason to book a real expert as the guest for its Outnumbered show today. Or maybe being a conservative is the only credential Fox cares about.
Fox didn’t even try to hide the fact that its sole guest for the show, media critic Joe Concha, has no professional qualifications for opining about the North Korea crisis. The show splashed his credentials across the TV screen (see above image) and not one of them was even remotely connected to international affairs, national security, Asian politics or national defense.
Concha has long seemed like he’d love nothing better than to have a paid gig at Fox. And even though he banned me from Mediaite (his prior gig) for saying so, I’ll cut him some slack for going along with the Fox booking. After all, appearing as the show’s #OneLuckyGuy has got to put him one step closer to that elusive but tantalizing contributor contract.
So I blame Fox for this journalistic malpractice, not Concha.
Nevertheless, despite an apparently utter lack of qualifications, Concha declared that North Korea is not an imminent threat because it’s not like ISIS and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is too much of a narcissist. (In case you didn’t notice, Concha has no psychological credentials, either.)
CONCHA: I don’t think that there is any imminent threat right now, to be quite honest with you. Because think about it … Kim Jong-un, as we said, is crazy but he’s also a narcissist. And narcissists value themselves more than anybody.
[…]
This is not ISIS. ISIS doesn’t care about the rules of mutual destruction. If they have a nuclear bomb, they’ll use it and they don’t care if you use it on them. I think in North Korea’s case and Kim Jong-un’s case, he knows if he goes provocative in any way, shape or form, that ensures, absolutely, his destruction and his people. He’s not gonna do it.
Sure, everybody is entitled to his or her opinion. Concha said he had been reading a lot about Kim Jong-un lately and he sounded knowledgeable. But on a cable news network that bills itself as “most watched, most trusted,” I want to hear from a professional, not just a conservative who has read up on the matter lately, as to whether or not I'm about to be blown to kingdom come, thank you very much.
Watch Fox’s inexcusable guest choice below, from the August 10, 2017 Outnumbered.