The Devil is in the Details -- So Where are the Details?
Reported by Judy - July 19, 2004 -
When the Newshounds were in New York for the premiere of Outfoxed, I never found time to run over to the U.N. headquarters and take a peek at those Oil for Food program documents that Fox News' Jonathan Hunt is always hyperventilating about. So when E.D. Hill brought up the Oil for Food program on Fox and Friends today (July 19), I thought I really had missed something.
Co-host Hill told viewers (8:09 a.m. EDT) that the insurgency in Iraq is being financed by the Oil for Food program. Co-host Steve Doocy added that the same banks involved in the Oil for Food program are funding the insurgency so "all that money is blood money now." The third member of the Fox and Friends triumverate, Brian Kilmeade, added a little extra Bush spin by noting that none of America's allies are going to help stem the insurgency because they don't want to help Bush get re-elected.
That string of non sequiturs, stretched across a suspension bridge of assumptions unsupported by any evidence, was one of the most audacious pieces of propaganda I've seen on Fox and Friends.
First of all, the Fox and Friends co-hosts cited no source for their information, such as The AP or one of their own reporters. Did it come from a U.N. report, a report from a congressional committee, or where? They also failed to offer any details -- which banks, in which countries? And even if they were the same banks, what does that prove by itself? And which countries don't want Bush re-elected? Isn't that last notion the one you all thought was so funny a few months ago when John Kerry suggested something similar?
All in all, it was pretty slipshod work coming from a crack investigative network like Fox.
