Fox Takes a Breather from Spitzer to Blame Democrats for High Gas Prices
Reported by Melanie - March 10, 2008
Your World w/Neil Cavuto was almost wall-to-wall Eliot Spitzer news today (March 10, 2008). Too bad Cavuto was off. He despises Spitzer and I'm sure he's a happy camper right about now.
Anyway, substitute host Terry Keenan fielded a show that was for all intents and purposes all about Spitzer but she and Fox did take time out of their whooping it up (and doing everything they could to link Spitzer to Hillary Clinton) to blame high gas prices on Democrats. And the segment aired immediately after a report that entirely contradicted that notion, no less. (Fox has no shame.)
Returning from a break 41 minutes into the show, Keenan introduced Jenna Lee, a reporter from the Fox "Business" Network. Lee ran through gasoline prices in various parts of the country and then said,
Why is this happening? Well, I talked to a couple oil analysts and basically they told me this: it's not due to supply and demand issues. It's not due to geopolitical tensions. Basically, it's due to nervous investors who see the commodity markets taking off and taking their money out of stocks and putting it toward commodities. So, that's why we're seeing this run up, basically just on speculation alone.
At the end of Lee's report, over a chyron that read, "Are Democrats Playing Politics with Gas Prices?" Keenan introduced her guests with,
Well, are the Democrats in Congress playing politics with gasoline prices, keeping them artificially high in hopes to win over votes in November? Republican strategist Angela McGlowan says yes they are. Sarah Flowers disagrees. She is a Democratic strategist.
With that, McClowan asserted that Democrats haven't offered legislation to "help with the supply and demand by creating credits for renewable fuels, alternative fuel sources like clean coal technology" or increases in "domestic productivity" like "drilling in Anwr or off the Gulf coast."
Flowers said this was a "silly premise;" the issue can't be "solved overnight."
You get the picture.
Comment: All I could think of during this blather was how Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House and one of the first things Ronald Reagan did when he moved in was to take them down. Both parties have been and are beholden to the automotive and oil industries and they've both looked the other way on this. The looking away has been going on for over 30 years. And that's not to mention Bush's war, the emergence of China and India as huge (and growing) consumers of gasoline, the possibility of "peak oil," OPEC's refusal to ramp up production, the Fed's failure to uphold the value of the dollar and on and on. But hey, never mind how complex this is. On Fox it's really, really simple (like most everything else): It's the Democrats' fault.
UPDATE: 11:15 p.m. ET - This post is closed to comments.
