Good on Fox News Radio’s Jon Decker for smacking down his colleagues as sounding “like a White Supremacist chat room” when they defended Donald Trump’s “good people on both sides” remarks about the Charlottesville neo-Nazis.
FTVLive got hold of the emails apparently offered to colleagues as “truth” about Joe Biden who launched his presidential candidacy yesterday with a video attacking Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. The first one published was from reporter Doug McKelway. It was sent to “SENIOR PRODUCERS” and a slew of supposedly “objective” news people such as the “FOX DC Assign,” “NationalDesk,” “WHUNIT,” etc.
McKelway’s subject line read: “Putting this Biden statement out there, next to Trump’s original presser, and a live interview I did in C-ville with ‘good people on both sides’” Then the email excerpt quoted a line from Winston Churcill, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
The Daily Beast has more:
McKelway contrasted portions of Biden’s script against the same quotes that pro-Trump outlets have used to claim the president never defended white nationalists. And then the reporter highlighted a quote from his own interview with Brian Lambert, an armed Unite the Right attendee, who portrayed the neo-Nazi rallygoers as victims: “They’re denying people their right to assemble. They’re denying their right to speak freely, however hateful their views may be,” he bemoaned.
Moments later, Fox News digital senior editor Cody Derespina replied-all, agreeing with McKelway, and adding to it a snippet of a Fox News interview with Jarrod Kuhn, a Charlottesville marcher who claimed he was not a white supremacist, but simply there to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
McKelway and Derespina are supposedly part of Fox’s “very professional and very solid news” team, the same team Fox claims is separate from its opinion shows and, therefore, perfectly suitable for holding Democratic candidate debates. The link in that Daily Beast snippet goes to another Daily Beast article explaining the Trump supporters’ attempt to rebrand his remarks. No legitimately solid or professional news team would claim that Trump didn’t mean what we all heard him say and then use that as “balance” against Biden.
Apparently, Decker was not the only one disgusted by McKelway and Derespina. He responded by email to McKelway, with cc’s to everyone else, saying, “Based upon the slew of emails that I’ve received today, both of you ought to send an apology to your Fox colleagues – many of whom are hurt and infuriated by your respective posts.” Then, in a new paragraph, which gave emphasis to the sentence, Decker wrote, “Your posts read like something you’d read on a White Supremacist chat room.”
According to The Daily Beast, McKelway later walked back his comments, noting that Lambert, the neo-Nazi protester he had cited as a “fine” person, turned out to be – shocker! – a white nationalist.
“So much for your Winston Churchill quote,” Decker reportedly retorted.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a very revealing look into the inner workings of the Fox News “news” division.
(Decker image via screen grab)