Written by Rachel Rose Hartman, posted at Yahoo News
Fox News host Greta Van Susteren is apologizing for “a doozy of a mistake” made on her show Monday when a picture of Shirley Sherrod was used to illustrate a segment on Rep. Maxine Waters, the Huffington Post reports.
Waters, a California Democrat, has been charged by the House with ethics violations, and Sherrod was fired from the USDA for incorrectly being cast as a racist. What the two visually have in common is that they’re both black women.
Van Susteren took to her blog Monday to issue an extremely effusive apology, calling the incident on her “On the Record” program “a very bad mistake and a painful one for which we are very apologetic.”
“We really don’t know what to say and there is nothing that you can post to make us feel better (not that we deserve to feel better!) This mistake was bad, very bad and we are immensely sorry,” Van Susteren wrote.
The obvious problem here is that even if it was a mistake, FOX has a history of race baiting and seemingly intentional gaffes like this. I know, from having done TV, such things can happen. But when you follow teabaggers and pro-war protesters around as if their protests were huge: when there’s a far bigger one you don’t cover that’s on the opposite side, then on a regular basis you show pictures of larger protests claiming they were the smaller one…
When you spend so much money keeping Glen Beck on the air who calls Obama a racist, while making racist comments out of the other side of his mouth…
When you become a propaganda tool for folks who carry racist signs like Obama in white face…
Don’t be surprised when anyone with an ounce of common sense is more than a bit suspicious when you claim it’s was a “mistake.”
By the way, wardrobe/prop malfunctions do happen: take it from someone who has done a lot of acting. So why is it folks are more likely to believe this was just a mistake? Where’s all the cynicism in the reporting, and the general public, the Jackson event had?
Yeah, sorry like a FOX. She posted her ‘effusive apology’ on her blog?!? Why didn’t she broadcast it on her show? As you say, with Fox’s history of ‘accidentally’ but advantageously to their conservative bias screwing up such things as pedophile Mark Foley’s party identification (they repeatedly put a ‘D’ after his name instead of an ‘R’), any mistakes of this sort should be treated with skepticism.
You know they “all look the same” to the people who watch Fox. I doubt that anyone even noticed.
That’s probably true, even to Fox ‘houseboy’ Juan Williams.