Every day is Opposite Day at Fox News
Posted on | October 14, 2007
It’s driving them crazy that Al Gore won the Nobel—absolutely crazy. Fox News’ answer to inconvenient truths, though, is always to invent an alternate and more comforting reality.
Ah, you have to love the predictability of
PravdaFOX News Channel. When Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, you KNOW they started scrambling to find ways to diminish him. And Friday, they found their mouthpiece in the conservative NY Sun’s Seth Gitell.Gitell thinks that the Nobel committee awarded the Peace Prize to the wrong American, arguing that it should have gone to…wait for it…Gen. David Petraeus.
So the general presiding over a horrendous civil war of our own making, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of millions more, not to mention the deaths of more than 3,800 American troops should be given the Peace Prize???
No surpries here; Fox always stands ready to report what they wish were true. In a completely unrelated column, James Fallows recalls some of the criticism leveled at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Nobel:
I am old enough… well, there are many ways to end that sentence, but for now: I am old enough to remember, from my school years, the disdainful reaction in my home town to the news that Martin Luther King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
The reaction was, of course, racial at its root. This was a majority-white, minority-Hispanic small town with very few black residents, which went for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson in the presidential election that same fall.
But the stated form of the objection concerned not King’s race but his obnoxiousness as a man. He was a windbag. He was pompous and self-dramatizing, He was holier than thou. Plus, he had started getting involved where he didn’t belong, in raising questions about the Vietnam War. Through the rest of Martin Luther King’s life, the father of my best home-town friend always went out of his way to refer sneeringly to “Martin Luther Nobel.”
So let’s check in again in twenty years to see how history remembers Gore and Petraeus.
