{"id":33014,"date":"2012-11-27T20:06:31","date_gmt":"2012-11-28T00:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=33014"},"modified":"2012-11-27T20:26:03","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T00:26:03","slug":"ricks-on-fox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=33014","title":{"rendered":"Ricks on Fox"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oops, I forgot to thank Valerie for the link.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yesterday, Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks was on Fox News to talk about the deaths of four Americans at the Benghazi consulate, but instead he decided to make his appearance about the only network who has had the testicular fortitude to report to Americans about those deaths and the circumstances that resulted in those deaths. <\/p>\n

The UK’s Daily Mail<\/a> says that Rick’s appearance was cut short because of his verbal attacks on Fox News, the network he was on;<\/p>\n

Ricks, a respected journalist who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, responded that few people knew how many U.S. security contractors were killed in Iraq and compared that to the attention paid to ‘what was essentially a small firefight’ in Libya.<\/p>\n

‘I think that the emphasis on Benghazi has been extremely political, partly because Fox was operating as a wing of the Republican Party,’ Ricks said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, given the current crop of Pulitzer awardees, I don’t think that gives him much credibility. During the interview, Ricks says that he’s “covered” numerous firefights. What he fails to mention is that he’s covered those firefights after they were over and from afar – he’s never heard a shot fired in anger. As I pointed out once before<\/a>, Ricks has absolutely no military experience beyond his reportage. He’s so inexperienced that he has called for the return of a draft. He once put Kayla Williams’ book “Love My Rifle More Than You”, a book based on her experiences as a promiscuous female soldier, on the same level<\/a> as David Belavia’s House to House.<\/p>\n

Says Fox News;<\/p>\n

‘When Mr. Ricks ignored the anchor’s question, it became clear that his goal was to bring attention to himself and his book,’ Fox News executive Michael Clemente said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There have been a few times that my participation in an interview was abbreviated when it was clear to the interviewer that I wasn’t going to say what they wanted me to say. So, it’s not a rare practice. But, then, I never attacked the network I was on as a wing of any particular party.<\/p>\n

If Ricks had any respect for the profession of journalism, such as is it these days, he’d recognize that Fox News is informing the public, and just because that reportage makes Ricks’ political party uncomfortable, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s biased. Wasn’t it Hillary Clinton who said that Fox was the fairest of the networks when they were covering the 2008 Democrat primaries?<\/p>\n

Ricks also makes a quixotic comparison of the contractors killed in Iraq to the four Americans killed in Benghazi. As if one had something to do with the other. The American contractors killed in Iraq were killed in an actual war. The Americans killed in Benghazi were killed in our consulate, ostensibly US territory, not during a war. Their deaths were a result of failed security planning. <\/p>\n

When Ricks said “Nobody cares” about the contractors in Iraq, he’s insinuating that Fox News doesn’t care because the deaths happened under the Bush Administration. But there was a war and although tragic, they weren’t killed by any failures of security planning by the Bush Administration – and the Bush Administration didn’t try to cover up the facts surrounding the deaths. Unlike the Benghazi deaths.<\/p>\n

By the way, I talked to someone who works at Landstuhl Hospital in Germany this weekend where all of the casualties from Benghazi were taken and I was told they treated more than thirty casualties – something else we never heard here in our media.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’m putting the video of Rick’s appearance on Fox below the jump if you’re at all interested in watching Ricks hawk his book instead of informing the public;
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