The Hartford Courant's Roger Catlin offers an eccentric take Roger Ailes and Fox News--call it eccentric mixed up with inaccurate.
It's eccentric for Catlin to assert that Ailes has the "both the gravitas and grave demeanor of Alfred Hitchcock." Anybody who has seen Ailes on TV--and he had his own show on CNBC, way back when--knows that he is fast-talking, not at all like the great film director, who was notorious for stretching out his words and thoughts. Hitchcock was mock-ponderous, Ailes is rat-a-tat-tat right now.
OK, that's Catlin's opinion--free speech and all that. However, while Catlin should be free to have his opinions, he should not be free to be inaccurate.
And yet that's what Catlin did in the same article--he was wrong, bordering on malicious, when he falsely claimed that Ailes was responsible for the Willie Horton anti-crime ads in the 1988 Bush for President campaign. As responsible journalists and historians have abundantly demonstrated, the George H.W. Bush campaign did ads on the prison-furlough program of Democrat Michael Dukakis, but the Bush spots never mentioned Willie Horton, the most notorious prison-furlough-ee, by name or face. It's simply wrong, what Catlin wrote, and he should retract it.
He probably won't apologize, of course. Why should he, when all of his buddies in the old media are no doubt giving him high fives for sticking to Fox and Ailes. That's the MSM for you, still arrogant and out of touch after all these years, despite falling ratings and circulations--and that's one reason why Fox and the whole new-media movement have so much energy.
If the old media can't get it right, it's time to give someone else a chance.
