Fox School of Thought: Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brit Hume Try to Grade and Fail the President

BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Jeffrey Joseph

President Barack Obama's choice to appear on Oprah Winfrey's "Christmas at the White House" earned more than the expected ratings envy from the people at Fox News. They also decided to take the opportunity of Obama's self-assessment of a B+ to express their usual disdain through their own grades, almost all failing.

One of the quickest to disparage President Obama was Brit Hume on an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor. According to Hume, President Obama deserved a D for his efforts with the economy, "the principal issue confronting this president when he took office, the issue that, I would argue, elected him." Hume then goes on to complain that President Obama deserved no credit for averting the banking crisis, preferring to credit the previous administration, and that the stimulus package passed after that was simply "one of the most reckless pieces of legislation I have ever seen" that he believes "did nothing to help the recovery to speak of."

Laura Ingraham got in on a parallel train of vitriol against President Obama, saying she "would hold him back a year" and subsequently "force him to go back and take rudimentary economics and history." She then lambasted the opinions of economic experts, ones with far more education and experience in the field than she has, for disagreeing on whether the recession has already ended.

What neither Hume nor Ingraham accepted was that economists developed a strong consensus that the economic stimulus package had a positive effect. The economy worsened, but could very easily have dipped much further.

In fact, Ingraham so blatantly ignored the facts that she made Brian Kilmeade appear reasonable by comparison for commenting that President Obama "kept his composure, he hasn't snapped anybody's head off, despite all the criticism; he did exactly what he said he was going to do in Afghanistan, just took a little longer to do it; he has reached out to all our enemies; [...] and the other thing is the economy is getting back on its feet again." When Kilmeade, who's been blatantly racist in the past, makes Ingraham look that much more extreme, her credibility comes under serious scrutiny.

Sean Hannity welcomed the opportunity to play the professor, too, awarding President Obama an F for job creation, Afghanistan, and the popular course suggestion, "keeping your word." He did sarcastically give President Obama one A+ for reading off a teleprompter. Of course, Hannity gave the president that dubious recognition while he happened to read off a teleprompter himself. Academic condemnation from a man who dropped out of college toward a graduate of the Harvard Law School also happens to ring a bit hollow.

Fox News guests and hosts may want to take President Obama to school, but so long as they refuse to read the information obviously contradicting them, they will hardly have any serious effect. Viewers could try to take those on-air personalities to task for their obvious errors, but some of them have a history of resisting education. Better to take a more certainly effective approach -- and to Turn Off Fox.

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Originally posted at Turn Off Fox.

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