During Fox's pre-Super Bowl show, President Obama sat down to chat with Bill O'Reilly. During that interview, Obama may have--at last--opened the trap door under both the winger fringe and its house network. When O'Reilly asked him about the Cincy IRS bureau's improper investigation of right-leaning groups, Obama said--rightly--that it was just one local branch, and this and other scandals are only in the news because Fox News Channel makes them into big stories.
The transcript, courtesy of ThinkProgress:
O’REILLY: So you don’t recall seeing Schulman, because what some people are saying is that the IRS was used at a local level in Cincinnati, maybe other places –
OBAMA: Absolutely wrong.
O’REILLY: How do you know that, because we still don’t know what happened?
OBAMA: No, we do — that’s not what happened. Folks have again had multiple hearings on this. These kinds of things keep on surfacing in part because you and your TV station will promote them.
Ouch. I know a lot of us have been waiting for Obama to finally call out Faux News for being decidedly unfair and unbalanced. And now the nation saw it for all to see. I don't normally do three diaries a day, but this was too good to pass up.