Friday, July 22 2005, John Gibson aired one of the most despicable diatribes ever uttered by an American "journalist". I'm talking, of course, about his "Five in the Noggin" piece aired on Fox News. I searched the diaries and didn't see others on this. If there are, I'll take this down when I get up in the morning.
Atrios has the key graphs. Emphasis mine,
Five in the Noggin
What is also good is the Brit police tactics that we saw at work in the subway Friday morning. The tackle and kill team is incredible, if for no other reason than their bravery. Can you imagine the job of those cops? Tackle the guy wearing a vest bomb and hope your colleague is right behind with the gun to put five bullets in the noggin before he sets off the bomb.
Turns out he didn't have a bomb, and turns out he wasn't one of the four bombers Thursday. And if it turns out ultimately that he had nothing to do with anything, no doubt there will be hell to pay. But the police say he was linked to the terror probe, so let's wait and see.
Meantime, got to admire the cojones of those Brit cops to go after him like that. All of this trumps any of my other complaints that the Brits weren't making the right noises about fighting terror. They like to go about things a bit more quietly than us. Not my style, but okay, fine -- as long as they get the five in the noggin of the right bomber boy. They do that and I'm fine.
So for the moment, alls well. Just catch the four bombers. Five in the noggin is fine. Don't complain that sounds barbaric. We're fighting barbaric
Of course, if Gibson had the decency to wait five minutes to spout his third rate bile, he would have been able to report a different story. The poor guy was Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, a Brazilian electrician on his way to work with no connection whatsoever to the bombings. Not that that would have mattered to Gibson since he wrote the piece already knowing that he wasn't carrying a bomb. That the British police overreacted and shot an innocent man five times in front of hundreds of horrified onlookers is a tragedy and something that can well be learned from. But not by Gibson apparently. Nope, he applauds the gung ho, take no prisoners attitude and describes it at the sub human level that his network revels in. Is England or Brazil so far away that this man's family would not be hurt by such callous words? Is our country now so devoid of moral authority that we allow crackpots to talk shit on air with no repercussions when they go over the line? (Don't answer that.)
What will Gibson say when NY City cops chase down my 15 year old daughter or one of her friends when they don't stop because their ipod was blasting in their ears? What will he say when they shoot our 17 year old exchange student from Germany when she doesn't stop because she doesn't quite understand the language yet? "Turns out she didn't have a bomb, but you got to love Republican Mayor Bloomberg for telling his police force to be proactive and not wait for another Madrid or London to happen in New York. Got to love the cojones of those NYC cops going after a German teenybopper like that. Five in the noggin is just fine for her and her kind..." Who's the barbarian John?
The fact that it is now Sunday 1:00AM EDT, more than 12 hours after the facts of the case have come to light and Fox still has My Word up without any clarifications, changes or apologies shows where the network stands on this kind of reporting.
Tell Gibson what you think of his compassionate conservatism.
myword@foxnews.com
Tell Fox.
Viewerservices@foxnews.com
Any other ideas of how to get rid of garbage reporters like this? People in the public eye used to get fired at one time for saying really stupid things.