One thing you can count on: Fox will never miss a chance to defend a Republican and they'll never miss a chance to slam their "colleagues" in the "mainstream media." So it's no surprise that when Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour went into full-on oil spill denial mode yesterday, Fox anchor Bill Hemmer launched a defense of Barbour's "insight" while slamming reporters as the "real" criminals for scaring people away from Mississippi's beaches.
Watch:
HEMMER: I thought Haley Barbour's observations with Chris Wallace on Sunday were truly revealing. I mean, he said: "Look, Venice, Louisiana has been hit hard. So has Grand Isle, Louisiana. But we're not all the same area."
MacCALLUM: Right.
HEMMER: And then he talked about getting these tar balls that he called "a natural by-product of the Gulf of Mexico" they see on the shores every year. He says the biggest crime is that the media right now is telling America about this story and everybody thinks Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are in the same boat you find in Grand Isle, Louisiana and Venice, Louisiana and what that is doing is it's forcing people away from the shores.
MacCALLUM: You know what I do know, is that in the initial stages of this, Bill, when those first tar balls came up, you remember they said, but they're not from this spill.
HEMMER: That's true.
MacCALLUM: So, you have to wonder, what's coming down, nobody knows, really, you know, which areas are going to get hit the hardest, and everybody is trying to protect their tourism industry. It's summertime, and you hope that they're right.
Here's a helpful hint to Mr. Hemmer: when you say that "the biggest crime" with the BP spill is that reporters are telling people that the Mississippi coast is threatened, you shouldn't be sitting next to a reporter who is telling her audience that "nobody knows...which areas are going to get hit the hardest." After all, it's that lack of certainty which has so many people worried; let's hope that Mississippi escapes this oil, but the real crime would be if the media followed Barbour's lead and trivialized the risk to Mississippi and the rest of the Gulf Coast.