Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:58 pm
Fox News hosted Foreign Policy’s Tom Ricks with the hope of furthering their Benghazi conspiracy. Instead, Ricks suggested that Fox’s coverage of the story was due their operating as a wing of the Republican Party.
Here is the video from Media Matters:
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The segment was prefaced by a question about a White House Benghazi cover up, but Ricks wasn’t playing along. He called the Fox News coverage of Benghazi hype. Anchor Jon Scott asked how it could be called hype when the first US ambassador was killed in 30 years, and Ricks responded, “How many security contractors died in Iraq? Do you know?” Scott answered, “I don’t.” Ricks continued, “Nobody does, because nobody cared. We know that several hundred died, but there was never an official count done of security contractors dead in Iraq. So when I say this focus on what was essentially a small fire fight. I think number one, I’ve covered a lot of fire fights. It’s impossible to figure out what happened in them sometimes, and second I think that the emphasis on Benghazi has been political partly because Fox was operating partly as a wing of the Republican Party.”
What Ricks was essentially saying here is that Fox politicized Benghazi in order to help the Republican Party. In short, Fox News turned a serious event like Benghazi into Republican propaganda. Tom Ricks isn’t just some foreign policy writer. He has extensively covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has written two of the best books that you will ever read on the subject, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005, and The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq.
It is always fun when Fox’s politicization and bias get called out on their own airwaves, but when the person doing the calling out carries the gravitas and expertise of Tom Ricks, the criticism carries even more weight.
When this sort of criticism occurs, the Fox News reaction is to publicly ignore it while retreating even more deeply into their echo chamber.
Tom Ricks probably won’t be back on Fox for a long time, if ever. In the future when they want to fan the flames of their faux foreign policy scandals like Benghazi, the network will turn to trusted propaganda hands like John Bolton to spread the seeds of propaganda to their shut in and intellectually shut out viewers.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
