Courtesy of Mediaite:
On Friday afternoon, Fox News host Neil Cavuto took the rather extraordinary step of delivering a lengthy apology over his show’s use of Wayne Simmons as a terrorism expert, after it was revealed that Simmons had been arrested for allegedly lying about his ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Cavuto told viewers that “it has come to our attention that a frequent guest on this show might not have been who he purported to be” (which presumably means Fox News will no longer be booking “presidential candidate” Bobby Jindal), but he also made a valiant attempt to stop the buck:
“If it’s true that all our due diligence and vetting on Mr. Simmons missed this, that’s big, and that’s on me. And only me.”
Oh it's true alright. Not only that but I would be willing to bet money that a number of the other "experts" on Fox News are fakes as well.
And it should be remembered that Fox allowed this Simmons guy to do incredible damage during numerous interviews.
Think Progress has a list of just some of them.
Here are a few of the highlights:
A little more than a year after the 2008 presidential election, Simmons told Fox News that president Obama — who he called the “boy king” — was directly responsible for a number of recent acts of terrorism.
Speaking on The O’Reilly Factor in 2005, Simmons defended then-President George W. Bush’s decision to go into Iraq, and said Democratic-controlled government would cause “9-1-1s unabated.”
Employing another “guys like me” reference, Simmons in 2009 said that CIA operatives might abandon their posts because of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whom he called a “pathological liar.”
Appearing on Fox News in March, he asserted that White House adviser Valerie Jarrett was actually running the country. But she didn’t know how to defeat ISIS. For Simmons, the solution was very simple.
“We could end this in a week. And that’s not an exaggeration. That’s not hyperbole. We could run a number of sorties, thousands of sorties, locate, identify and designate absolutely decimate ISIS, ISIL, I.S., whatever you want to call them. They would all be dead,” he said.
There are of course many more examples of the constant stream of bullshit spewed by this phony asshole.
The thing is that while I hand it to Cavuto for at least making the minimal attempt to take some responsibility here, the fact remains that Fox News provides disinformation and outlandish fact free exaggerations on a daily basis.
And the truly frightening part is that their audience does not seem to care that they do.
Neil Cavuto publicly apologizes for having fake terrorism expert and CIA agent on his show.
5:43 PM
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