Posted by Mary Chastain Dec 17th 2011 at 6:00 am in Fox News, GOP, Justice/Legal, Mainstream Media, Politics, elections 2012, journalism, national security I’m not happy. Operation Fast and Furious was finally brought up in a debate, but it received one question and two responses. Growing up my mother told me to either go all the way with something or don’t bother with it because sometimes going half-way is worse than not doing anything at all. This is one of those cases. I don’t blame the media for ignoring the ONE question with TWO responses on Fast and Furious. If the moderators asked Speaker Gingrich or Governor Romney maybe the media would have given it a shout out.
I couldn’t find it anywhere in The New York Times. I found a part of the Fast and Furious segment in the Fact Check article at The Washinton Post. They didn’t mention that this Rick Perry quote came from his answer on the Fast and Furious question.
“Venezuela has the largest Iranian embassy in the world there.”— Rick Perry
This is a dubious statement, especially since Iran has much deeper interests in countries closer to Tehran, such as Iraq and Syria. The extent of Iranian influence in Latin America is often overstated. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was embarrassed in 2009 when it turned out her claim that Iran was building a mega-embassy in Nicaragua was untrue.The rest of the articles at the Post didn’t mention Fast and Furious. There’s a blog post at MSNBC about Rick Perry, but it doesn’t mention his response to Fast and Furious. Matthew Boyle and Katie Pavlich wrote about it.
But I fault Fox News on this more than the rest of the media. Operation Fast and Furious deserved the attention gay marriage and abortion received if not more. So many people on Twitter were demanding questions be asked that Fast and Furious was even trending on Twitter.
Granted, Fox actually asked–as opposed to this topic’s total absence in previous debates–but did they only ask the question, one question, just to shut us up?
Big Jounalism
