Brit Hume

Hume complains of “double standard” on Woods comments

The Fox News personality hasn't given up the victim act he started after telling the golfer to convert

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Brit Hume is sticking with his story.

The Fox News personality has previously claimed there was anti-Christian bias at work in the reaction to his telling Tiger Woods, “Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.” In one recent interview, he continued that theme, and extended it.

Hume told the conservative CNSNews.com, “There is a double standard. If I had said, for example, that what Tiger Woods needed to do was become more deeply engaged in his Buddhist faith or to adopt the ideas of Hinduism, which I think would be of great spiritual value to him, I doubt anybody would have said anything.”

Hume’s right that the reaction would have been different if he’d just encouraged Woods “to become more deeply engaged in his Buddhist faith,” but it’s rather amazing that he can’t see the actual difference. It’s not about bias against Christians — always an amazing claim to make, I think, in a country in which fully 76 percent of the population identifies as Christian — but about the fact that he used his platform at Fox to, essentially, tell Woods and millions of other Buddhists that their faith is inferior to his. It’s about the pompous, self-righteous way in which he did it too.

Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon.

Fox’s Hume digs in deeper on Woods comments

The Fox News anchor claims his telling the golfer to convert didn't amount to proselytizing

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When Fox News’ Brit Hume told Tiger Woods, “Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world,” he wasn’t proselytizing. At least, that’s what he said Monday night, when he discussed those comments with his network’s Bill O’Reilly.

The exchange between O’Reilly and Hume on the subject:

O’REILLY: Was that proselytizing?

HUME: I don’t think so. I mean, look, Tiger Woods is somebody I’ve always rooted for as a golfer and as a man. I greatly admired him over the years, and I always have said to people it was the content of his character that made him, beyond his extraordinary golf skills, so admirable.

Now we know that the content of his character was not what we thought it was. He is paying a frightful price for these revelations. I – - my sense is that he has basically lost his family, and there’s a lot of talk about the endorsements he’s lost. But that pales, I suspect, in his mind, with what he’s lost otherwise. And my sense about Tiger is that he needs something that Christianity, especially provides and gives and offers. And that is redemption and forgiveness.

And I was — I was really meaning to say in those comments yesterday more about Christianity than I was about anything else. I mentioned the Buddhism only because his mother is a Buddhist and he has apparently said that he is a Buddhist. I’m not sure how seriously he practices that. But I think — I think that the — Jesus Christ offers Tiger Woods something that Tiger Woods badly needs.

O’REILLY: Now, if he does go that route, then he would be accused of — remember in the Bill Clinton years, he got in trouble, he had the Bible and Jesse Jackson and they were praying and, you know, wouldn’t Americans…

HUME: That’s true, Bill. That wouldn’t — and that wasn’t the first time. Remember Chuck Colson, who is one of the leading lights of Watergates, if you will.

O’REILLY: But he made a true conversion.

HUME: He did. And I’m — what I’m saying is if Tiger Woods were to make a true conversion, we would know it. It would show through in his — in his being, and he would know it, above all. And he would feel the extraordinary blessing that that would be. And — and it would shine because he is so prominent. It would be — it would be a shining light, and I think it would be a — it would be a magnificent thing to witness.

O’REILLY: Now, what kind of reaction did you get when you said that? A lot of letters and e-mails and things?

HUME: I got some letters and e-mails from people who were like me, who are believers who said, “Great. Right on. Right on. Way to go.” I’ve heard a lot of terrible comments from people who claim that I was a pompous jerk who had no business mouthing off on the subject and that I shouldn’t have belittled the Buddhist faith and so on. I really wasn’t trying to belittle and demean.

O’REILLY: I don’t think so either. What drives — what do you think drives the negative comments about — Buddhism aside, I don’t think we’re trying to denigrate Buddhism. But what do you think drives the negative comments about Christianity?

HUME: It has always been a puzzling thing to me. The Bible even speaks of it, that, you know, you speak the name, “Jesus Christ,” and I don’t — and I don’t mean to make a pun here, but all hell breaks loose. And — and it has always been thus. It is explosive. I didn’t even say the name in that way. I simply spoke of the Christian faith. But that was enough to trigger this reaction. It triggers a very powerful reaction in people who do not share the faith and who do not believe in it.

I’m fairly sure the reaction to Hume — at least from what I’ve seen, and I looked at quite a bit of it Monday — has much more to do with the “pompous jerk” part than with the mere mention of Christianity. But maybe Hume believes the opposite; even if he doesn’t, it certainly plays with O’Reilly’s audience. And for Hume to say he wasn’t proselytizing is absurd — as Steve Benen points out, what he did is the dictionary definition of the word.

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Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon.

Fox’s Hume slammed for telling Tiger to convert

Former Fox News anchor told beleaguered golfer, "turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery"

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When you’re a celebrity, everyone seems to know how you should best run your life — and they’re not shy about offering advice on that score, publicly. Take Tiger Woods, whose dirty laundry has been very public recently in the wake of revelations about his extramarital affairs. On Sunday, Fox News’ Brit Hume decided to tell Woods how he can get things back on track:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think, is a very open question. And it’s a tragic situation … But the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover, seems to me to depend on his faith.

He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, “Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

The reaction to Hume’s comments has been largely negative.

“I do not understand and can’t begin to comprehend the arrogance it takes to publicly anoint yourself someone’s spiritual adviser, and to then lecture them about their faith and its alleged inadequacies,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman wrote. ” A person’s faith is a private matter between that person and God, and is not a matter to be judged by some pompous TV anchor.”

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan was similarly critical, writing:

The pure sectarianism of this comment — its adoption of the once-secular stage of political journalism to insert a call for apostasy — is striking … But it has long been established that non-evangelical Christians have at best an auxiliary role in today’s religiously defined GOP, and the slow morphing of Fox News into the 700 Club is not exactly new … Once you have abolished the distinction between secular and religious discourse, as they routinely insist on doing, their politics is their religion and their religion is their politics. And both are corrupted.

And Steve Benen chimed in to make a few good points, “It’s hard to even know where to start with something like this. How many high-profile Christians have had damaging sex scandals of late? Why is Buddhism deemed inadequate for those with family problems? Why is a senior political analyst for a so-called ‘news’ network proselytizing, on the air, during one of the network’s ‘news’ programs?”

As of this post, a spokeswoman for Fox News hadn’t yet responded to a voice mail Salon left seeking comment. But there were some conservatives in the blogosphere who came to Hume’s defense.

“Leftists in the state-run media are lambasting Brit Hume for promoting Christianity on a Sunday morning talk show,” the Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, complained, before going on to make a somewhat nonsensical argument in response to Benen: “It used to be that liberals didn’t want you to mention Christ in schools. Then they banned Christ from Christmas concerts and public squares. Now they are demanding that we not talk about Christianity in public. We should have seen this coming.”

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Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon.

Uh, Brit?

Brit Hume is up in arms about another atrocity perpetrated against a conservative -- apparently no one bothered to tell Hume it didn't happen.

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It’s never good to be the last one to arrive at an outrage party. Actually, it can be downright embarrassing: Just ask Fox News anchor Brit Hume.

On Monday, in his “Political Grapevine” segment, Hume took up the cause of the latest conservative to be oppressed by unhinged liberals, Princeton student Francisco Nava. “Conservative students and faculty at Princeton University are questioning the absence of campus and community outrage — following the beating of a student leading a morality movement at the school,” Hume said. “The New York Sun reports Francisco Nava was attacked by two men last week and told to shut up. The beating came two days after Nava received death threats by e-mail.

“Nava — who is a Mormon — wrote in the student newspaper that a school campaign to distribute free condoms on campus was a ‘tacit sponsorship of hookup sex.’ Three other members of the morally conservative Anscombe Society also received the threats, along with a conservative professor.”

But there was a good reason for the lack of outrage. Nava — who had a history of faking threats, having done so while in high school — made the whole thing up. By Monday afternoon (we put it at no later than 1:50 p.m. Eastern, based on the time stamps at blogs covering the story), hours before Hume went on the air at 6 p.m., the campus newspaper and the conservative New York Sun were reporting that Nava had confessed to local authorities that he had faked the attack and was responsible for sending the threats.

We caught the rebroadcast of Hume’s program, which ran at 2 a.m. Eastern. The segment remained. Tuesday morning, Fox’s Web site carried an update to the print version. “Here’s a quick update on our Grapevine about The New York Sun story concerning the Princeton student who alleged he had been beaten — after coming out against the school distribution of condoms,” the update reads. “The Daily Princetonian says Francisco Nava has admitted he made up the story and fabricated e-mails threatening his life and those of other students and one professor.

“Nava reportedly confessed to police on Monday. He has been released with no charges so far. The school says its investigation is ongoing.”

As of this post, however, Fox’s Web site still listed the segment as its top video, with the description: “Questions at Princeton University about why more people aren’t defending a student who was beaten.”

Update: In comments, reader johnnydollar points out something we hadn’t noticed in reading the transcript originally posted to Fox’s Web site or in watching the rebroadcast, which is that Hume corrected the story on-air shortly after initially reporting it. Our apologies.

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Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon.

Fox News’ hourlong Petraeus and Crocker commercial

The network, long derided as a Republican mouthpiece, did nothing to dispel that image with Brit Hume's post-hearing interview.

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We didn’t think it was possible, but this time, we actually gave Fox News too much credit.

We expected that the exclusive hourlong interview that anchor Brit Hume did Monday night with Gen. David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, would actually be a journalistic affair. That seemed especially necessary given the pre-interview criticism Petraeus and Crocker had come under for giving their big post-congressional hearing exclusive to a news source widely seen as a shill for the Bush administration and an apologist for the war in Iraq.

Well, we were wrong. Indeed, the hour could not even fairly be described as an interview. It was an advertisement, an opportunity for Petraeus and Crocker to reprise their testimony unchallenged.

Hume started the hour fairly enough, asking Petraeus just to give a synopsis of what he told Congress earlier Monday. But then it was a solid 15 minutes before Hume actually asked his next question. So, based on a transcript of the interview provided by CQ Transcripts Wire, we did a quick bit of figuring. In those 15 minutes, 2,600 words were spoken. Of those 2,600 words, Hume got in seven prompts — calling them questions would be silly; they were just attempts to clarify for the audience what Petraeus was talking about, or nudge Petraeus in directions more favorable to his own position — and spoke a total of just 55 words.

After a commercial break, Crocker got similar treatment for 10 minutes of his own. In fact, it wasn’t until after the second commercial break (and by now we were halfway through the hour) that Hume got ready to ask his first truly penetrating question.

“Gentlemen, in both your testimony today, you indicated that there had been this bottom-up reconciliation which was sort of unpredicted and much welcomed, but it seemed to be mostly in Sunni areas. And the situation with the Shia seem — and the possible misbehavior, difficulty, problems with Shia militias, and so on,” Hume began.

And when, with the end of Hume’s question still hanging, the camera panned to the faces of Crocker and Petraeus, both looked to be bracing themselves for the blow surely coming. Would Hume ask whether the Sunni reconciliation had come solely because of fear of the majority Shiites? Or whether Shiite partisans dominate the Iraqi army and police force, turning them into sectarian militias and leading to the conclusions of the Jones report, which said that the national Iraqi police force should be disbanded altogether?

Not quite.

Instead, Hume wanted to talk about the new boogeyman of the right and Fox News: Iran. He blamed the Iranians for the aforementioned Shiite “misbehavior” and problems with Shiite militias, saying, “With Iranian influence [that's] always something you worry about when it comes to the Shiites,” then going on to ask,

“You indicated that Iran would be a big winner, in its own eyes at least, if this all went badly in Iraq. Why should we not believe that as progress is made with the Sunni, that progress is made militarily, that Iran could simply rachet up its interference in Iraq to the point where it would in the end spoil whatever progress is being made?”

At one point, Hume went so far in presenting pro-war propaganda that Petraeus actually had to walk the anchor’s statements back. In fact, the general actually looked shocked when Hume said to him, “You’ve suppressed the insurgency by al-Qaida to a considerable extent.”

“Well, we still have concerns about sectarian violence on either side, some still carried out by al-Qaida when they can,” Petraeus responded. “They are less active. They are off balance is the way I think we’d like to describe it, but still dangerous.”

Even that couldn’t slow Hume down. He’d just been handed an opportunity to further an administration talking point, that the war in Iraq is an inextricable part of the war on terror and specifically on the perpetrators of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Would you — you — you said today — I think the phrase you used, correct me if I’m wrong, about al-Qaida was — when I guess you were asked the question about who is the principal enemy there — you said al-Qaida was — I think you called it the wolf closest to the sled,” Hume asked.

Then it was:

“Would you say that we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in today, in terms of sectarian violence in Iraq, generally, had not al-Qaida been present and active there?”

And then:

Has “this, in an ultimate sense, turned out to be, more than anything else, a war with al-Qaida?”

In a courtroom, they’d call that leading the witness. At Fox, though, it’s just “fair and balanced.”

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Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon.

Iraq, Iran, what’s the difference?

Fox News slips up.

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Since Fox News has been so ready to trumpet every success story coming out of Iraq, you’d think they’d at least try to get them right. But if you go to Fox News’ website right now, you’ll see that Brit Hume couldn’t do that last night.

In his Grapevine segment, Hume discussed the recent handover of the province of Najaf to Iraqi troops, and the ceremony, which involved Iraqi soldiers tearing apart a live rabbit and biting the heads off of frogs. Except he said it was an Iranian ceremony, and the mistake is repeated in headlines all over the site. Oops.

While we’re on the subject, check out this article also posted to FoxNews.com — discussing holiday cards sent to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Fox actually goes ahead and makes fun of the detainees. No “innocent until proven guilty here.” Fair and balanced, it’s not.

Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon.

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