Build your own scandal!

By Gus Bode

In Tyler We Trust

Or thinking about the people who have to manufacture scandals for O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to talk about every other week. But what happens when that guy calls in sick for two weeks? I think University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill is finding out.

If you were unfortunate enough to see Fox News at all lately, you’ve heard of Ward Churchill. There has been a lot of attention on him recently for an essay he wrote called “Some People Push Back.” Basically, the essay suggests the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy and previous actions in the Middle East – specifically, bombing raids that killed several thousand children in Iraq in The Gulf War.

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The controversy surrounds comments Churchill made specifically about the victims in the World Trade Center. He said they (and the businesses they worked for) played an essential role in the United States’ immoral foreign policy. He went on to call them “little Eichmanns,” after Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who was directly responsible for organizing the relocation of Jews to concentration camps.

The essay went unnoticed until a Hamilton College professor came across it and tried to keep Churchill from a scheduled speaking appearance at Hamilton by going to the press. The headlines read:UC Professor Compares 9/11 Victims to

Nazis. The University is considering disciplinary action and has been called upon by some to fire Churchill.

Whether he should be fired is debatable, but how much coverage should one dumb comment by some professor get? Quite a bit, evidently. Churchill was the subject of every episode of The O’Reilly Factor from Jan. 31 to Feb. 11. The last episode featured Bill in his “Talking Points Memo” asking why network news was ignoring this story that “goes right to the heart of our liberties, right to the moral fabric of America. This is huge.”

Then, at last, someone with firsthand expert experience on insensitive comments regarding terrorist attacks weighs in. That’s right, Ann “My only regret about Tim McVeigh is that he didn’t bomb the offices of the New York Times” Coulter dedicated her Feb. 13 column to Churchill. It’s mostly Ann sarcastically comparing Churchill to Democrats and suggesting he’s not even a real “Indian.”

Wonderful. Ann’s contributions to the political and academic world never cease to amaze me.

If you want to see some firsthand evidence of how slanted Fox News is, try to find a transcript of it mentioning Coulter’s insensitive comment about the Oklahoma City Bombing (above). You’d think they would at least mention it, considering she said this in the New York Observer, is a bestselling author and also speaks at universities. But if you manage to find one, you’re better at it than I am because I couldn’t. Not once in any Fox News transcript in the last five years.

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But when an extremely liberal professor makes a similar comment, he gets two weeks of coverage on a 24-hour news network. I guess “Fair and Balanced” news is here to stay. God bless America.

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