Katie Bar The Door

This is the new face of nightly news credibility? Eric Alterman at MSNBC writes of Katie Couric at CBS:

I really couldn’t care less who reads the news, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Katie, particularly since I worked with her late husband on MSNBC when the station first began ten years ago, but our affair ended last night when she said that she wanted to help restore “civility” to the public discourse and then announced she would have Rush Limbaugh help with the job. I guess that’s the last time I can believe anything she says—or at least make sense of it. I wonder which of Limbaugh’s comments led the poohbahs at CBS, who, like NBC’s “Meet the Press,” decided to give Limbaugh this honor. …

Could it be when he said “the religious left … hates and despises the God of Christianity,” because “Liberals consider themselves more powerful than God?”

Could it be when he opined that a letter to President Bush from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—the very same one who previously advocated “wiping Israel off the map,” has referred to Israel as a “rotten, dried tree,” and has dismissed the Holocaust as a “myth.”– contained, in Limbaugh’s scholarly view, “some liberal Hollywood Jewish people talking points?”

Could it be when he said John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz, was called “one of the nation’s leading wackos…in love with a dead man?”

Could it be when he said the Supreme Court “expelled gas” in striking down antisodomy laws in Texas. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is a “racist” for upholding affirmative action programs?

Could it be when claimed that women “actually wish” for sexual harassment?

Could it be when he said Democrats believe “the more deaths in Iraq the better?”

Could it be when Limbaugh told a black caller, “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back?”

Could it be when he said, “The NAACP should have riot rehearsals?”

Or what about when he announced on another occasion, “They should get a liquor store and practice robberies?”

Could it be when he asked “Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”

Could it be when an environmentalist died of breast cancer in 1997, Limbaugh played the sound of a buzzsaw and said the woman had “finally been cut down to size.” And “she’ll never be able to bark up the wrong tree again?”

Could it be when he compared then-teenage Chelsea Clinton to a dog?

Didn’t see it myself, so I can’t confirm it. But, if true, it’s another black eye for CBS.

Explore posts in the same categories: Color Commentary, Kabuki