This should end forever the myth that Fox News is fair and objective toward to Obama Administration. It should -- of course, it won't.
Bill Sammon, the network's Washington managing editor, has been busted in an audio recording of a speech he gave in 2009 on a cruise ship to people who paid as much as #37,600 per couple. The clip was obtained by Media Matters.
“Last year, candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and first let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to ‘spread the wealth around.’ At that time, I have to admit that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.”
Howard Kurtz in The Daily Beast recalls some of the times Sammon's engaged in that mischievous speculation:
On Oct. 14, 2008, Sammon said on the air that Obama’s “spread the wealth” remark “is red meat when you’re talking to conservatives and you start talking about spread the wealth around. That is tantamount to socialism.”
On Oct. 21, he told Greta Van Susteren: “I have read Barack Obama’s books pretty carefully, and he in his own words talks about being drawn to Marxists… Now all this stuff’s coming out about whether he’s a socialist. I don’t know why anyone is surprised by it, because if you read his own words and his sort of, you know, orientation coming up as a liberal through college and a young man, it’s not a huge shock.”
Of course, the reason Sammon said that was to set up the rest of his speech, in which he rips Obama for becoming a socialist once he got in office.