[First published in AM New York]
WHAT’S WRONG WITH the following sentence? “The fact that you have these homicide bombers now, wreaking such hatred and violence while people pray, is to me an indication of their failure.”
That is supposedly a verbatim quote from Senator Hillary Clinton – as reported by Fox News during her Iraq trip last weekend.
Say again? She quite clearly used the word “suicide” , not “homicide“, during her Baghdad press conference.
But Fox News has policy – aimed, they claim, at denying glory or sympathy for terrorists.
We know that Fox staffers are ordered to call such killers “homicide bombers.” But did we know that their policy now extends-to doctoring the vocabulary of public figures that they quote?
What next? Will Fox News, because it suits their editorial agenda, quote the Republicans’ Senate Leader Bill Frist talking about the Bush Social Security plans: “We DON’T have a lot of work to do in terms of educating our own colleagues“? Frist actually said they DO have a lot of work to do.
Or could Fox be tempted to doctor House Speaker Dennis Hastert‘s unwelcome words on the same subject: “You can’t jam change down the American people’s throats.”
Maybe Fox believes they can jam down our throats anything they like.
HUNTER S THOMPSON’s DEATH from a gunshot to his own head – after a life with all the fascination of a oncoming train-wreck – is a sad mile-marker.
Thompson has repeatedly been linked with Tom Wolfe as a progenitor of “The New Journalism” of the 1960s – though Wolfe disavows the label, telling me that the credit properly lies with Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin.
And Thompson himself once protested when anthologized by Wolfe under that same title “The New Journalism.”
Wolfe acknowledges: “He wrote ‘gonzo’. He was ‘sui generis’.”
Exactly. Thompson was without doubt one-of-a-kind. Perhaps it’s just as well.
