When even FOX News personalities scoff at the headlines they’re forced to read, you know there’s a problem with the network. At least pretty well everyone present guffawed heartily at the assertion that the Constitutional Law Professor-In-Chief doesn’t believe in the Constitution. I’m guessing because there’s an amendment to the constitution that forbids sensible regulations applied to your civilian militia? As though the 2nd Amendment was so hard to interpret!
Yeah.
And that’s not to mention the mockery of Te’o at the beginning of the clip.
Via Media Matters.
The boss will let them off this time, but I’ll bet you won’t see any of them laughing at any future headlines.
And someone at Fox HQ adds another bullet point to his presentation titled “Why we need CGI newsreaders”.
“Believe in X” does not mean the same thing as “believe that X exists”. It means something like “put trust in X”, “hold X in high esteem”, “wants to comply with X”, etc. Someone can study a text without putting trust in it, holding in high esteem, or wanting to comply with it. A good example of such a person would be Bart Ehrman who studies the New Testament and regards eleven books as politically expeditious forgeries and the remainder as containing some egregiously unethical doctrines.
The words on the teleprompter, “Does Obama actually believe in the Constitution…?”, was not that absurd. It might have stemmed from being uninformed of Obama’s positions on things, sure, but it’s not so absurd in itself that it should provoke laughter. As such, I think the FOX News persoalities misinterpreted the headline as asking “Does Obama believe the Constitution exists?”, as opposed to what it really asked. That was a slight slip-up, not something one can rationally hold up as proof that they “scoff at the headlines” and this proves “there’s a problem with the network”.
In short, I think you are making a mountain out of a molehill.
I’m not so sure. On a network rife with overreach smears of Obama, surely, such a headline is commonplace. It being a simple parsing error is unlikely, especially with *all* the personalities making the same parsing error at the same time.
The problems with the network are well documented. This is another example of those problems.
If only they aimed it at all the ways he’s actually trampled the Constitution instead of their absurd fantasy world. Unfortunately they are all for secret wars, indefinite detention, assassination lists, lack of due process, and killing Muslims, so that never gets on their radar. Not that any other network is really much better.
I agree that it is improbable that all the network personalities would have the same parsing error at the same time, but that does not mean it is more improbable than some other scenario, such as the one you have outlined here. Consider how many times FOX News has accused Obama of ignoring, undermining, defying, and otherwise “not believing in” the U.S. Constitution. It would not surprise me to learn that it has happened a thousand times by now, being such a constant theme for the network. Given that, how improbable would it be for all the network personalities to find the accusation funny on the one-thousandth time? To me, that seems even more improbable.