On Tuesday, The Intercept‘s Jeremy Scahill went on CNN and accused the network’s terrorism experts of being “frauds.”
“CNN and MSNBC and Fox are engaging in the terrorism expert industrial complex, where you have people on as paid analysts that are largely frauds who have made a lot of money off of portraying themselves as terror experts and have no actual on-the-ground experience.”
I don’t watch enough cable news any more to know for sure whether this is totally true. Over the years, however, I’ve seen some analysts who are reasonable and smart, while others are totally unhinged crackpots cynically pretending to lean on the panic button in exchange for too much cash. So, Scahill’s partly correct, I suppose, yet I don’t subscribe to the idea that you’re only an expert if you’ve been embedded in AfPak or if you’ve dodged Hellfire missiles on the ground in Yemen. This is like saying you can’t be an expert on space unless you’ve spent time on the International Space Station, or that you can’t truly know anything about filmmaking until you’ve actually directed a movie.
Anyway, there’s one specific host on Fox News Channel who absolutely falls into the fraud category. She also falls into the unhinged-crackpots-cynically-pretending-to-lean-on-the-panic-button category. Real-life judge and Botox victim Jeanine Pirro hosts a Sunday night show on the network during which she delivers what are arguably the most ridiculously unglued monologues in all of cable news, perhaps second only to Nancy Grace. No one at Fox News even comes close to Pirro’s master-classes in obnoxious fire-eating, hack writing and poop-flinging, at least not since Glenn Beck bailed out several years ago.
You might recall the last time we covered Pirro here at The Daily Banter. It was shortly after ISIS hit the news and Pirro ball-shamed President Obama and offered up her expert solution: “Air strikes. Bomb them! Bomb them! Keep bombing them, bomb them again and again. And I don’t care how long it takes. Just take out ISIS. Take out their convoys, and take out those troops.”
At the time, I described Pirro’s rant like so… CONTINUE READING