Good Riddance: “The Big Story” Is… John Gibson Fired
John Gibson and his narrow-minded, ad hominem vitriol will no longer disgrace Fox News. He has been let go because of low ratings. No way you thought they were firing him because of his simplistic, fallacy-filled, neo-conservative sycophancy toward all things Bush and right-wing. No way…
Of course, if they fired people for that at Fox News, they’d have to replace nearly everyone there. I think Mort Kondracke and Alan Colmes might still have jobs if that were to happen, but that would be about it.
Anyway, Gibson was fired. With him will go the news show “The Big Story,” which Gibson has hosted since 2008.
Gibson was known for his outrageous comments, like this one about the French:
“First, the French think they are so good at dealing with the Arab world that they would have gone out and paid every terrorist off. And things would have been calm.
“Or another way to look at it is the French are already up to their eyeballs in terrorists. The French hide them in miserable slums, out of sight of the rich people in Paris.”
Gibson wrote this in July, 2005. Little did he know that the United States would employ the tactic of “buying off” the Sunnis to make the “surge” work in Iraq. Still, be that as it may, to call the Arab population in France’s slums “terrorists” was a bit much.
Gibson made the Media Matters of America’s 11 “Most Outrageous Comments of 2006” with this comment on May 11: “Do your duty. Make more babies… half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, the Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably the ones Hispanics call gabachos, white people, are having fewer.” These comments were his answer for the U.S. Census report that stated that nearly half of all children under five years of age were racial and ethnic minorities.
Then there was his treatment of Rosie O’Donnell, especially when she began questioning the official Bush administration story of 9/11, which, as an American, is her right. He was quick to call for Rosie to be taken off the ABC morning talk show “The View” in April, 2007, making false statements such as: “She directly accuses President Bush and the administration of attacking the U.S. on 9/11.” She never said anything of the sort, but this was the kind of misdirecting hyperbole with which Gibson trafficked.
After the Success Tech shooting in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2007, Gibson made the comment on his radio show that: “I knew the shooter was white. I knew he would have shot himself. Hip-hoppers don’t do that. They shoot and move on to shoot again. And I could tell right away because he killed himself. Black shooters don’t do that. They shoot and move on.” These comments resulted in Keith Olbermann of MSNBC calling Gibson a racist. Others, like Rick Sanchez of CNN, would castigate Gibson as well.
But Gibson probably began losing his audience just after actor Heath Ledger died. Calling him a “weirdo” and mocking the talented young actor, Gibson went far afield of the line of tastefulness, territory with which he was all-too-familiar. The backlash calling for Gibson’s removal was unprecedented.
Perhaps we can look at this as Heath Ledger’s parting gift to us all. There can be little doubt that Ledger was a free thinker, a person who liked to explore boundaries. Freeing part of the broadcast world from the poisonous rantings of an intolerant authoritarian would probably sit well with him.
