WILLIAMS: First of all, don’t you think, this spill now is going to be in excess of what happened with Exxon Valdez.
HUME: Let’s see if that happens. There’s a good question today if you are standing on the Gulf, and that is: Where is the oil?
WILLIAMS: “Where is the oil?”
HUME: It’s not on — except for little of chunks of it, you’re not even seeing it on the shore yet.
There’s stupid. There’s willfully deceptive. There’s blindly, reflexive ideological. And then there’s Brit Hume, who’s all those things and SO much more. Despite his long and exceedingly mediocre career, Hume continues to be to objective journalism what Jeffery Dahmer was to vegetarianism. To Hume’s way of thinking, news exists to serve the interests of his employer, Fox Noise Channel, and by extension the Republican party. If that means denying objective reality as if your life depends on it…well, then that’s what you do. And Brit Hume has never met a lie he couldn’t utter with gusto if he felt that it serves the cause.
Unfortunately, denying reality does not render that reality any less real. In this case, the reality is that, as of Sunday, the oil slick in the Gulf Of Mexico covered an area of about 4,922 sq. mi., an area larger than Los Angeles County. Oil contamination had, by Sunday, also reached the barrier islands of four states- Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Indeed, where IS the oil??
This disaster, Hume’s laughable protestations to the contrary, is real and the impact is both visible and tangible. What I find so reprehensible is that Hume, who as a journalist should at least understand the concept of objectivity, decided that it was appropriate to flack for Big Oil. No reasonable person could seriously argue that the impact of the oil spill has been minimal. Then again, no reasonable person could seriously describe Brit Hume’s journalist skills as objective or competent. To borrow (and paraphrase) a phrase that Keith Olbermann frequently uses to describe Caribou Barbie, “that man’s an idiot”.
The reality is that what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico is an absolute, undeniable, and unmitigated disaster. Oil is bad for everything that lives in water, and aggressively denying the reality of the disaster only makes Hume look like an idiot…but that train left the station long ago. If Brit Hume is a journalist, then I’m the Queen of England. He can’t even spin his propaganda and Right-wing talking points in a coherent, credible manner.
