The potshot of the weekend illustrates the visceral disgust in academia toward the Fox News Channel. If Franklin Roosevelt were a candidate or President today, FNC “would have loved” to show video of him “at his most helpless” – such as when he was carried or forced to have others attach and remove his leg braces.
The potshot, on CBS’s Face the Nation, came from historian Geoffrey Ward, writer of PBS’s [1] The Roosevelts [1]: An Intimate History, which began a seven night run on Sunday.
Appearing with his more famous collaborator, Ken Burns, Ward asserted on the September 14 Face the Nation:
“I think if he were running now, sadly, I think TV crews would compete with each other to see who could get the footage that showed him at his most helpless. He had to be carried in and out of buildings. He had to be helped to remove his braces and so on. And I think Fox News would have loved that.”
(Earlier, host Bob Schieffer described Roosevelt as “crippled, for want of a better word,” hardly the politically correct terminology.)
— Brent Baker is the Steven P.J. Wood Senior Fellow and Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Follow Brent Baker on Twitter. [2]