Fox's Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and CNN's Erin Burnett
Two hosts at Fox News and one at CNN went from blasting thousands of Wall Street protesters to supporting them after a dozen of the activists donned tricorn hats and passed themselves off as members of the tea party on Thursday.
Fox host Bill O’Reilly changed his views mid-sentence while video of the protesters aired on his show. He instantly went from mocking and misrepresenting the views of the protesters and instead began reporting on them accurately and with praise.
“These people are unwashed bums. The reason they don’t have jobs is they just don’t want them. They hate capitalism,” O’Reilly said. “Oh wait a minute, is that a tricorn hat in the crowd? Never mind what I just said. These people must be patriots after all.”
O’Reilly ended his show with an unscripted rant that called for more regulation of Wall Street and for the rich to pay their fair share.
“All these people are saying is that they don’t want the banks and the corporations to have more power than the average American, is that too much to ask? If you think about it, that’s what the original Boston Tea Party was about. It was about the British government giving a monopoly to the East India Company,” O’Reilly said. “It was a revolt against the crown’s cozy relationship with a big corporation at the expense of the average citizen. I can’t think of anything more patriotic than protesting against corporate interests like those wonderful people are on Wall Street.”
Fox’s Sean Hannity followed up on his own show by noting that while the tea parties may have started in response to bank bailouts, they became organized and sponsored by corporate interests such as Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.
“My company talking points for the day said we’re supposed to trash the Wall Street protesters, but the minute they donned those tricorn hats they became instant patriots in my book,” Hannity said. “The tea party may be a bunch of corporate stooges but now it seems they’re finally focusing their anger where it belongs by taking a stand for freedom and economic equality.”
CNN’s Erin Burnett also fell for the ruse. Burnett previously aired a segment where she mocked the protesters, misrepresented their views, took the side of Wall Street firms and lied about the bailouts they received.
On Thursday Burnett apologized for this and said her views had been clouded by her former employment at Goldman Sachs, her engagement to a Citigroup executive and her years of being a corporate shill. She said this was the reason she made fun of the protesters and ignored the fact that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz supports the protests.
“Now that Fox is on the side of the protesters that must mean CNN will have to follow suit if we want to maintain our status as third place in cable news,” Burnett said. “I’m going to find it awfully hard to stop being a Wall Street apologist and may have to do some actual research once in a while, but it looks like that might be the trend in corporate news these days. I had no idea.”
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