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Andrew Breitbart may be dead but his practice of creating fake political scandals lives on at Fox News. The latest case involves Frank Vandersloot, the Romney campaign’s co-chair, who is apparently no relation to Joran Van Der Sloot, the accused murderer in the Natalie Holloway case. Rachel Maddow reported the facts beneath the fakery in the latest case last night. Here’s Media Matters’ take:
Frank VanderSloot is an Idaho businessman and a prominent Mitt Romney donor. According to Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, he’s also a member of Barack Obama’s purported “enemies list.”
In a May 10 column, The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel complained about the scrutiny VanderSloot has come under since the Obama campaign questioned VanderSloot’s background. On May 11, Fox jumped on the story, airing five separate segments that denounced attacks on a “private citizen.”
But a crucial detail was missing from Strassel’s column and the half-hour of airtime that Fox devoted to the story: VanderSloot is a national co-chair for Romney’s finance committee. So VanderSloot is not merely a “private citizen,” but actually a high-ranking member of Romney’s campaign.
Fox’s Neil Cavuto even let VanderSloot carry out his responsibilities as national finance co-chair on the air. Toward the end of an interview with Cavuto, VanderSloot said that he plans to “stand up and get more involved in this campaign, and we hope that other people will join us in that. Everybody should get out their checkbooks.”
Fox is outraged — outraged — that the Obama campaign would discuss Vandersloot’s political positions because he is, they falsely claim, a “private citizen.” They were not similarly outraged, of course, when Republicans skewered private citizens like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers in the 2008 campaign.
Why? I.O.K.I.Y.A.R.
