Democrats on Capitol Hill have been howling about “the memo” for quite some time. According to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), it “cherry-picks facts, ignores others and smears the FBI and the Justice Department — all while potentially revealing intelligence sources and methods,” wrote Schiff in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this week. The Federal Bureau of Investigation — that’s the FBI! — issued an unsigned statement: “With regard to the House Intelligence Committee’s memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it. As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
Someone forgot to tell Melissa Francis, one of five Fox News hosts on Friday’s edition of “Outnumbered.” The show airs in the noon hour, which, today, was just in time to propagate some ill-informed riffs on the explosive story of the week.
Fox News somehow got the first televised peek at memo excerpts produced by GOP House Intelligence Committee staffers on FBI surveillance practices. The Washington Examiner was also early to the story, prompting some grumbling that the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Republican Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), was playing favorites with right-leaning news outlets.
Not a good look by the House GOP to release cherry picked excerpts through friendly media outlets in order to build a narrative. Only reinforces the partisan look to all this. A truly nonpartisan act would have been a complete release without cherry picks
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) February 2, 2018
In any case, Fox News was forced, like the rest of the media, to digest the memo and all its allegations and analyze them in real time. Check that: No one was actually forced to do such a thing. That’s just the way cable TV is; a proper and thorough vetting of a four-page memo relating to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act takes human beings at least a couple of hours, but hey, why not do it in real time?
As Howard Kurtz, Fox News’s top media guy, told anchor Harris Faulkner during “Outnumbered,” “Two points that jump out at me, Harris, as we go through the memo all together on live television.” In fairness to the Fox News team, there was a fair bit of restraint on the premises: Catherine Herridge refused to be dragged into leaping to conclusions, and Kurtz did his best to stick to the memo’s text.
However, Francis treated the memo, well, just the way men such as Nunes and President Trump surely wanted to see it treated. For instance: The document alleges that top law enforcement officials “omitted” certain facts and circumstances from applications used to seek surveillance on Carter Page, a former adviser to the Trump campaign. The famous Russian dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via research firm Fusion GPS, according to the memo, “formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application.” The role of Democratic interests in funding the Steele research, states the memo, wasn’t rolled into the FISA applications.
The memo also claims: “Furthermore, Deputy Director [Andrew] McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.” Based on the foregoing, Francis concluded, “Our top law enforcement officials lied to a FISA court in order to spy on people. Like, that’s horrifying. You don’t have to go any further than that.”
There you have it from a Fox News host. Even though the much-talked-about memo from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee hadn’t yet surfaced, and even though “Outnumbered” hosts hadn’t yet had a chance to slow down and compare the memo’s conclusions with the available public record, Francis was essentially calling a halt to the reporting. “You don’t have to go any further than that,” she said, to repeat this affront to television journalism.
The roundtable shows on Fox News sometimes have a self-cleaning-oven aspect, thanks to folks who speak up when abuses crop up. And so Kurtz, a broadcaster who came up in print journalism at The Washington Post and other outlets, did precisely that. “That’s a very heavy charge,” he said, then expressing doubt that the memo went as far as Francis said.
“It does,” Francis rebutted. “It says they knew the dossier was fake and they used it. … Yes, they used it to get the warrant, and they knew it was fake. How is that not lying?”
As the show carried on, Kurtz took a closer look at the document, later reporting to Francis that he’d uncovered no allegation of lying. She responded that the offense may be “lying by omission” and went on to identify the material omissions. “So you’re saying that’s not lying. Either way, it’s a huge deal,” Francis concluded.
Either way, Francis was doing her job of magnifying the impact of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo. Nunes & Co. were clearly happy to have a playing field all to themselves, banking on the possibility that cable hosts such as Francis would say things like, “You don’t have to go any further than that.”
The entire back-and-forth also drives at a point that flits across all the cable news purveyors: Those who arrive at simplistic conclusions, who are convinced of large and significant truths based on shaky evidence, who steer new facts into the same lane as previous convictions — they invariably speak louder than the people who are trying to grapple with complicated fact patterns. For more evidence of this dynamic, please tune in to other Fox News shows such as “Hannity,” “Fox & Friends” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine.”