Jitterbugging for Jesus

The popularity of “Fox & Friends,” a TV program that consistently has the highest ratings in daytime broadcast journalism, underscores the fact that high ratings are not a measure of high quality.

On the Friday morning edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Pete Hegseth took the lead in trashing the New York Times for allegedly failing to cover the capture of five ISIS leaders.

Flipping through a print edition of the Times, Hegseth gleefully noted, “I’ve looked for the five ISIS leaders captured in the failing New York Times, and in the print edition today, I have not seen it yet!”

That’s because the allegedly failing New York Times had reported the story of the capture of five ISIS leaders two days earlier, on Wednesday.

The day before, on Thursday, Hegseth’s own Fox News reported the story of the capture, catching up to the New York Times scoop.

Maybe the guys at Fox & Friends should watch their own Fox network for news. I would highly recommend they watch Shep Smith’s program at lunchtime. It’s the one network news program I try to watch every day for its excellent news coverage and smart, hard-hitting commentary.

In addition, Hegseth and his two co-hosts at Fox & Friends could read the always great New York Times every day rather than scanning it on Fridays. And read it along with the great Washington Post.

Not that the Times and Post are perfect.

But the two papers are two great American institutions. And great American institutions — in journalism as in religion as in business as in sports as in the military and as any other big institution — make mistakes.

In fact, big, great institutions sometimes make whopping big huge mistakes.

Have you seen the latest news about that great American business institution AT&T?

That great business institution had to admit to making a whopping big mistake in hiring Donald Trump’s personal “fixer” Michael Cohen in a whopping big case of influence peddling.

It’s doubtful that Hegseth won’t be manning up and admitting his mistake in trashing the New York Times with a blatantly false accusation about its excellent coverage of the capture of ISIS leaders — a story that informed people around the world read on Wednesday in the world’s best paper.

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