We don’t want to kick anyone for what’s essentially a technical glitch—there but for the grace of choose-your-God go I—but a friend has pointed out something in the Daily Beast’s Roger Ailes interview too quirky to ignore.
The interview is between Ailes and Howard Kurtz and is every bit as riveting an interview as you might expect from such a subject and such an interlocutor—with more to come tomorrow. There’s the usual Obama-bashing, Soros-bashing, media-basing. And then there’s Walmart.
Click the “print” button and the newly clutter-free and ready-to-print interview comes with a pest: “_WalmartAd_”. In the middle of Aile’s quotes, the pesky “_WalmartAd_” pops up at the most inopportune times. Take this as a prime example. Our emphasis.
Sipping coffee from a “Fair & Balanced” mug, Ailes insists that his channel lives up to the logo in its treatment of the administration. “We are not interested in savaging them. We are interested _WalmartAd_in the truth.
And then these:
Beck trashes Republicans every night. I’ve said to him, ‘Where the hell are you going to _WalmartAd_get your audience if you keep this up? You’re trashing everyone.’”
“The president has not been very successful,” the Fox News chairman says in a lengthy interview. “He just got kicked from Mumbai to South Korea, and he came home and attacked _WalmartAd_Republicans for it.
Much of the interview focuses on Fox personality Glenn Beck and interestingly, Walmart was one of a number of companies to pull advertising from his show after he called president Obama a racist last year. Alas, through some ghost in the machine, the association lives on.
Joel Meares is a former CJR assistant editor.