The Competition Gets Ugly

Those of you who have written to me about my friend Geraldo Rivera know I have written back defending him.

Geraldo is offering to walk away from his job at Fox News if a panel of media experts decides he did something unethical — as the Baltimore Sun alleges — when he reported what everyone now agrees was erroneous information from Afghanistan.

Last week, an unbelievable thing happened. CNN's Aaron Brown decided to weigh in on the issue by doing a report that raised the Sun's allegations and dragged Geraldo through the mud.

What is unbelievable about this is that CNN is currently getting its butt kicked by Fox News, and the folks over there just can't stand it.

In the TV business, there is no excuse for passing judgement on the air on your competitor, or what your competitor is doing, unless it becomes a story that must be covered. The Geraldo story is not one of those.

If you don't like what your competition is doing, go out and beat him. Get more people to watch. Do better work. Tell a better story. Dig up more interesting facts. But don't think you'll succeed by going on the air to say that your competitor stinks.

Brown says that if the shoe were on the other foot "I have no doubt Fox would be all over me like a rash."

I don't think so. When CNN got into trouble with the tailwind scandal, other networks got into the story because entire departments of the government raised the issue and disputed the story.

No ... what Brown and the Baltimore Sun are up to, I think, is attacking Fox through Geraldo. The liberal media is fuming over Fox's success over CNN, because that's just not supposed to happen.

I might get on Brown like a rash here on My Word, an opinion segment, but I wouldn't do a show segment on him, pretending he was a legitimate news story that needed serious journalistic treatment. That's garbage.

Think whatever you want about Geraldo. Evidently, a panel of experts is going to investigate him and determine if the Baltimore Sun was right.

But get this straight. Fox is beating CNN, because more people want to watch Fox.

CNN hates that, and they're now telling you that their esteemed journalists — who wear tweeds and horn-rimmed glasses and speak at prestigious journalism schools — that they have judged Fox wanting.

It's a rash, alright — the rash that breaks out when you push garbage, which is what CNN's Geraldo story was. It was nothing more than bashing the competition, and pretending it was high brow journalism.

Garbage. Garbage, plain and simple.

That's My Word.

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