Laura Ingraham Fox News 5/3/18 interviews and monologue
Posted by John T. Reed on
The sound of her own voice
Laura Ingraham has a slobbering love affair with the sound of her own voice. She “asks” thousand-word, leading “questions” that leave almost no time for the answer from the guest. On 5/4//18, a guest actually asked her to stop talking over him when he was trying to read a document.
Smirk
She also wears an almost permanent smirk about how dumb those who disagree with her are. That is like Al Gore’s sighs, the fake theatrical laughter of Hillary and Juan Williams—an intellectually-dishonest debate tactic that would have you believe it proves the other side is wrong. But there are no facts or logic in a sigh or a smirk. They are offered as a substitute for facts or logic. They are no such thing.
She is a graduate of Dartmouth and U. of VA Law School. So she is smart and experienced enough to find and use facts and logic. So do that. Lose the smirk. It suggests you lack pertinent facts or logic for your side.
I have no problem with much of what she says, maybe most of what she says. My feelings about her are “You go, girl, but you’re better than the smirk. You don’t need that and it hurts your cause. And you need to talk less and listen more if you are going to have guests. If you cannot do that, expand your monologue to fill your whole show. Rush does that to a large extent. He rarely has guests, but does take some phone calls and handles them well.”
Here is an analysis of Ingraham’s monologue—she calls it her “angle”—on White House Press Corps and liberal media criticism of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Laura Ingraham said on 5/4/18 |
The dishonesty or other criticism |
|
Today’s press briefing turned into a total feeding frenzy on Sanders |
Okay, maybe a hair-on-fire metaphor; there was no blood |
| Familiar Trump enemies joined in the anti-Sanders mob | I would have said “The usual suspects on the cable news channels joined in.” Mob is a slightly exaggerated and therefore dishonest dysphemism in this case. |
| “How dramatic, Mike Barnacle” [He said this is how demociaries die—deception becomes normal] | He deserved her comment. I would have said he was melodramatic and trying to make a Mount Everest out of a molehill. It appeared that Sanders was putting out a different story than Giuliani, not because she is a liar as the press was claiming, but because Giuliani made a mistake or Trump changed what he wanted to say from what he previously told Sanders. A non-event. |
| Ingraham said to consider the sources of the criticism. Are these reliable sources? | Fair, albeit clichéd. |
| White House Press Corps has become a pack of lupine commentators | Good, accurate metaphor |
| activists masquerading as journalists | True, I would add the adjective “partisan” to activists. |
| I had to turn my volume down on that last joke [from the White House Correspondents Dinner comedian] | Clunky criticism of a dumb catty put down of Sanders’ make-up |
| They have become hostile adversaries in the Anti-Trump Resistance |
Fair |
| Ingraham said the fist-fight talk by a couple of black female critics of Sanders would be condemned in the extreme if Fox did it. | True, but we really have heard about the double standard about ten times as much as we needed to. News should be about things that are new. |
| Generally, there was little dishonesty in this monologue. I am not saying there normally is with Ingraham. I will write about another if I see her use more dishonest debate tactics in others. |
Apparently, Ingraham is pretty fair and honest in her monologues, which are written out in advance. In her interviews, however, she tends to occasionally punch below the belt.
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