If you thought “date night” at this past Tuesday’s State of the Union Address was the last word in bipartisanship, then prepare to have your world shaken. FOX News Channel—you know, the network whose name comes up more often on MSNBC than MSNBC’s own call letters—is seeking to validate its “fair and balanced” motto by landing a high-visibility liberal to host a talk show. No, I’m not referring to Keith Olbermann, of departed MSNBC memory. The personage FOX is after is none other than former President Bill Clinton.
The network’s president, Roger Ailes, in an interview with Esquire, speaks of a meeting he took with Clinton in the ex-president’s Harlem offices to broach the subject of hosting a show on FOX News:
I met with him for an hour, an hour and a half, I asked him to do a special, which he's still thinking about. I'd like to have it; I'd like to have him do a special for us.
Ailes makes it clear that he’d be willing to extend the offer of a regular full-time spot to Clinton, though he admits it would take some work to get Bubba ready for prime time:
The problem with him in a talk-show mode is not that he's not charming, good, smart, and glib. He is. But he loves to talk about policy. He's actually a policy wonk. So if you really want eighteen minutes on ethanol, he'll give it to you. But it won't get ratings. So you have to be able to produce him and say, "Most people are not that interested in ethanol, Mr. President. What we'd like you to talk about is this." And if he would stick with current affairs and stick with the clock, he'd be one of the great talk-show people in the world.
As Ed Morrissey, my colleague at Hot Air points out, getting “Clinton to shut up to hit his timing marks so that Fox can actually sell the ads” would take nothing short of a Herculean effort:
If you think that would be easy, just recall what happened when Clinton appeared as a guest at Barack Obama’s press conference in December.
On the question of liberal voices on FOX News, Ailes tells his interviewer at Esquire:
Tell me who you want to see on the left and I'll hire them. If you give me a big name that's out there, that's floating around and wants work, I'd be happy to hire them. We have Ed Rendell, I mean he was the head of the Democratic party. He's on twice a week. You can't get any bigger than that. I go for people who will get ratings, but I'd be happy to put a bigger name Democrat on if you've got one….
The passage concludes with Ailes editorializing, “Now that probably surprises you and won't get into the story, but it's true.” Apparently FOX is not the only news outlet that can claim to be fair and balanced!
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