Can someone please tell me? Is there something in their water? In the air? Is it what they’re drinking — or smoking?
There seems to be an epidemic now of foot-in-mouth comments involving the once-taboo “a-word” (not the “a-word” people use to describe some politicians, but the “a-word” that describes what tragedy can befall politicians…).
As Senator Hillary Clinton’s team used a host of methods to try and short-circuit her comment about the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the 2008 campaign (…She first said it due to her thinking about terminally ill Ted Kennedy…But then it came out that she said it before…So her campaign blamed the controversy on Obama’s campaign looking to turn something into a big deal…) Fox News contributor Liz Trotta, a journalism pro who has a long and distinguished career reporting journalism and teaching it, made a joke on the air dealing with Barack Obama’s assassination.
And thus began the firestorm. And the obligatory apology.
Watch videos of her making her Big Mistake and make her Big Apology HERE.
Trotta’s problem is two-fold (1) her joke was in bad taste, (2) she won’t be taken seriously by a lot of viewers and even journalists now since the joke shows a political bias that isn’t usually stated by journalists as openly as in her brief comment.
For her poor choice of a comedic role model (former Governor Mike Huckabee making a joke about Obama and assassination), Liz Trotta wins the Memorial Day Edition of TMV’s highly-coveted Foot In Mouth Award.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.