if, as James Taranto has written, Helen Thomas is American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic, then Ted Turner is its nutty uncle. In 2005, we noted his Strangelovian comments regarding North Korea; today, Newsbusters catches this exchange between Turner and GQ magazine:
QUESTION: You’re also opposed to the Iraq war.
TURNER: I’ve become very antiwar. I don’t think the way to accomplish things is to bomb people. [Good thing Ted wasn’t around to offer advice on how to deal with the Confederacy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan–Ed] All that does is make them angry. That causes insurgent movements and so forth. It’s easy to start wars, hard to stop them.
QUESTION: I know that you think Fox News helped fan the flames of this war.
TURNER: Well, they did. This is Rupert’s war.
Gee, I thought news organizations were neutral utopian transnational organizations surveying the world’s events from on high–or as Charleton Heston once yelled to a CNN anchor, “Who do you think you are? Switzerland?”
But if we go by Ted’s logic (such as it is), then isn’t it far better for a news organization to have removed a dangerous tyrant than to have propped him up for over a decade?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member