If Fox News chief Roger Ailes learned anything today, it’s that people can be so sensitive when you invoke the Holocaust sometimes. News to him! After describing several similarities between NPR and the Third Reich in the Daily Beast, he apologized in a letter to Abraham Foxman, national director for the Anti-Defamation League.
“This morning you might be receiving calls because I used the word ‘Nazi attitudes’ to describe the NPR officials who fired Juan Williams,” Ailes wrote. “I was of course ad-libbing and should not have chosen that word, but I was angry at the time because of NPR’s willingness to censor Juan Williams for not being liberal enough.”
Later in the letter, Ailes apologized “for using ‘Nazi’ when in my now considered opinion ‘nasty, inflexible bigot’ would have worked better.” We guess that qualifies as an apology to NPR for someone who thought NPR qualified as Nazis. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said, also by letter, that he found Ailes’s apology and explanation “sincere and heartfelt.”
The Internet, as it is wont to do, decided to go a less agreeable route than Foxman, starting up a #NPRGoesNazi meme on Twitter. Not everyone was amused, and yet the twitterers tweeted on. Why let Fox News have all the inappropriate, castration-threatening fun?
@jackshafer Fatherland Home Companion #NPRGoesNazi
@moetkacik Fresh bags of Hair #NPRgoesNazi
@danielradosh This American Lebensraum #NPRGoesNazi
@blackmagpie69 #NPRGoesNazi Science Fryday w/ Josef Mengele
@MightyOCD: We Have Ways Of Making Your Car Talk #NPRgoesNazi
Fox News chief apologizes to ADL for ‘Nazi’ remark [The Cutline/Yahoo]
