Fox News Channel “The Five” co-host Greg Gutfeld said NBC sports analyst Bob Costas and writer Jason Whitlock have exploited for their own benefit the murder-suicide committed over the weekend by former Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher.
On Monday’s “The Five,” Gutfeld, author of “The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage,” ripped Costas in particular for quoting Whitlock’s editorial, which strongly advocates for gun control, during Sunday night’s NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys.
“If it was a deadly flood, it would be the same saying we need to ban water,” Gutfeld said. “Here is the problem — there is no law that actually could have stopped him owning a gun. So what is Costas saying? He is talking about a total gun ban, which makes him a hypocritical buffoon, because he spends most of his life wandering in and out of the New York buildings where he is flanked by people who are armed.”
“He is a sanctimonious ghoul, because whenever something like this comes up, he has to come up. It’s ‘pay attention to me.’ It really wasn’t about the tragedy. It’s about scoring points with other people in media,” Gutfeld added.
The Fox host also reminded viewers of Whitlock’s ill-advised tweet from earlier this year, which mocked then-New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin’s anatomy.
“Same with Jason Whitlock, who is such a chucklehead. This is a guy who, during the Knicks when he was talking about Jeremy Lin, played off a stereotypical deficiency that I’m not even going to get in to, who now refers to the NRA as KKK. He is a bigot. He had to apologize for that.”
Gutfeld’s liberal “The Five” colleague, Bob Beckel, pressed Gutfeld on his characterization of Costas.
“A ghoul is somebody uses tragedy to build himself up,” Gutfeld said. “This was an unnecessary thing. But he is such a hypocrite, because he doesn’t worry about being armed. People are armed for him. We live in a building right now — we work at a building right now, Bob where everybody has a gun outside. We are lucky. The rest of the American public doesn’t.”
Later in the segment, Gutfeld more generally targeted the media’s reaction to the Kansas City deaths.
“What kills me is how the stories generate within 24 hours after an event. And it always begins with this sentence: ‘Is it time to rethink gun laws?’ You know who is raising the question? The media — it’s always the media. They’re going to spin it in a couple of ways. They’re going to talk about, ‘We got to rethink gun laws. They never thought about it to begin with. They never had a changed mind about it. They always want gun laws.”
