From 1976 up until the mid-1990s, Brit Hume was a correspondent for ABC News, covering the White House for seven of those years. All of that happened before taking the anchor seat for Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” in 1998.
But when Hume made the move from ABC to Fox News, he changed, said MSNBC’s “The Last Word” host Lawrence O’Donnell. On Tuesday, during O’Donnell’s long-winded “Rewrite” segment quibbling over when exactly Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan embraced novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, he attacked Hume for not making more of an issue out of that during his exclusive interview with Ryan that aired on Tuesday’s “Special Report.”
O’Donnell was troubled that Hume didn’t press him on a 2009 Facebook video, where Ryan elaborated on Rand’s moral teachings. And had Hume not been serving to get Ryan elected, he might have pressed him on that, “The Last Word” host argued.
“But Fox News viewers didn’t see that video,” O’Donnell said. “And they never will see that video of Paul Ryan for two reasons. One, it would involve Brit Hume or someone working for Brit Hume today to have done some homework. And two, Brit Hume’s job nowadays, after a distinguished career in real journalism elsewhere, is to help Fox News help Paul Ryan become the next Republican vice president of the United States, who gives orders to the president.”
The problem, according to O’Donnell, was that Hume didn’t push him on Rand’s atheism and how that measures up in today’s conservative movement.
“Now, during our next commercial break, which is a moment away, I offer this thought experiment. Imagine Brit Hume interviewing a Democratic candidate for vice president of the United States, whose moral and political guiding light was a Russian atheist. What would Hannity say? What would O’Reilly say? What would Sarah Palin say? If Barack Obama tried to dismiss and rewrite a lifelong infatuation with a Russian atheist the way Paul Ryan just did on Fox News, what would they say? Just imagine. Imagine what they would do to Barack Obama for that. Imagine. Imagine what the Fox News crew would say about him. Imagine.”