Listening Cavuto Style
I just finished watching this video on Crooks and Liars of Paul Krugman’s appearance on the Fox News show, Your World with Neil Cavuto. During the segment, Krugman discusses his article in Rolling Stone titled “The Great Wealth Transfer.”
I haven’t read the article yet, but I will. I am, however, quite familiar with Krugman’s writings on this topic for The New York Times, so I was pretty sure of what he was trying to tell Cavuto on his show. Only problem was that Cavuto constantly interrupted him and barely let him speak for more that twenty seconds at a time. I didn’t have a stop watch handy to measure how many minutes of the six-minute video segment were of just Krugman talking, but I would estimate total Krugman time to be just slightly over one minute. The rest of the time was all Cavuto. It seemed to me that the whole point of Cavuto having Krugman on his show was to belittle him and ultimately call him a liar.
After watching the segment, I went to Cavuto’s site on Fox News, and there next to Cavuto’s photo was a link to a very short Cavuto opinion piece titled Common Sense, with the subtitle, and I kid you not, “Has our entire culture forgotten what it means to listen?”
Answer: Not most people, just those who host “fair and balanced” shows on Fox News.
Cavuto and guys like him, along with Rita Cosby and her ilk, are the entire reason I dumped cable TV completely.