Sammon, the biased Washington managing editor for Fox News, is a true right winger. As we know, Fox News has been almost 100-percent opposed to health care reform.
Beyond calling it "Obamacare," an effort to try and substitute the president's name for "health," there is the issue of "public option" vs. "government option" going on these days.
Sammon, who might as well be on the GOP payroll, has made his slant clear as reported by Media Matters for America:
To borrow the famous (some might say infamous) words of Dennis Green, "They are who we thought they were." He wasn't talking about Fox News, but it certainly fits.At the height of the health care reform debate last fall, Bill Sammon, Fox News' controversial Washington managing editor, sent a memo directing his network's journalists not to use the phrase "public option."
Instead, Sammon wrote, Fox's reporters should use "government option" and similar phrases -- wording that a top Republican pollster had recommended in order to turn public opinion against the Democrats' reform efforts.
Journalists on the network's flagship news program, Special Report with Bret Baier, appear to have followed Sammon's directive in reporting on health care reform that evening.
Sources familiar with the situation in Fox's Washington bureau have told Media Matters that Sammon uses his position as managing editor to "slant" Fox's supposedly neutral news coverage to the right. Sammon's "government option" email is the clearest evidence yet that Sammon is aggressively pushing Fox's reporting to the right -- in this case by issuing written orders to his staff.
As far back as March 2009, Fox personalities had sporadically referred to the "government option."
This is why you can't trust a lot of what you hear from Fox News without checking it against other reputable and fair media outlets.
