About that tweet....
UPDATE: I FOUND THE EMAIL! Read the silly details here.
So here's the deal. Last Thursday, I was in the office at my PC when an email arrived at my kcstar.com account. It was from Fox News, and it said in the subject line: Glenn Beck raises fears. And I chuckled, because that's Glenn's schtick. Why would you promote that? Well, I double-clicked the message and read that Beck was planning a very special broadcast that night about the H1N1 vaccine. But it's the subject line I found unintentionally hilarious and worthy of a tweet.
Two minutes later, it was all over ... or so I thought. That night, "Countdown" mentioned my tweet. On Friday (after I'd left work), Fox demanded a source for it. On Monday (after I failed to reply), they went to Danny Shea with it. And we've been talking about it inside the Star ever since.
Apologies to my media friends who have inquired this week and gotten the brush-off from me, because what we were talking about was this inconvenient little truth: I deleted the email!
My in-house email at kcstar.com can't be auto-forwarded to my tvbarn account, which is on Gmail (and where almost all my mail since 2005 is stored), and my kcstar.com inbox fills up quickly, so long ago I asked publicists who were sending to kcstar to please change their address books to tvbarn. However, some PR still comes to the Star account, including from Fox News. (Oddly, I've noticed some Fox News mailings that arrived at kcstar.com didn't arrive at tvbarn, and vice versa.) Of course, I can hand-forward any email to my tvbarn account, but in this instance I didn't, and the email went away after I logged off.
Fox News denies sending any such message, so that leads to two questions that I will leave up to the reader to answer. One: Who would make something like that up -- a press release that does its job of promoting a special show? (In my visual memory, the email bears all the marks of Fox News PR, right down to the 18 point-ish Helvetica bold headline and breathless punctuation in the copy -- what William F. Buckley called "exclamationitis.")
And two: Why would I make that up? It's a pretty innocuous email and a pretty innocuous post, from someone who has written nice features over the years about Shep Smith, Alan Colmes, Chris Wallace, Tony Snow (God rest his soul) and, for that matter, the whole Fox News juggernaut. I have no reason to believe that Fox News is fibbing. Next time, though, you can be sure I'll have proof of what really happened.
Previously on TV Barn, I took the measure of Fox News on its 10th anniversary.
