‘Loaded questions and answers cut short’: When Fox News came to Cornell

We spoke to the students Fox interviewed and got the real story

On Monday night, a Watters World segment aired on the O’Reilly Factor in which Jesse Watters, a producer and interviewer at Fox, visited Cornell and interviewed us about what O’Reilly called “the lack of political diversity among the school’s faculty.”

According to the O’Reilly Factor, their lovely visit was inspired by a figure reported by The Cornell Daily Sun claiming 96 percent of the money donated by Cornell’s faculty to political candidates or campaigns in the last four years has gone to Democrats.

So does 96 percent constitute leaning to the left? Well, yeah.

But the better question is, are you really that surprised? Academia is widely known as a liberal bastion, and so typically leans left. Simply put, this isn’t just the case at Cornell.

Last May, The Crimson reported 96 percent of Harvard’s faculty donations to political candidates went to Democrats over the last three years.

In 2012, Fox News reported 96 per cent of Ivy League professors’ political donations went to Obama’s campaign. Noticing a trend? (Or perhaps just a lot of the number 96?)

What’s more surprising about Fox’s Cornell segment is the juvenile, and somewhat tasteless way in which it was done.

I know plenty of well-informed liberal and conservative Cornellians who would have happily answered their questions, and answer them well. Fox, however, didn’t seem interested in including them.

Instead, they made us look uninformed – either by the way they edited the student’s answer, or by cutting to a silly cartoon or TV clip directly after a student spoke to diminish their intelligence and equate them to a joke.

Senior Applied Economics and Management major Twan Terrell was one such student.

He told The Tab: “I was overly excited when I was interviewed for the show, but I was not quite as thrilled when it aired.

“They cut my answers for most of the questions, so it was perceived by the public that Cornell students weren’t as smart as thought.

“They also asked an abundance of loaded questions, so you were forced to answer a way that pushed their ‘Cornell brainwashing kids’ agenda.”

Some of Jesse Watters’ questions and comments were not only juvenile and loaded, but outright disrespectful. Watters asked if our professors ever “passed around doobies in class”.

This suggests because we have a largely liberal faculty, they must be a bunch of weed-smoking hippies who don’t take teaching us seriously, which is a great insult, since that’s kind of their profession. You know, that thing they do for a living? That they take pride in, and are generally quite good at?

Maybe Fox shouldn’t denounce our professors simply because of their political affiliations on national television if they consider themselves a reputable news source? Just a thought.

Perhaps my favorite part of the interview segment was when Watters asked a friend of mine if she’d be OK with, and I quote, “Guatemalans coming into [her] dorm room and sleeping on the floor.” He made the egregious assumption (or the tasteless joke) that Guatemalans are a bunch of trespassing freeloaders who would want to sleep on her floor so nonchalantly it took me a minute to realize what he had said.

I only wish she looked at him and responded, “I’m Guatemalan.” Now that would’ve been good television.

Cornell administration quickly caught onto Fox News’ presence, and asked them to refrain from interviewing students on campus. They then released a statement on the Cornell Facebook page.

It read: “Fox News has been on our campus many times, but they have typically contacted us in advance and worked with us to set up interviews with students.

“This time, there was no advance notice. We provided the crew with a written version of our policy and they proceeded to go off campus where they interviewed students and completed their story unhindered.”

So was Cornell right in removing Fox News from campus? Some say yes, some say no. I can’t say I’m mad about it.

All I know is, Fox already gets a bad rap and they didn’t prove any of the naysayers wrong at Cornell.

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