I wish Fox News had treated me the way CBS treated leftist activist Ta-Nehisi Coates.
That is to say, I wish the network had told me what I was going to be asked before a recent interview.
In a now-infamous interview with CBS’s Tony Dokoupil and Gayle King, Coates was challenged on his opinions about Israel by Dokoupil. Although she didn’t get to ask any questions because time ran out, King had told Coates beforehand what she wanted to talk about. “Gayle King is a great journalist and a great interviewer,” Coates said. “Gayle came behind the stage before we went, and she had gone through the book. And I’m not saying she agreed with the book. She was like, ‘I want to ask you about this,’ ‘I want to ask you about that.’”
CBS defended King last week, saying her tipping off Coates was a part of her job.
Nonsense. King and CBS should follow the example of someone I consider a real journalist — Martha MacCallum. In March of this year, I was interviewed by MacCallum for a documentary on Fox Nation called Judge and the Justice. It is about my book, The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.
Fox had rented a house in Maryland, and I showed up at 10 a.m. for the interview. The guy who owned the house and rented it to the Fox crew was there. He looked at me with some concern: I had no idea what MacCallum was about to ask me, right?
It hit me. He was right. MacCallum had briefly introduced herself, gone to hair and makeup, and I was left in the kitchen with two producers, talking about sports. What had I gotten myself into?
My book was about the hit put on my and my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court. The media had tried to assassinate my character along with Kavanaugh’s.
In November 2023, Fox News veteran Brit Hume sent out a supportive tweet with a link to an article about me. “What happened in this case never should have,” Hume wrote, “least of all in America. But it did. Beware of political actors, including journalists, who think their side is so undoubtedly right that they are justified in doing whatever it takes to advance its causes.”
Because of this, I maybe got lulled into a false sense that MacCallum was not going to bring any heat. Before I knew it, I was fielding question after question about high school drinking, my friendship with Kavanaugh, and questions about Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982 while I was in the room. I was being hammered.
Yet unlike the leftist media, Fox actually listened to my points — and aired them. I told them about Blasey Ford referring to me in her letter to Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein as “Mark G. Judge.” Mark G. Judge is an old journalism byline of mine — no one calls me that. It indicates they were doing opposition research on me. In fact, according to the New York Times book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, Blasey Ford has a friend who spent all summer doing oppo research before Blasey Ford came forward with her allegations.
There was also the fact that Blasey Ford’s dates of when the alleged assault took place kept changing. They were trying to link me with Kavanaugh, and when the date didn’t work, they simply changed it.
MacCallum even let me make my point in a pretty blunt fashion. As we were filming a “b-roll” of us walking outside the house, I tried to prove my point. “You know Martha,” I said as we walked side by side, “when we were inside and away from the cameras, you touched me in an inappropriate way.”
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It was completely untrue. Judging by her reaction, MacCallum was not taking it seriously — she knew the point I was making. “So how do you feel?” I said. If I could make that kind of a charge and be believed, I argued, we would be living in East Germany. You could say anything about anybody, which is exactly how the liberal media operate today.
Am I happy with the final result of Judge and the Justice? Not 100%. Yet I feel that Martha MacCallum and Fox treated me with fairness and acted with honor. There are very few in the leftist media about which I could say the same.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.