TAKE A BOW…. Fox News polls are notorious for asking nutty questions that mainstream outlets would be too embarrassed to consider, but the network’s latest (pdf) survey only includes one oddity.
“When the president of the United States is traveling overseas, do you think it is appropriate for him to bow to a foreign leader if that is the country’s custom or is it never appropriate for the president to bow to another leader?”
The results no doubt disappointed the network — 67% of Fox News’ respondents said customary presidential bows are fine. Even a majority of self-identified Republicans (53%) agreed that the gesture is appropriate.
And yet, despite the fact that the country doesn’t seem to care, this was considered a pretty huge deal in media circles all week, generating items in the AP, Newsweek, the NYT, and of course, Fox News. (In fairness, some of those items were questioning the seriousness of the “story.”)
As Greg Sargent noted, “It’s another sign, if you needed one, of how far off to the right some contemporary conservative discourse has drifted. It’s also a mark of how absurd it is that some traditional news orgs actually felt obliged to, er, bow to the pressure to cover this particular line of criticism.”
