Fox News’ John Gibson backs down over Ledger mockery

January 25, 2008

Once in a while, even a wacky Fox News personality finds it necessary to walk his comments back.

On his Fox News show [yesterday], John Gibson apologized for his recent comments mocking the death of actor Heath Ledger. “I’m sorry that some took my comments as anti-gay and insensitive,” said Gibson. “Once again, to anyone offended by my comments, I’m sorry.” […]

Gibson said the same apology on his radio show [Thursday] evening, though before mentioning that his comments were “anti-gay and insensitive,” he added the words “some gay groups.”

Media Matters has a full transcript, and Gibson must have taken quite a bit of heat over this one, because he almost sounds sincere. “I’m aware that Ledger has a family and many fans who were grief-stricken by his sudden death. As I speak, a crowd is gathering at the funeral home where Ledger’s funeral services will be held. Those who knew him say he was a good actor and a loving dad. And what happened to him was terrible, but was evidently an accident.”

If you’re just joining us, in his first show after Ledger’s death, Gibson apparently saw the actor’s passing as a chance to have some fun. The right-wing personality called Ledger a “weirdo” with a “serious drug problem,” while repeatedly mocking Ledger for having portrayed a gay man in “Brokeback Mountain.”

In response to criticism, Gibson told his audience on Wednesday that he mocked Ledger’s death because “there’s no point in passing up a good joke.” He then made up some bogus details about Ledger’s death, and said he couldn’t be a “closet homosexual” because he’s “still breathing.”

That was Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, Gibson was “sorry.” I’m curious: why do you suppose Gibson backed down?

I suppose the natural response would suggest that Gibson felt bad about his callous remarks and wanted to express genuine contrition. Given Gibson’s record, that’s probably the easiest explanation to reject out of hand — it’s just not realistic.

So, what was different this time?

* GLAAD started a petition asking Fox News “why they continue to provide a platform for John Gibson’s cruel and tasteless comments.”

* ThinkProgress published contact information, and encouraged readers to pressure Fox News and Gibson.

* MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski was flabbergasted that Gibson may face no repercussions for his comments, at one point saying,“I don’t know how you stay on the air after doing something like that, quite frankly.”

Is it possible that Fox News actually responded to public pressure on this? And if so, doesn’t this offer a roadmap on how to respond to the next Fox News scandal?

now some of you might get some idea of what us gay people have to deal with on an ongoing basis……..

  • Pssst, did you hear that John Gibson eats puppies and baths in the blood of baby Pandas?

    Tell all your friends.

    I think Gibson is worthy of mockery due to the fact that he is a mutated albino cockroach who attempts to be a human being on TV

  • CB wrote:

    That was Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, Gibson was “sorry.” I’m curious: why do you suppose Gibson backed down?

    I think it’s just a fig leaf to give Gibson and Fox News some credibility back in the eyes of the gullible. This is SOP now for these right-wingers– say whatever you want, then apologize.

    CB wrote:

    I suppose the natural response would suggest that Gibson felt bad about his callous remarks and wanted to express genuine contrition.

    In my experience, that’s almost never the case with people who say/do things like Gibson did. It’s just the gullible who want to believe otherwise.

  • Forget anti-gay, Gibson is hopelessly anti-humor. He thinks those count as jokes??

    Although, to be honest, I made similar wisecracks with coworkers upon hearing the news. In my defense, it was intended as meta-humor, i.e. “This is what a stupid Heath Ledger joke would sound like.”

  • This is a big opportunity.

    Gibson’s backtracking will piss off the hardcore wingnuts, and since he’s such a slimeball he’ll finally get the attention he deserves from the rest of us, who barely knew who he was.

    Fox backed him down because they stand to lose money. The reason they stand to lose money is because hardcore wingnuts only make up 25% or so of the population. What the progressives need to do now is keep the pressure on Fox for all their other idiots, using this example to make the others stick better, and drive them back into the swamp.

    The more that happens, the more we take away the right’s favorite propaganda megaphone.

  • Gibson has like 15 million entries in the Media Matters database. I’m totally sure FOX is going to fire him tout suite or he’ll lose whatever dipshit-magnet radio show on Clear Channel because of this.

  • Gibson made fun of the death of a popular, attractive actor. With kids. Some of his audience are mouth-breathers who think that’s funny, but he also gets watched by people who think of themselves as good people. It’s hard to keep up the delusion of being a good person when you’re laughing at something like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he got angry calls from his own listeners – and more likely his advertisers.

  • I suspect he underestimated the number of Ledger fans who watch Fox. And as gullible as they are, they can differentiate between a role an actor might play and the actual person, something Gibson doesn’t seem to grasp.

    Option B is someone found out he was a heavy donor to everything republican. Not saying he was, but the drastic Gibson reversal leads me to believe he really ticked of the wrong person.

    I will bet my last dollar GLAAD, ThinkProgress, and MSNBC had nothing to do with his apology. Fox wears those complaints/protests like a badge of honor.

  • Gibson’s “apology” sounds to me like a Bushist “mistakes were made and I take full responsibility so that should make you happy and now this whole thing can blow over” type of statement. Gibson is saying what will sound good to those who are not his listeners but will continue to say cracks just like his Heath Ledger ones to his audience that wants to hear them. That’s what he gets paid to do and that’s what he loves doing. Lipstick has been put on the pig of his remarks but I take no solace in that and neither should anyone else.

  • I’m completely over these clowns who say whatever they want and apologize later; they’re smart enough to know what they say is hurtful and damaging, but choose to say them anyway.

    Apology or no, there simply is no good reason to watch or listen to people like this.

  • Gibson wasn’t apologizing to the people he insulted, he was apologizing to the advertisers. Faux Snooze knows their tiny, tiny minded audience, but the advertisers know that their bottom line needs a bit more support than what the knuckledraggers who watch that crap can offer.

    RacerX is right. Time to introduce those fucks to the wonders of the All Mighty Free Market.

  • “I don’t know how you stay on the air after doing something like that, quite frankly.” — Mika Brzezinski

    When it comes to modern media, listeners and viewers aren’t the customers, they are the product that media’s customers — advertisers — buy.

    So, from a network perspective, the question is not whether Gibson did something reprehensible. The question is, “can Gibson still deliver a marketable product.” If the answer is yes, he stays.

  • guess what — rupert murdoch is a raw-boned opportunist. he’s finance an all-nazi pedophile channel if he thought there was money in it;

    rupert, if nothing else, has good instincts, and he knows the retarded-hate agenda of the gop is going to get crushed in the next election cycle, and unless he wants his channel to get more and more marginalized, he’s going to have to fine tune the message to try and get broader appeal.

    little things like this, and raising funds for hillary, etc are the small gestures he undertakes once in a while to try and scam the viewers again … and pretend his channel isn’t a right wing comedy noise machine. and if you don’t think it ISN’T …. take a look at the special they’re mounting on the bush legacy.

  • I’m sorry, but Gibson’s words weren’t an apology for what he said. They were expressing sadness (sorrow) that some people were offended!

  • MSNBC is still after him. The entertainment reporter basically mocked the apology — you’re sorry some people took this as insensitive? how else could they take it? — and good for her.

  • If Ledger had never portrayed a gay man, Gibson would have left his death alone. That’s the price Fox will make even a heterosexual actor pay for a sympathetic and indelible portrayal: mockery in death. Ledger himself, appearing on Oprah, declined to do as Jake Gyllenhaal was doing and make jokes about the film. He simply said he had nothing funny to say — it was the most beautiful script he had ever read, period. There’s a time to joke and there’s a time to be serious. And the time to vilify minorities, either seriously or humorously, is never.

  • Gibson should go eat a big, fat, scrapple sandwich.

    Seriously, though, I hope it’s breaking through to people that Ledger was just some guy, and Gibson is making fun of his death for no reason. If your kid who is in high school or in college, and has a heterosexual spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend, portrayed a homosexual in a high school or college drama, and then died in an accident, this is the guy who would be making fun of them, and he’d even do it on TV. Yet he holds himself out as a credible source of opinion and news to millions, and Fox even lets him have his own TV show.

  • It’s standard operating procedure for Fox and/or the right wing: ridicule others to boost yourself. Boosting yourself with dignity and courage takes work and that’s not gonna happen. Bashing Bill Clinton because he earned his way into Yale (and then a Rhodes scholarship) while dubbya gets into Yale because daddy’s a rich alum. Or swiftboating Kerry’s war service while dubbya stayed home because daddy’s a rich congressman. The cowardly right make me absolutely sick.

  • Obviously this demonstrates the tremendous power of the Log Cabin Republicans. Huckabee is sure to be next!

  • There are a few reasons that this sub-human slug backed down. Number one is always money. Gibson comments might, just might influence the bottom line of the money invested in Ledger’s next movie and that can’t be tolerated by the big corporations like Warner & Fox. It also may reflect poorly on the Oscars because as a past nominee Ledger was a member of the Academy. With the fate of the Oscars event in doubt the money people simply can’t risk more bad PR involving any visible members (by visible I mean not WGA members). Slamming a young man who was well respected within his profession, and who was a father for silly crap like a role the man played is extremely stupid and the mark of the self destructive wing of R party. It should not be overlooked that Ledger was an Aussie who was very popular in the native land of Gibson’s boss —Rupert (The Alien). So Gibson was mocking one of Murdoch’s fellow Aussies. Nice way to piss off the boss. I’ve seen pictures of Ledger at functions with Elisabeth Murdoch so he was a least on friendly terms with the boss’s daughter – again not smart.

  • Just Bill, if it’s any comfort to you, neither gay people nor Gibson are alone in being on the receiving and sending end of this sort of grotesque schadenfreude. When the young Mexican-American singer Selena was murdered, Howard Stern took the opportunity to talk about how much he hated Texano music, and then played some of her songs, with the sound of gunfire in the background. He had to apologize for that one too, and eventually take his schtick to a venue that couldn’t be hurt by boycotts by angry groups.

    As for Gibson, I guess he didn’t like the prospect of being frog-marched out of the building like Rachel Marsden, and tossed onto the street without salable skills that anyone besides Fox would pay good money for.

  • I’ve got an idea of how we can turn Gibson around on this. Gay cowboys have already been dramatized in Brokeback Mountain. Why doesn’t some film-maker dramatize the plight of gay Republican politicians, who are forced to solicit prostitutes in airport bathrooms, stalk their sixteen-year-old congressional pages, or offer to give black guys blowjobs at public bathrooms in public parks, and then are ruthlessly repressed by the police and congress, who stop them.

    Maybe when John Gibson realizes that it’s not just gay cowboys– it can be even some of his favorite politicians, like John McCain, the cross-dressing Rudy Guliani, and the effeminate Mitt Romney, or his favorite conservative TV personalities, such as Bill O’Reilly and Pat Buchanan, who just can’t wait to get their lips around certain parts of a young man’s anatomy, then maybe Gibson will be able to sympathize with it, and will call it all off.

  • Gibson and Fox are pure subhuman filth. It’s extraordinary that this garbage continues on the air. This is the kind of media you’d expect to be allowed in the US of 70 or 80 years ago, not today. Of course he’s not sorry, his bosses told him to apologize. Why? Hard to say because they certainly haven’t backtracked before whenever they’ve insulted gays or anyone else before.

    Filth, pure lowlife scumbag filth.

  • “I don’t know how you stay on the air after doing something like that, quite frankly.” — Mika Brzezinski
    I don’t know who this is, but someone from MSNBC criticizing FOX is a little hypocritical. NBC/MSNBC, owned by GE, the biggest War Profiteer in the U.S. and possibly the world, deny Dennis Kucinich a platform in the “debates” based on lies, has no standing to criticize FOX. I do not know much about Ledger and have not seen any of his movies, nor do I know anything about Gibson, so I am only speaking from the bit of news I’ve read/seen and reading these comments. I did see a report by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC on Gibson’s obscene sense of humor, and commend KO for his remarks. I wonder how he stays on the air, given some of his outspoken tirades against Bush. I guess he still sells well to advertisers. Perhaps the “consuming public” will tire of the Gibsons and Savages and withdraw their financial support from the sponsors, creating a whole new environment for commercial media. One can only hope.

    peace,
    st john

  • CONTINUE to pressure Fox News to fire gasbags like Gibson. Send them one strongly worded and well written email a day. Call them. Make it impossible for jerks like Gibson to continue poisoning culture. We have the power to do this.

    We should be doing the same everyday for Limbaugh, Coulter, and O’Reilly. If we were doing our job of boycotting every sponsor that has anything to do with these cut rate hate merchants they would have no jobs. Networks, corporations are spineless are succumb to public pressure.

    The problem is the left has not learned lessons from the religious right in terms of sustained boycotts and grass roots campaigns.

    Thanks.

  • hubcap halo is right. If we progressives applied ourselves, there would be a lot less wingnuts on the air. And BTW, Gibson isn’t sorry. At all.

    Look what he said (before his boss made him apologize):

    GIBSON: There’s no point in passing up a good joke. I mean, how many months did we live off that line, Brokeback Mountain?

    AUDIO CLIP (from Brokeback Mountain): I wish I knew how to quit you.

    ANGRY RICH: Several.

    GIBSON: I mean, it went on for months and months and months. I’m not giving that up.

    ANGRY RICH: The comments are unfortunate.

    GIBSON: Oh are they? Are they going after me over it?

    ANGRY RICH: Oh, yeah.

    GIBSON: OK. Well it’s the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but —

    […]

    ANGRY RICH: “Gibson will be whining tomorrow that his words were taken out of context.”

    GIBSON: No. I meant them, whatever they were. I don’t remember what they were, but whatever they were, I meant them.

  • I’m a rational human being so I never watch FOX, and I happen to be gay, so when I saw the You Tube clip of Gibson I was shocked! There he was, large as life! It was LIBERACE STILL SUFFERING FROM AIDS…. then someone told me it was Gibson. Uncanny.
    Sorry, couldn’t pass up the joke.
    Oh, I’m really deeply sorry if anyone took that the wrong way, fans of Liberace or those who have lost loved ones to AIDS.

  • Since the Right is forever talking about the Bible, maybe they should actually heed it occasionally, as for example when they’re tempted to mock a talented young man’s death. In public. On television. Before 1,000’s of viewers. Proverbs says: “It is like sport to a fool to do wrong.” And: “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.” And: “A fool’s mouth is his ruin, and his lips are a snare to himself.” Folks, the fools have taken over. It’s time to take the culture back.

  • Biggest load of crap apology to come down the pike in a long time. Total non-apology; “I’m sorry if you morons were offended, but I don’t get why at all, and if you were offended, it’s your problem, and I’m sorry about that part of it.” I’m surprised The Carpetbagger Report would even characterize this insult as an apology.

  • I am assuming the one and only reason he “apologized” is that many, many of us wrote in to complain and threaneed to boycott sponsors. His bosses made him.

  • Look up the word “twerp” in the picture-perfect-person dictionary…there you should find the face of John Gibson from Fox News.

    The word “fox” means sly…think Murdoch knows that when employing his sly talking head crew.

    To be sly—try slant and twist…whatever it takes to get viewers and listeners to tune (turn) around beliefs.

  • “I’m sorry that some took my comments as anti-gay and insensitive,” said Gibson.

    The way I see it, it’s not: “I’m sorry for what I’ve said; it was stupid and insensitive of me.” It’s: “I’m sorry some of you are too stupid to understand a good joke.” How’s that an apology??? It’s an added offense to his viewers.

    Seems to me there are a lot of people out there — like Gibson, Limbaugh, O’Reiley, all the sAdministration — who are good candidates for a rehabilitation camp, where they ought to take “Apology 101; what an apology is and how to deliver it properly”

  • That’s such a funny joke, Gibson. You idiot. No one else is laughing but your stupid pathetic self. Come up with some better jokes, ones that are actually smart and interesting to hear.

  • Ledger’s biggest sin in the eyes of conservatives like Gibson is that he played a closeted gay man in a performance that won widespread acclaim. Even worse, Ledger’s and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performances in Brokeback Mountain made a lot of people who were indifferent or hostile to gays rethink things. He humanized gays, so in John Gibson’s world that makes his death fodder for a joke.

    I wonder if Gibson would have apologized if Ledger had actually been gay.

  • now some of you might get some idea of what us gay people have to deal with on an ongoing basis……..

    WTF? Do you visit this site? I have a feeling the straight people that visit this site have an idea of what we go through and you would know that if you were paying attention. The sponsors of this site are always on it when it comes to discrimination against gays. The comments section is always sympathetic to our plight. I don’t think it was right for you to lecture the people that patron this site.

  • Cancel Fox News !

    Dish Network’s Package, America’s Top 100 package does not include Foxaganda news.

  • “I’m sorry that some took my comments as anti-gay and insensitive,” said Gibson. “Once again, to anyone offended by my comments, I’m sorry.”
    I keep reading Gibson’s words above and do not see an apology. How about, “I am sorry that I was offensive”? That would be a good beginning.

  • I can not believe that such a maronic neaderthal as Gibson is allowed to continue on American airwaves.
    It is comforting to know that the prick Rupert Murdock has given up his Australian citizenship.
    I trust that the pressure being brought to bear in America is going to continue to close this garbage broadcasting.

  • John Gibson has a lot of nerve making a joke out of death. Death isn’t a joke!!!! It’s NOT funny He has a sick sense of humor. Heath had more talent in his little finger than John Gibson has in in his entire body. Heath Ledger’s family, friends, and fans are hurting right now and he criticizes him.The apology was less than sincere. It’s a way to cover his ass so he doesn’t get fried. We don’t need people on the air like that. What a prick!!!!

  • All of the grieving, wailing Ledger fans (mainly the gullible ‘star-struck’ women) hate John Gibson because he has a nice thick head of hair (the kind they LOVE to run their hands through!) whereas ‘Heathy’ was destined to be a total ‘NUDE’-Nut (just like his father!) by the time he would have been 35. At that time he would have gone to the barber and simply said – ‘Just a POLISH please!’.
    Notice how ‘Heathy’ often wore a cap or hat – most notably in BrokeButt Mountin’ – his so called ‘groundbreaking’ movie, one which has (and will continue) to promote if not legitimise ‘the’ agenda.
    As for the NYC M.E’s comment; quote – ‘We have concluded that the manner of death is ACCIDENTAL, resulting from the ABUSE of prescription medication’ – unquote, does anyone perceive a CONTRADICTION of terms within that rather vague statement?

  • I wrote to john gibson and told him what a horrible human being he is for
    the disgusting way he talked about Heath Ledger on his radio show
    and john gibson replied to my e-mail and this is what he wrote

    he wrote back to me- ” where have you been, that is so yesterday.”

    that proves his apology was fake and that he is a disgusting person.
    and now his crappy show got cancelled, I was so happy when
    I heard they cancelled his show

    • Comments are closed.