We now know why it took more than three days for the Rev. Jesse Jackson comments to make it on to Fox News Channel. Jackson made the crude comments about Barack Obama Sunday morning while he prepared to do an interview on Fox & Friends.
SVP of programming Bill Shine tells TVNewser the comments, “went unnoticed,” on Sunday morning, and were only discovered Monday when a staff member, who was training in the process of converting to digital, logged the tape in to the system.
The staffer than emailed the remarks to an O’Reilly Factor producer, who was vacationing in France. That producer sent the mail on to his team in New York on Tuesday. “Over the course of the next 24 hours, we carefully went forward with the story,” says Shine.
Around 4pmET yesterday, Jackson went on CNN to preemptively apologize. Shine says, “We contacted Jackson’s camp, contacted Obama’s campaign. We showed a lot of caution and discretion, we were patient in moving forward with the story.”
Last night, while his comments were airing on FNC, Jackson went on CNN explaining himself again to Campbell Brown. In what would be his first comments on FNC, he later went on On The Record with Greta Van Susteren.
Van Susteren’s 15-minute interview with her “old colleague from CNN,” touched on other issues as well, including Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Sen. John McCain’s campaign.
• Editor & Publisher examines just how nuts the media got in describing Jackson’s language.