Greta van Susteren Defends Herself Against All Charges Except the Ones About Scientology
Fox News' Greta van Susteren is, according to a New York Times story published over the weekend, "defending her brand." But there's one thing she's not defending herself against, because the Times didn't ask about it: Her Scientologist husband's plot to infiltrate our political system to promote his cult's agenda.
Van Susteren has been buffeted about a bit lately: She came under criticism for stopping reporters from talking to Todd Palin as she shepherded him around D.C. during the White House Correspondents' Dinner, her husband John Coale was revealed to be secretly advising Sarah Palin while tagging along with his wife to Alaska for interviews, and then Palin threw Coale under the bus in a leak to Politico that made him look like a bumbling idiot for trying to set up a rapprochement with Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, she saved Ana Marie Cox's life on a train a couple months ago, so that's good.
In what looks to us like an attempt to shore up her standing—both within Fox News and without—amid all the criticism, Susteren granted an interview with the Times so that it would write that she has an "outsize personality" and ratings that "remain the envy of many a cable news host."
But no mention is made of van Susteren's involvement with Scientology, nor of her husband's well-documented plan hatched in the 1980s to "plug into this MONEY and VOTES formula in order to secure safepoints in this key political power arena" by launching a covert Scientology-dominated political action committee—a plan that sure looks creepy in light of his over-the-top efforts to use his wife's access to ingratiate himself to the Palins.
Maybe its an over-inflated sense of the value of our own reporting, but we're not the only ones curious about van Susteren and Coale's relationship to the Church of Scientology. So it seems like something that the Times would want to ask her about in a story devoted to her answering her critics.
In any case, the Times does raise flags about van Susteren's longevity at Fox: Even though she beats the competition in the ratings, her show is seen as a dead spot in Fox's primetime schedule relative to the viewership of its other shows. Her contract is up next year, and Megyn Kelly is waiting in the wings.