Please Keep Twittering About Us, Jesse Watters UPDATED
Jesse Watters, Bill O'Reilly's ambush artist, has sworn off ambushing. Oh, he still plans to stalk his boss' enemies in a hollow charade of getting answers, but that word — "ambush" — sounds so tawdry.
Watters, Fox News' stalker producer who's afraid to talk to Gawker, apparently read the questions we asked him yesterday. And via Twitter, he says he doesn't have to answer to us. UPDATE: Jesse Watters' Twitter account is fake.
We think you're missing the point of this exercise, Jesse. The fairly simple idea here is to apply to you the same rules that you have repeatedly applied to others. So, as per the Jesse Watters School of Ambush Interviews, you no longer get to decide whether or not to answer our questions. It wasn't up to Hendrik Hertzberg, or Amanda Terkel, or William Arkin, or a host of other people you ambushed. So now it's not up to you. And as for our "sordid, trashy voyeurism"—well, your employer's publicists have found gossip sites useful enough when Fox wanted to spread damaging information about its enemies.
Watters also responded on Twitter to the lie we caught him telling yesterday when he said he doesn't consider his interviews to be ambushes. We pointed out that O'Reilly proudly used that term on the air and online, including a time Watters got wistful about one of his "funnier" ambushes.
Well OK then. Young Watters has clearly been a careful study of the lie-attack-lie Fox News playbook.