Anyone who watches national Fox News is aware of its conservative pundits who all predicted a Mitt Romney landslide. Throughout the presidential campaign, Fox News pundits doled out their right-wing opinions as indisputable fact. Not one of them gave Barack Obama a chance and ridiculed the national polls that showed him in the lead.

After Obama won, they were quick to make excuses. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said he and other Republican/Fox strategists “misunderstood what was happening in the country.” A bit hypocritical, don’t you think, for someone who postures himself as an astute political historian?

Beth Martin, national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, also blamed Romney for being “a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club wing of the Republican Party.” Where were her critical comments before the election? Once again, a bit late and disingenuous, don’t you think?

This backtracking must make viewers question Fox’s so-called “fair and balanced” slogan. Fox pundits supported Romney unquestionably before the election, but after his defeat, these fair-weathered friends suddenly found plenty of reasons to throw him under the Republican bus.

I doubt anyone, including Fox diehards, still believes its farcical “fair and balanced” self-promotion. If Fox really wants to save face, the time is right for a symbolic act of contrition for confusing their viewers with their two-faced journalism.

May I suggest all of the Fox reporters and the outspoken pundits they promote, including Ann Coulter, Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Dick Morris, in particular, might show some humility by publicly eating crow, as they say down South. That would be a fair and balanced gesture for the reams of slanted reporting they present as newsworthy.

J.C. Smith, MA, DC, is a resident of Bonaire.