The most grievous offense in this sorry episode is the idea that America needs more ambush “journalism.” That technique was pioneered by “60 Minutes” not because it made for good reporting but because it made for sensational television. Everyone looks guilty when you pop up in front of them, stick a camera in their face, ask them when they stopped beating their wife, and scare them into running away.

But that’s how Watters made his bones on Fox News, doing ambush interviews for Bill O’Reilly. You too can do what I do, he assured a crowd of ambitious right-wing college kids at a Turning Point USA event this week. Next time Fauci comes to your town, he told them, confront him with questions about his agency funding gain of function research in Wuhan and record it so that Fox and other outlets can spread it around. Watters got exuberant with his metaphors — the right question during this “ambush” will operate as a “kill shot,” with “deadly” effect to Fauci’s credibility, he claimed.

Was he calling for anyone to attack Fauci? No. Should he be encouraging righties to accost Fauci, a guy who needs bodyguards due to the volume of death threats he receives? Also no.

The incendiary, dangerous, violent rhetoric against Dr. Fauci continues at AmericaFest. Fox News host Jesse Watters tells them how to go after him to harass him in public: “Now you go in with the kill shot – deadly. Because, with an ambush, he doesn’t see it coming.” pic.twitter.com/V34YZwDdPD

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 20, 2021

That clip went viral last night, probably due more to Filipkowski’s misleading description than the video itself. Watters isn’t talking about “harassing” Fauci, he’s talking about an ambush interview. Which is journalism, of a sort.

Poor journalism, as I’ve said. Journalism that makes a televised spectacle of something that’s not unlike harassment. But not a call to violence.

CNN asked Fauci about it this morning but declined to play the clip for context. Anchor John Berman described Watters’s comments this way: “Jesse Watters, who is a Fox News entertainer, was giving a speech to a conservative group where he talked about you, and suggested to the crowd that they ambush you with what he said was some kind of rhetorical kill shot. That was his exact word.” The only clue to the viewer there that Watters wasn’t calling for Fauci’s literal assassination is the word “rhetorical” and I’m guessing plenty of CNN viewers missed that as they perked up at the phrase “kill shot.”

It’s not clear that Fauci even saw the clip of Watters. But Watters must go, he insisted. Watch, then read on.

Fauci’s reached his limit with Fox demagoging him, to the point where he seems to be boycotting the network. (He was on with Neil Cavuto recently but that was Cavuto’s show on Fox Business, not Fox News.) He wants management to crack down on some of the criticism of him by the talent, which in some cases has veered away from “Fauci isn’t telling us the truth” to “many people think Fauci is a new Mengele.”

Fox News hosts, as well as Republican congressional lawmakers, have repeatedly targeted Fauci throughout the coronavirus pandemic with inflammatory and personal attacks. Lara Logan, a Fox News personality and host on its streaming service, compared him to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele earlier this month.

In response to those remarks, Fauci rebuked Fox News for not taking disciplinary action against Logan, telling MSNBC: “What I find striking … is how she gets no discipline whatsoever from the Fox network — how they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action. I’m astounded by that.”

A few weeks ago Tucker Carlson called him a shorter Benito Mussolini. Jesse Watters egging on college kids to ask Fauci questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology for viral lulz isn’t dangerous but mainstreaming the idea of confronting him to a broader audience for whom Fauci’s already become a singular hate object is ill-advised. Go figure that a guy with bodyguards is touchy about incitement.

Watch a few minutes here from Watters’s TPUSA address to get the full flavor of his comments about Fauci, which Filipkowski’s video didn’t provide. He tells the crowd he wants them to be “little James O’Keefes” at one point and even urges them to be respectful. (At least initially.) He’s talking about ambush journalism, not harassment. By the end, though, you’re left wondering what he thinks it would achieve if anyone in the crowd put his plan into action. You see Fauci and his bodyguards walking along, you run up with your smartphone out and say, “Dr. Fauci, Dr. Fauci, didn’t you fund dangerous research at a sloppy Chinese lab?”, and Fauci does … what? Keeps walking in silence, probably. Or maybe gives you some anodyne reply about how NIH never funded true gain of function research. You’re not going to get anything from him that Rand Paul hasn’t gotten during their half-dozen confrontations on the Hill when Fauci was under oath. So what’s the point? Where’s the “kill shot”?