Even Shepard Smith Sick Of Republicans Blaming “Mainstream Media Bias” For John McCain’s Loss To Barack Obama

I look hard and I love to give credit to people at Fox News who fight back against the propaganda machine and tell it like it is from time to time. This time, it was Shepard Smith, a Fox News anchor, who had heard more than enough of Republicans trying to pin Sen. John McCain’s loss in the presidential race to now President-elect Barack Obama on so-called mainstream media bias (a Republican talking point throughout a chunk of the campaign). Watch as Smith becomes fed up and tells it like it is … pointing out, most interesting of all, that Republican George W. Bush won two presidential elections in spite of this so-called media bias.

Smith’s comments:

“Oh, please…the mainstream media reflected what was happening in this nation. It did not drive it. The blogs didn’t drive this movement. The media didn’t drive this movement. Barack Obama did not lose this election. It was his to lose, it was not John McCain’s to win. The Republicans had no shot unless the Democrats gave it to them, and they didn’t. And to blame the media is a cop out and ridiculous. We are always here to be blamed by people like you who enjoy that activity. We always will be. When the Democrats lost last time, it was our fault. When the Republicans lost this time, it was our fault. It’s not.”

Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/12/foxs-shepard-smith-disput_n_143393.html

Fox News Continues To Blue The Line Between Objective Journalism And Tabloid-Like Opinion And Sensationalism

The people at Fox News are obsessed with trying to force-feed us this phony image of its network as this bastion for fair and balanced news reporting. Those of us who have spent any amount of time watching Fox and comparing it to CNN and MSNBC, however, know better. One of the dangers of Fox News, functioning as a machine of right-wing propaganda, is that many people are fooled by the mixed messages Fox sends in its broadcasts. Frankly, this is what makes Fox News so crafty and (as much as it pains people to hear it) relatively successful. What Fox News has done is to blur the line between what is objective news (some of the actual reporting of Fox) and what is opinion loosely-based (if at all) on facts (Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Laura Ingraham, Fox and Friends, etc.). Watching Fox is kind of like reading a lot of college student newspapers where some writers (I’m not talking about the columnists) have been known to take some liberties to dress up stories by editorializing and stretching the facts to near the breaking point (if not, at times, past the breaking point). Fox News is slick in its presentations. The messages that news channels run along the bottom of the screen for “objective” news are the same types Fox News uses during its high-viewership prime-time run with the likes of O’Reilly and Hannity – ideologues who force-feed viewers their values wrapped in what they see as a protective jacket of “facts” as they see it. Because of this, many blind followers and believers of Fox News become fooled into taking so much of the unbalanced opinion of people like devout right wingers such as O’Reilly, Ingraham, Van Susteren and Hannity and believing it (simply because it is on Fox News and Fox News portrays itself as “fair and balanced” on a nightly basis). Fox News is good at what it does. But, then again, Vince McMahon (the wrestling counterpart to Rupert Murdoch, who is the man at Fox News) has been pretty good at what he has done with World Wrestling Entertainment. When you think about it, however, there are a lot of similarities between WWE and Fox News.