On November 6th, you clearly stated that you believed Glenn Beck was “right” when he called President Obama a “racist.” Then, on November 10th, through a spokesperson, you stated that you don’t share the same opinion as Beck, or believe that President Obama is a racist.
Which is it, Mr. Murdoch?
Fox News, under your leadership, has had a long, deep history of engaging in inflammatory racial rhetoric: attacking black leaders, black culture, and black institutions. Now you’ve been caught defending the words and behavior of Glenn Beck, the worst of the worst when it comes to race-baiting, whom more than 80 advertisers have abandoned–because of the very comments you endorsed.
Mr. Murdoch, more and more it appears that Fox’s problem with race starts at the top, with you. If you support Beck and others on Fox News using race-baiting, say so. If you have a problem with their tactics, tell us what you’re going to do to make them stop. You can’t have it both ways.
People must stand up against the garbage coming from Beck, Murdoch and many others at Fox News and throughout the Murdoch empire.
President Obama spoke out strongly against the tragedy that took place at Fort Hood, Texas and expressed sympathy for the victims and families of the victims of this violent and terrible crime that has shaken our nation at its core. But, as I read an opinion piece posted through the Fox News Web site, I quickly realized that political opportunists who are haters of the president will let no opportunity to attack the president pass unexploited.
Dan Gainor, who is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture, also is a contributor to Fox News with regard to opinion pieces. It is crystal clear, however, that his latest entry to the Fox News right-wing effort is a desperate attempt to exploit the Fort Hood tragedy as an opportunity to attack President Obama utilizing the weakest and most flimsy of material imaginable.
The headline reads, “Obama on Ft. Hood — Not Even ‘Shocked’” to get things started. Then, the sub headline reads, ”While President Obama called the murders at Ft. Hood ”horrible” and a “tragedy” and urged “prayers,” the response seemed understated compared to the other incidents.” So, it is not enough that he called the murders at Fort Hood “horrible” and a “tragedy” as far as some right-wing nuts are concerned. Because he did not specifically use the word “shocked” it seems he now is again being attacked.
Here is how hater Dan gets started:
How a president responds to a crisis defines him. President Obama has shown how upset he was after the murder of abortion Dr. George Tiller and after the attack on the Holocaust Museum. But when it came to the Ft. Hood shootings, the president twice gave the incident a limited response …devoting little more than 4 minutes over two separate appearances to the 13 dead and 30 wounded.
In the Tiller case, the president was “shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning.” In the case of the museum attack, Obama was “shocked and saddened by today’s shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.”
But when it came to the horrendous Ft. Hood shootings, the term “shocked” was nowhere to be found.Instead, the initial response was shoehorned into comments he made opening the White House Tribal Nations Conference. First there were a couple applause lines to Native Americans and Obama’s “shout out to that Congressional Medal of Honor winner,” who appears not to have won the medal. (Joe Medicine Crow won the Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor.)
What is striking about Gainor’s comment is he (in true right wing form) comes back to one of their key issues (taking away the reproductive freedom of women … abortion). It shows the obsession on the part of many conservatives with the issue of abortion and how upset a large number of right wingers were that the president and others were outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller.
Gainor is actually counting the minutes devoting to the president’s responses to different tragedies. That is just weak, silly and insulting to the victims of all the aforementioned crimes to use it as a tool to launch a politically-motivated attack.
If President Obama had held a press conference to express his feelings he probably would have been accused of exploiting the tragedy to put himself in the spotlight.
Actually, Gainor goes on to attack President Obama anyway for putting himself into the spotlight.
Then the president addressed the shooting. While he called the incident “horrible” and a “tragedy” and urged “prayers,” the response seemed understated compared to the other incidents. Then, in true Obama fashion, he did manage to make the shootings at least in part about him. “I want all of you to know that as commander in chief, that there’s no greater honor but also no greater responsibility for me than to make sure that the extraordinary men and women in uniform are properly cared for and that their safety and security when they are at home is provided for us.”
To some, that statement is taking responsibility, but two a right-wing political bigot it is about putting yourself in the spotlight. The writer ignores the positive as President Obama salutes the brave men and women who fight for our country and instead chooses to politicize the statement to portray the president in a negative light. Many conservatives have attacked President Obama for not saluting the troops enough, but when he does many of these same conservatives essentially accusing him of grandstanding.
How pathetic can it get from Gainor?
He busts out the stopwatch again.
Two minutes and 39 seconds later he was done and without even taking a breath back to talking about the Native American event. Nowhere in his speech or his remarks the next day did he even acknowledge that the attacker was a Muslim. In his statement after the museum attack, he correctly criticized “anti-Semitism and prejudice” but made no mention of religion in the latest incident.
The Nov. 6 appearance took up just 1 minute 30 seconds and this time it was paired with his remarks on the bad unemployment numbers. In all, he spent 4 minutes 9 seconds to address the attack on 43 Americans …less than 6 seconds per person.
This is beyond childish.
Then, notice the bigotry reveals itself again as Gainor bashes the president for not acknowledging that the accused attacker in the Fort Hood massacre was a Muslim.
Fox News has, as I have pointed out countless times on this blog, has blurred the line between news and its right-wing opinion with its coverage. Since the historic election of President Obama, a Democrat, Fox News has gone head first off the deep end of fairness in its leaning to the far right of the political mainstream. While the network tries to portray people as not being able to distinguish between its far-right opinion shows and its right-wing news coverage, the two have become indistinguishable and more so since the presidential election of 2008 that swept Barack Obama in as president and Joe Biden in as vice president.
Cleverly, these right-wing talking points pop up on right-wing shoes hosted by Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and then find themselves on so-called news shows hosted by Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, Bill Hemmer, Megyn Kelly and others.
As Eric Burns of Media Matters for America is right … (Fox News) has morphed itself this year into a 24/7 political operation.
The right-wing nuts, led by Fox News has been on the attack against White House communications director Anita Dunn due to her strongly-worded criticism of the conservative network for its obvious right-wing bias (that includes both opinion and news content that leans heavily to the right). The righties have been working hard to falsely portray her as an admirer of former Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung and now the latest is a disgraceful and sloppy attempt (a “Hail Mary” to borrow a football analogy) by Fox News to grossly mischaracterize Dunn’s comments about the campaign strategy of Team Obama during the presidential election of 2008.
DUNN: A huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to, you know, why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was, that we — we had a huge premium both on message discipline, on people in the campaign not leaking to reporters and people in the campaign not discussing our strategy, and also on making the press cover what we were saying.
So we, you know, one of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters; we just put that out there and make them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it, as opposed to the press controlled it.
That is what Dunn said, but here is how Fox News mischaracterized her comments to put them in the most negative light possible (remember that this is coming from a “legitimate news organization”) in an ongoing retaliation effort:
The Obama campaign’s press strategy leading up to his election last November focused on “making” the media cover what the campaign wanted and on exercising absolute “control” over coverage, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told an overseas crowd early this year.
In a video of the event, Dunn is seen describing in detail the media strategy used by then-Sen. Barack Obama’s highly disciplined presidential campaign. The video is footage from a Jan. 12 forum hosted by the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development in the Dominican Republic.
“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” Dunn said, admitting that the strategy “did not always make us popular in the press.”
This is, of course, a gross and irresponsible mischaracterization of what Dunn said. Fox misleads readers into thinking that Dunn was saying that the Obama campaign controlled the media which is false and irresponsible on the part of people at Fox News.
Notice how Fox takes single words quotations and frames them based on their own right-wing bias (an effort that is even more powerful considering its ongoing vendetta against Anita Dunn).
Here is how Media Matters boiled it down:
WorldNetDaily, followed by the Drudge Report and Fox Nation, falsely claimed that during a January 12 speech, White House communications director Anita Dunn boasted about the White House’s “control” over the media. In fact, Dunn was discussing the Obama campaign’s strategy for controlling the campaign’s message, not the media; moreover, her comments were made before Obama had taken office and before she became communications director.
So, the campaign was not controlling the media, but making sure its own message was controlled and consistent. This distortion by Fox News is done purposely and, I believe, maliciously simply to attack Anita Dunn in retaliation for her strong comments about what she perceives as bias on the part of Fox News.
Fox News, of course, responds like an elementary-school child would … with attacks, lies, gossip and essentially name calling.
Check out the Media Matters research to see the depth and breadth of the lies coming from the far right in a desperate attempt to attack Anita Dunn.
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called out Fox News for what it is: a conservative media outlet with a far-right agenda.
But, is this really anything new? This is kind of old news, but it is refreshing to see the White House call out Fox News for its right-wing bias (which extends beyond its prime-time lineup of opinionated hate).
Here are some of the comments highlighted by Sam Stein of The Huffington Post with the video to follow:
“If we went back a year ago to the fall of 2008, to the campaign, that was a time this country was in two wars that we had a financial collapse probably more significant than any financial collapse since the Great Depression. If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election what you would have seen were that the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and a something called ACORN.”
“The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party. And it is not ideological… what I think is fair to say about Fox, and the way we view it, is that it is more of a wing of the Republican Party.”
“Obviously [the President] will go on Fox because he engages with ideological opponents. He has done that before and he will do it again… when he goes on Fox he understands he is not going on it as a news network at this point. He is going on it to debate the opposition.”
“[Fox is] widely viewed as a part of the Republican Party: take their talking points and put them on the air, take their opposition research and put it on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news organization like CNN is.”
Good for Dunn and the White House to fight back against Fox News which is playing the role of media relations firm for the Republicans.
The right-wing bias on Fox News is not just in its evening programming with conservatives like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. It includes others masquerading as liberals (Greta Van Susteren and to a lesser extent Juan Williams) or disguising themselves as objective “reporters” or analysts (The dreadful Fox and Friends crew, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly, etc.).
This is a reach by even the low Fox News standards for objectivity.
Fox News on-air personalities have been whining about President Obama not coming to them and kissing their butts when he made appearances on major television networks, but skipped Fox (which has skipped out on him during a few of his speeches and meetings when other networks covered them). Was that a case of putting financial gain before country? (If Fox can ask these kind of loaded questions then I guess others can, too). But, perhaps part of the reason the president has avoided Fox News is its ongoing campaign to demonize him and hint that he may somehow be anti-American or that supporters of him may be anti-American. The latest from Fox News is a video it has plastered all over its homepage of young school students from B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, N.J., singing songs about the messages they’ve heard from President Obama. But, instead of looking at it as students learning about the presidency and the messages of equality they were actually singing about, Fox News takes it and turns it into the most negative interpretation possible.
Here is the image it put on the Web and (below it) how Fox News described the video:
Here is how Fox News describes the video of those evil messages such as lending a hand, making the country strong, equal work means equal pay and being fair.
Video shows little kids at the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, N.J., being taught to sing Obama’s praises — have they already learned the Star Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful and God Bless America?
• VIDEO: School Kids’ Song Praises Obama
The messages below the Fox headline don’t match. The kids, based on those lyrics were not singing the president’s praises, but rather singing about his messages that all good people should embrace. A large majority of the people who are angry are those who just can’t stand that a black man is in such a prominent position and can’t handle the historical significance of his presidency, with positive messages and that people are listening and being moved. None of these people cared about this kind of stuff when Bush was in office or even when President Clinton was in office.
Now, notice the part where Fox asks if the children have already learned the Star Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful and God Bless America? This is of course done to again raise the idea of the president and those who support him being anti-American or not having the best interest of the country first and foremost. This is yet another case of Fox News injecting its right-wing bias into what should have been a fair and balanced news story. But, as we know, Fox is neither fair nor balanced its news and is especially unfair and unbalanced when it is reporting on almost anything it feels can portray Barack Obama in a negative light.
I bet none of the right wingers at Fox cared about praise from school children toward President George W. Bush when he was in office or since he has been out of office. No, the bigotry of Fox News is on display only in matters related to President Obama.
Watch the video for yourself. The video is completely innocent. I did stuff like this when I was in elementary school where we talked about national leaders, historical figures and others.
This is just stupid, far-right political hate from conservatives , such as those we see from morning to evening on Fox News, who didn’t (and still don’t) care about praise school kids have given to previous presidents.
Angry right wingers, such as the people who run Fox News, are in full-blown attack mode as they go at President Obama and we still are not even a year removed from Election Day 2008.
This one is weak even by far-right standards (on the YouTube page some nut compares President Obama to Kim Jong il, Fidel Castro, Adolph Hitler and others). These right wingers are overflowing with hate. My goodness, well-known people who speak to elementary school students often are praised with songs or get handmade drawings, paintings or handwritten thank yous. This is weak.
Where are the good and strong conservatives who are going to stand up against the race baiting from extremists to the far right like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh? A few brave souls, ones rejecting this racial antagonism, have begun to speak up and demand their voices be heard. Clearly, it’s not easy, but a few of these conservatives are trying to regain control of a Republican party that has been hijacked by the extremists on the far right who are plenty comfortable with a party that not only lacks significant diversity, but oftentimes seems to be running away from it while screaming in fear.
Fox News, home to right-wing news and opinion, recently sent out a memo to its people with “standards” in the subject line. As many of you know, Fox has effectively carved out a nice spot for itself in the media as the voice for the conservatives of this country and as media leader of the forces loudly opposing pretty much anything that is proposed by President Obama. But, Fox News is increasingly taking heat for its blatant activism for the causes for people far to the right of the political mainstream. Recently, after being busted leading cheers at what was in essence an anti-Obama rally (packed with tea baggers), the network apparently decided to issue a memo (one that is nothing short of ironic and laughable) to its employees.
From: Sammon, Bill
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 2:25 PM
To: 005 -Washington
Subject: standards
For those of us who have only been at Fox for a relatively short period of time, it’s useful to remind ourselves that, as journalists, we must always be careful to cover the story without becoming part of the story. At news events, we’re supposed to function as dispassionate observers, not active participants. We are there to chronicle the news, not create it.
That means we ask questions in a fair, impartial manner. When approaching interviewees, we identify ourselves, by both name and news organization, up front. We seek out a variety of voices and views. We take note of the scene in order to bring color and context to our viewers.
We do not cheerlead for one cause or another. We do not rile up a crowd. If a crowd happens to be boisterous when we show it on TV, so be it. If it happens to be quiet, that’s fine, too. It’s not our job to affect the crowd’s behavior one way or the other. Again, we’re journalists, not participants — and certainly not performers.
Indeed, any effort to affect the crowd’s behavior only serves to undermine our legitimate journalistic role as detached eyewitnesses. Remember, our viewers are counting on us to be honest brokers when it comes to reporting — not altering –the important events of the day. That is nothing less than a sacred trust. We must always take pains to preserve that trust.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please stop by.
Uh, we have a lot of questions, but we expect few meaningful answers and thus see little reason to stop by.
This is completely and utterly laughable as Fox News regularly spits on these hollow standards Sammon is talking about.
Those fears have, to some extent, panned out. Jones’s most public appearance in the past few months may have been when he stood up at a White House press conference to ask the gathered reporters to silence their cell phones (he had no further remarks to make). Instead of playing a leading role in drumming up support for clean-energy polices—something he was extremely effective at—he’s now a relatively low-level bureaucrat trying to steer stimulus funding toward green-job programs. In all honesty, Glenn Beck may have more to worry about with Jones outside the White House than in it.
There may be some truth to that last sentence. Maybe Beck’s efforts (if successful) could turn Jones into something of a political martyr who could be a greater factor outside the Obama administration.
But, Beck’s motives seem to be more about: (1) smearing Barack Obama and portraying him as an angry black radical and (2) marginalizing the somewhat successful ColorOfChange boycott against him by smearing someone who helped start the group.
Here is a nice catch by News Hounds that helps illustrate the hypocrisy of Fox News in terms of how it treats President Obama. Fox News, whining about mild criticism (depending on whether or not the following comments are put into context) from President Obama in isolated comments he has made about the media. Fox has been working hard to be the network of opposition and obstruction to President Obama and this current duly-elected administration that is leading the United States of America.
Here is an excerpt from the News Hounds blog about an exchange between Greta Van Susteren and Rick Santorum as Santorum compares President Obama to Venezuela President Hugo Chavez:
The segment began with Van Susteren playing a montage of Obama’s comments about cable news. Each clip was from a different setting:
- Referring to media coverage after Sarah Palin’s nomination for vice president in 2008, Obama said, “Cable was 24 hours a day (saying) Obama’s lost his mojo.”
- Speaking to his supporters, Obama said, “Instead of being preoccupied with the polls and with the pundits and with the cable chatter, what you guys consistently did was you just kept on working.”
- “They don’t want to be constructive, they just want to get in the usual political fights back and forth. And sometimes that’s fed by all the cable chatter on the media.”
- “I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration… That’s a pretty big megaphone.”
- “I don’t find most of the cable chatter very persuasive… It feels like WWF wrestling. Everybody’s got their role to play.”
Santorum reacted by saying, “This is an attack on Fox. This reminds me of what Hugo Chavez is doing down in Venezuela, trying to shut down the voice of opposition in the media. This is not good.”
Santorum took the president’s comment about Fox News out of context.
This is all old news, but naturally host Van Susteren (who is no liberal as proven by her spectator status in regard to the smear) and hardcore right-wing extremist Rick Santorum leave on the table no opportunity (large or small) to attack President Obama. And, as you might expect, he is once again compared to a leader (who is considered a dictator) from a foreign country. It fits right into the theme of the far right to paint President Obama as extremist, as socialist, as not one of us, as different, as exotic … so on and so forth.
The work of Fox News, to mischaracterize and demonize our president and commander-in-chief continues.
Perhaps only the far-right nuts in our society could possibly bring themselves to qualify a gay Jewish man (Rep. Barney Frank) and a biracial man (President Obama) as Nazis.
Thanks to Jon Stewart for pointing that out and giving us a glimpse of what the less-than-stellar Fox News person Griff Jenkins is all about.
The latest on Fox News to attack Rep. Barney Frank without putting the full exchange into context is Andrew Napolitano. If you just heard Napolitano, you would think Frank held this town hall meeting just to yell and scream at people in the audience. As usual, however, Fox News takes what happened out of context to smear Rep. Frank and, in general, Democrats.
Notice a few things:
1. See where the edited video starts and notice what it conveniently omits (the question from the woman with a disgraceful Nazi reference to it)
2. He frames the rest of the biased segment by ridiculously bringing on ”a psychiatrist to talk about Barney Frank losing it.”
3. He makes a weak, token effort to mention the nature of some of the questions, but never showed the context with video footage (at least in this clip).
The hatred we see on the right-wingFox News channel, directed at anything that isn’t favorable to Republicans, long ago spiraled out of control. It was even more evident when some of the Fox and Friends hosts launched an attack on Rep. Barney Frank (obviously, he’s a democrat) who was trying to respond to some aggressive nuts targeting him during one of these increasingly hostile town hall meeting fiascoes we see more and more in the media.
Here is one part:
STEVE DOOCY: Well, give him credit for showing up. But let’s face it, he was downright rude. Somebody asked him a question –
BRIAN KILMEADE (co-host): Smug.
DOOCY: OK, somebody asked him a question, then he said, “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” And then to somebody else he said, “Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table.” Barney, they showed up at the senior center in Dartmouth last night for some answers. Give them some answers, don’t give them attitude.
First, the irresponsible and borderline sinister Doocy flat-out fails to put into context the hateful and ridiculous rhetoric (invoking the word Nazis) that prompted that response from Rep. Frank.
They did not show up looking for answers. Their minds are already made up. They showed up eager to spew right-wing hateful venom.
It’s especially sad because how Doocy and company are whining about Rep. Frank standing up for himself there is an image of Barack Obama as Hitler (apparently that did not spark anger in Doocy, Kilmeade or anyone else on the set).
Note to Doocy and Kilmeade, give us some context.
DOOCY: Meanwhile, a health care confrontation like you’ve never seen before. Congressman Barney Frank starts attacking the same people who put him in office.
FRANK [video clip]: Ma’am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.
DOOCY: Oh, yeah, he’s a sweet talker. Is this really the way Democrats are defending their plans for health care — referring to them as dining room tables?
No, this is the way Democrats are defending themselves from hateful labels like “socialist” and “Nazi” from far-right extremists.
DOOCY: Well there were some extraordinary other sound bites that he had. At one point, after a person asked him a question, he said, “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” And then he said, to somebody else, “Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table.”
Maybe Barney Frank has spent a little too much time in Washington, D.C., away from realpeople, because real people have real questions. And rather than answers, a lot of those folks up in Dartmouth last night got attitude.
Do real people insult those (and the family of those) who suffered at the hands of Nazis by referring to people who want health care for all people as Nazis?
When you give venomous hate (as we’re increasingly seeing at these town hall meetings) you should be lucky that someone is classy enough to just give back attitude.
Again, Doocy conveniently ignores the context for Rep. Frank’s comments and lets the far-right crazies off the hook for their ridiculous and irresponsible rhetoric.
Maybe Doocyhas spent too much time sucking up Republican talking points and has become so far out of touch with the mainstream. Rep. Frank showed a lot of courage doing these town hall meetings and going on Fox News from time to time (in both cases knowing he is going to encounter far-right bias). This garbage from Fox News proves the bias that has become all too prominent at the biased Fox News.
Honestly, I applaud Rep. Frank for taking a stand against this hateful garbage being spewed by these nuts at these town hall meetings.
Reading a story published by the Washington Independent confirms what will likely not be a big shock to a whole lot of people who follow much of what is going on with cable news these days. Fox News performs well as it draws nearly all Republicans/conservatives to its right-leaning broadcasts. Left-leaning MSNBC, as one might expect, runs strong with liberals. CNN tends to be more popular with those who consider themselves independent. I would imagine CNN also gets some conservatives and some liberals who want a bit of a break from the more partisan approach to news that is popular on Fox News and MSNBC.
But, the Washington Independent article opens up a different kind of argument as it discusses who are the viewers who gravitate toward Fox News. Those who appreciate Fox News most tend to be white, Southern and Republican.
The biggest swing region in the poll? The South. In Southern states, 46 percent of viewers say that Fox News is “extremely reliable” or “reliable.” Only 6 percent of them say that of MSNBC, compared to 26 percent who say it of CNN, a huge shift from the days when CNN was derided as the “Communist/Clinton News Network.” And non-white viewers really don’t like Fox. Only 5 percent of African-Americans, 11 percent of Hispanics, and 8 percent of other minorities consider the network reliable, while a majority of every one of those groups trusts CNN and sizable pluralities trust MSNBC.
Interestingly, this research sows that only five percent of blacks, 11 percent of Latinos and eight percent of other minorities consider Fox News “reliable” with respect to its coverage and commentary. Frankly, it surprises me that the number is even that high for Fox News.
“Fox News Watch,” a poor imitation of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” (which has its problems too from time to time), has fallen off the deep end and into a pit of more right-wing propaganda. The show has degenerated into mostly a group of right-wing talking heads coming on and whining about the “liberal media” while turning a blind eye to bias and anything else negative that comes from the right. Listen to the clip as the far-right and oftentimes irrational Jim Pinkerton (who reportedly left the show to go work for Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee before returning) brings race into the issue and then tries to marginalize President Obama by referring to his background as a community organizer (as if that is some kind of a negative label). He then sprinkles a little sugar on it to try and soften it.
JANE HALL: That’s true but you can scare people to the point — I mean, I think there’s a difference between…
RICH LOWRY: Who is scaring people about the drug companies and the insurance industry?
HALL: I mean, you have people shouting down U.S. congressmen.
LOWRY: There is scare tactics on both sides.
HALL: If someone hanged an effigy and — and a congressmen having to be escorted to his car, that is not civil discourse.
JIM PINKERTON: Here’s scare tactics.Scare tactics is Rachel Maddow taking the first ten minutes of every show this week to denounce them and call them names and talk about Astroturf. By contrast, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat from Missouri, said in her Twitter account, listen, I think this is just real people. That’s the choice. The real terrorism going on is MSNBC and the liberal media.
HALL: Oh, that is so upside down.
PINKERTON: They’re playing liberal snob to white working-class Americans.
This is from a panelist on a show that is supposed to be analyzing the media?
Pinkerton is a far-right nut who struggles to see any good coming from the other side. he uses the line with “liberal snob” and “white working-class Americans” to scare people about this black president. You don’t expect Pinkerton to be challenged much for this on Fox News.
On “Reliable Sources,” Sunday (Aug. 9), host Howard Kurtz provided a platform to S.E. Cupp, a right-wing blogger who repeatedly talked about the “liberal media” as Kurtz hardly challenged his biased guest for spewing right-wing talking points.
I have a fundamental problem with media watchdog shows like ”Reliable Sources” and “Fox News Watch” bringing on biased talking heads. Isn’t it a contradiction to have a show supposedly analysing the media by discussing and debating media-related issues (including issues related to bias) with biased panelists?
Even if you “balance” your panel, you still provide a platform to political ideology (left wingers and right wingers) on shows that are supposed to be designed to hold the media accountable.
Frankly, hosts of these shows need to work harder to find objective panelists or cancel the shows.
Conservatives have been trying to portray (outgoing) Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as some kind of victim of media bias since the early stages of the presidential campaign of 2008. Fox Nation, the blog wing of the Fox News conservative empire, took a shot at Sen. John Kerry, calling him “Long Face” in a headline of one of its entries:
Call it Kerry vs. Palin, Round 2.Massachusetts Democrat Sen. John Kerry, a longtime Obama ally, and Alaska’s Republican Gov. Sarah Palin are sparring again, this time over climate change and energy policy.
Well, nothing like the “fair and balanced” people at Fox. You see, to Fox, it’s OK for Palin to rip on anyone, but heaven help you if you say anything critical of her.
Impaired byprejudice, Sen. Jeff Sessions went to work appeasing his base by targeting Judge Sonia Sotomayor with the out-of-context “wise Latina” comment that has been blown out of proportion in an effort by conservatives to paint her as racist.
WASHINGTON – Supreme Court nomineeSonia Sotomayor stoutly denied racial bias Tuesday at her Senate confirmation hearing and said an oft-criticized remark about her Hispanic heritage affecting her decisions was a rhetorical device gone awry.
An attempted play on words “fell flat” in a speech in 2001, Sotomayor told Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., referring to remarks in which she suggested that a “wise Latina woman” would usually reach a better conclusion than a white male.
“It was bad because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that’s clearly not what I do as a judge,” Sotomayor said.
Sessions, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, sounded unconvinced.
“As a judge who has taken this oath, I am very troubled that you would repeatedly over a decade or more make statements” like the one in 2001, he said.
Of course Sessions is unconvinced. The man had his mind made up before the hearings even started. Sadly, that is pretty much all Sessions and other members of the Grand Obstructionist Party have in their efforts to smear Sotomayor.
Bill O’Reilly returned to the plantation (also known as The O’Reilly Factor) and hosted the far-right John Ziegler to discussSarah Palin’s decision to resign as governor of Alaska. The problem is … O’Reilly, a definite right winger posing as an impartial talk show host, clearly was not up front about John Ziegler’s very strong pro-Palin, blind-rage bias. O’Reilly seemed to try and portray Ziegler as some random radio talk show host who happened to have an opinion about Sarah Palin.
By the way, he just had Karl Rove (one of George W Bush’s right-hand men) on the show with no balance and he is bringing on Mary K. Ham and Juan Williams to probably try and portray President Obama as bankrupting the country.
Bill O’Reilly is definitely back and sitting comfortably to the far right of the political mainstream.
Sandy Gholston