A posting today on the Fox News community website Fox Nation contains the sort of tabloid scandal mongering that they usually save for the final days of election cycles that they are desperately losing. Perhaps their eagerness to sink to this low so soon is an admission that being saddled with noxious characters like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has already ruined any chances for their victory in November.
The Fox Nationalists posted an article sourced to a suspiciously obscure website that featured a video interview with Sally Miller, a former Miss Arkansas who claims to have had an affair with then-Governor Bill Clinton. In the video (below) Miller makes some wild and wholly unfounded allegations about Hillary Clinton that are so outrageous they would seem implausible if they were plot lines in a daytime TV soap opera.
Miller leads off with charges that Clinton had several abortions until Bill convinced her that “if they were ever going to move up in politics they had to have a child.” That allegedly led to the birth of Chelsea, a purely political offspring whom Clinton, a confirmed feminist, didn’t want. In fact, Miller described Clinton, and most feminists, as “cold,conniving, bitches” who “don’t care about anyone but themselves” and “don’t like men.”
Miller went on to assert that the man-hating Clinton was a lesbian. When asked how she knew this, Miller laughed and said that “Bill told me.” Apparently the chatty governor also confided that in college Clinton and some other girls “experimented and she liked it.” Of course, there is no evidence that any of Miller’s gossipy ramblings are true. Not that there would be anything wrong with it if they were. These are the sort of allegations that are only regarded as insults by right-wing bigots and religious zealots. However, that just happens to be the audience that Fox is aimed at.
The source for Fox’s scandal-fest was The American Mirror, a website with no masthead, no identification of any publishers or editors, no mission statement, nothing to lend it any credibility whatsoever. The author attached to this article, however, does have a record. Kyle Olson is also the founder of an organization called the Education Action Group, a Koch brothers funded, anti-union front group for a conservative brand of education reform that primarily opposes teachers’ unions and public schools. Its reputation is a joke that includes nonsense like an investigation into “racist” peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at Portland schools. That piece of journalistic garbage was rated a “Pants on Fire” lie by PolitiFact.
These charges about Clinton are not new. They have been floating around the ultra-rightist mediasphere for years and were even ridiculed by the National Enquirer when Miller was trying to pitch her fantastical imaginings in a book that she was never able to get published due to her utter lack of credibility. But she did find allies among the crackpots and fringe-dwellers like Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Matt Drudge, who giddily embraced her bizarre ravings.
What’s new is that now Fox News has taken up her delusions and is passing them off as reality. Which tells you something about how severely degraded and abused the word “news” has become, particularly when in proximity to the word “Fox.”
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.
