GEICO Fires Actor Over Tea Party Comment

Posted by on April 21, 2010 at 7:55 pm. 1 Comments :

Stop the presses – or should I say the video satellite uplinks. With health care off the docket, the media is clamoring to identify the next big story to misconstrue and sensationalize. And it looks like they found it.

Today on Fox News, Megyn Kelly preceded the airing of a shocking audio recording that she described as her “top story.” The recording was of a phone message left on the answering machine at FreedomWorks, the AstroTurf sponsors of the Tea Party movement headed by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey. The message said in part:

“I just need to know what the percentages of people that are mentally retarded who work for the organization.”

The caller, as it turns out, was Lance Baxter (aka D.C. Douglas), a voiceover actor who has done some work for GEICO Insurance. The prank call was brief and not particularly noteworthy. Baxter conceded on his blog that it was “stupid” and ultimately lowered him to the level of the Tea Baggers.

Fox Nation and the GEICO GeckoHowever, Fox News had a different assessment of the news value of this incident. They plucked the story up from Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment blog and featured it both on air and on the Fox Nation website. In doing so, they got the story all wrong. Note the caption to the graphic posted by the Fox Nationalists: “Is the Geico Lizard a Tea Party Crasher, Too?”

The problem here is that the voice of the GEICO gecko, Ricky Gervais, had nothing to do with any of this. Baxter had done some voiceovers for GEICO a couple of years ago wherein he introduced celebrities speaking on behalf of real GEICO customers. But anyone relying on Fox to report this exposé would have come away with the wrong impression of Gervais. Apparently, when Fox picked up this scoop from Breitbart, they regurgitated it errors and all, not bothering to verify the story or perform even the most minimal duties of responsible journalists. Why would they, they’re Fox?

As a consequence of his ill advised messaging, Baxter has been terminated by GEICO. This seems to be a bit of an overreaction to a private citizen exercising his right to free speech. But the outcry from right-wingers complaining to GEICO that this affront was unforgivable led to Baxter’s dismissal. Ironically, the very same right-wingers applaud far worse behavior by the likes of James O’Keefe and Jason Mattera. Those childish offenders are featured contributors to Breitbart’s website and are regularly syndicated to Fox. FYI: in the case of O’Keefe, the term offender is especially appropriate in that he was recently arrested on felony charges (later reduced to misdemeanors) for falsely representing himself as a telephone technician to the staff of Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu.

To compound the embarrassment that Fox and Breitbart ought to feel (but certainly do not), when this story appeared on BigGovernment it was accompanied by yet another depiction of President Obama as Hitler. The picture was altered to include the GEICO gecko, but otherwise had no bearing on the story. I guess they are just so desperate to make the Nazi association that they’ll attach it to anything regardless of whether there is a substantive connection.

And the cherry on top is actually on the bottom and to the right. The very article about how terrible GEICO is for employing the Tea Party basher has an ad for GEICO immediately adjacent to the Hitler/Obama picture. Which just proves once again that commerce trumps everything. And with that in mind, it would be a great corporate coup if Progressive Insurance were to hire Baxter and feature him in their ads. It couldn’t be a better fit given the name of the company and the fact that the Tea Bag Pope, Glenn Beck, calls progressives a cancer on America.


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Glenn Beck: Old News, Old School, And That Old-Time Religion

Posted by on April 21, 2010 at 11:08 am. 4 Comments :

Analyzing the Glenn Beck show reveals a cornucopia of phobias, rational breakdowns, and paranoid delusions. It would keep a psychotherapist occupied for weeks. But stuffed in between the narcissism, the fear mongering, and the Messianic complexes, there is a distinctly regressive aspect to Beck’s personality that manifests in everything he does. He is obsessed with an idealized past for which he yearns achingly.

His television show has entered a new phase wherein he presents himself as part evangelist, part history professor. When he isn’t exhorting his viewers to get down on their knees, or flee their social justice practicing church, he is filling them up with half truths (if that) about America’s founding. And like many brilliant madmen, Beck has even found a way to marry the two themes. He preaches feverishly that God is the only grantor of rights and that government has no role in such matters. Of course, many of our nation’s original rights were granted by the government via our Constitution. Beck gets around this fact by declaring that those particular government authorities were divinely inspired, elevating them to sainthood in his personal church. He never addresses the divinity of every other right that was granted by the government authors of constitutional amendments or legislation.

Beck’s history sermons are devoutly bizarre and unconnected to reality. He ties together unrelated events and concepts with the barest of threads. He has usurped the memory of our Founding Fathers and recast these revolutionaries as proctors of faith. He binds their works to the times in which they lived and insists that nothing be changed. That would be fine if humanity stood still and never progressed over time. But Beck believes that the Constitution is an immutable doctrine of biblical stature and he ridicules those who consider it a living document that adjusts over time and adopts the advances of accumulated learning and progress. In fact, he considers progress to be a destructive force that perverts the tried and true models of conduct of yesteryear. This is why he is so adamantly opposed to progressives and has woven a web of lies about a positive and productive political philosophy whose foundation is knowledge and … well … progress.

Beck seems to want desperately to travel back in time to a more innocent era that was never actually there. In his mind it was a simpler world where all the different shades of white people share common values of work, church, and obedience to an agreed upon ethical dogma. It was a world where a gun was a fixture on every man’s hip and women didn’t confuse things by aspiring to sit on the Supreme Court (or vote). Only in the past could this imaginary Eden have existed, and Beck wants to be there so badly that he populates his present with its symbols. Take a look a Beck’s set. It is an alter to anachronism.

He sits on a chair that he said, on a previous show, that he inherited from his grandfather. Next to him is a TV set that predates Ed Sullivan. He keeps a prop microphone on his desk from the golden age of radio. The red phone that he says is his direct line to the White House looks like the model that Nixon might have tapped. And his use of blackboards couldn’t be a clearer rejection of technology and the evils of modern society. Even the logo for his fiber cable-distributed TV show incorporates the concentric bands of old-fashioned radio waves.

By the way, that’s a real chyron at the bottom of the screen, and solid evidence of Beck’s distorted view of history. If thinks the 1960’s was a decade of unity – if he’s forgotten the turmoil of war, civil rights struggles, and the cultural divisions in everything from music to morality – then he’s more senile than his audience.

While Beck clings longingly to the past, he almost never addresses the future without some allusion to doom. He has predicted the end of America and democracy, the collapse of the world economy, the forsaking of decency and values, and a near-term fate that is nothing short of Armageddon. The present is just a cauldron of misery that must be grudgingly endured until the Rapture. But it is his attachment to bygone years that really defines his world view. And he may actually have a very good reason for this.

The devolutionary posture Beck has assumed is convenient from a ratings standpoint. Beck’s audience (along with the rest of Fox News and the Tea Party crowd) skews to an older demographic than the average of the nation at large. They must take comfort in the familiar icons of an analog world. Blackboards are less threatening than the computer-generated motion graphics that all the kids are into these days. And all the talk of history is just the sort of entertainment that would appeal to people rooted in the past. Add to that a touch of that old-time religion and you have a recipe for corralling the curmudgeon community who wants nothing more than for those damn kids to get off of their lawns.

That is Beck’s fan base. They enjoy reminiscing about how much better things were in their day. And the last thing they want to hear about is a future that they won’t be present to witness. It’s never good business to remind people of their mortality, particularly the people who are closest to it. Beck is adept at accommodating (manipulating?) these folks who have plenty of free time to sit at home and watch his program in the middle of the day. Sure it cuts into the early-bird special at Applebee’s, but what they hunger for is far more fundamental. It’s the solace they get from the passionate young man whose weepy patriotism validates their conviction that they were indeed the greatest generation and, dagnabbit, they’re not gonna let you whippersnappers forget it.

Now, I don’t want to go overboard with generalizations. Most senior citizens are thoughtful, rational people with a wealth of accumulated experience. Just not the ones watching Glenn Beck. They are consumed with fear and are grateful that someone is articulating the nightmares that torment them. Knowing that somebody else sees the monsters too makes them feel less crazy. And the visual cues scattered around Beck’s studio, along with the daily affirmations of pseudo-history, the backward-looking books, the revival meetings on the road, and the reliance on salvation, all produce a comfort zone for a few of America’s severely demented old fogies. If watching Beck’s show keeps some of them off the freeway, then maybe he’s performing a public service after all.


ALERT: Right-Wing Plots To Plant Propaganda In The Press

Posted by on April 16, 2010 at 12:53 pm. 3 Comments :

For many years now, conservatives have been complaining that the media is dominated by liberals. The evidence of that has never materialized, although evidence to the contrary is abundant. The common sense perspective is that the media is as liberal as the giant, multinational corporations that own them.

To conscious observers, the assertion that right-wing propagandists have infiltrated the news business would not be regarded as much of a scoop. Fox News has built their empire on it. But there is a new wrinkle that is gaining momentum and it must not be allowed to establish a foothold on the journalistic landscape.

The Associated Press (of all people) published a story on a troubling trend wherein overtly partisan operatives “are bankrolling startup news organizations around the country.” It is an apparent attempt to exploit the ailing news business by “fill[ing] a void created by the downsizing of traditional” media. These efforts are almost exclusively run by conservatives and are popping up nationally in places like Michigan, Texas, Florida, Montana, and more.

The pseudo-news enterprises are deliberately trying to pass themselves off as traditional news sites on the Internet. But their origins are somewhat mysterious, as is their financing. The reporting jobs at these outfits often pay better than conventional news gigs, sort of like PR. In applications for local press credentials these groups refuse to identify their financial backers. If nothing else, that absence of transparency is sufficient cause to be suspicious.

This initiative to inject rightist propaganda into local reporting did not spring up out of nowhere. Two years ago I wrote an article about plans just like these that were just being formulated. They were hatched by the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-wing think tank that argued that…

“The long-term decline in newspaper circulation presents the conservative movement with an excellent opportunity to increase its influence with the media. Falling readership and tighter budgets are forcing newspapers to dedicate fewer staff to investigative reporting. As a result, they are increasingly relying upon nonprofit organizations to fill the gap.” […and…] “[B]y aggressively getting involved in investigative journalism conservative nonprofit organizations stand to enormously change the terms of the media debate, perhaps in much the same way that Fox News and Talk Radio revolutionized media coverage.”

The National Legal and Policy Center has received about 73% of their funding since 1995 from the ultra-right Scaife Family Foundations who are famous for financing wild conspiracy theories and extremists in the media. The plan, then as now, is for conservative think tanks to produce stories that they could feed to newspapers and television who, due to their desperation for content, would gladly publish it. This is not unlike the Bush administration’s illegal distribution of propaganda through the use of video press releases and payoffs to pundits and celebrities. It is just shifting it to the private sector where it could pick up steam from aggressive fundraising, marketing, and the absence of oversight.

This plan is now beginning to take shape. The AP’s reporting documents precisely the sort of journalistic charade that conservative strategists have been plotting for years. This makes it more critical than ever to be vigilant and to pay attention to where the “news” is coming from. And don’t be shy about exposing the masquerade and embarrassing any press outlet that engages in it.

[Correction] I received an email from Peter Flaherty, president of the NLPC, demanding that I “cease and desist from making defamatory statements” about the organization. The statements Flaherty regards as defamatory are pretty funny:

  • 1) He objected to my reference to the “Scaife Family Foundations.” Flaherty argues that there is no such thing. However, there are several foundations associated with the Scaife family: The Scaife Family Foundation (not plural), the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Carthage Foundation. NLPC has received funding from all of them and that is what I was referring to. Apparently Flaherty’s objection is to my having capitalized the words “family” and “foundations.” Duly noted.
  • 2) He objected to my linking to donor figures at Media Matters. I consider them to be an authoritative and reliable source, and until I am shown otherwise (which Flaherty did not do), I will continue to cite them as a source. However, Flaherty may be correct with regard to my statement that “73% of their funding” came from the Scaife groups. It appears that 73% of their funding from foundations came from the Scaife groups. not their total funding. Duly noted, but that’s still a huge chunk of their foundational support and the distinction doesn’t diminish my argument one bit. The point is that the NLPC is a significant beneficiary of the largesse of the uber-conservative Scaife empire.

That’s pretty much it. Of course, neither of these issues are remotely defamatory. Unless, that is, Flaherty considers it defamatory to overstate the funding they get from Scaife-related groups. His response suggests that he is embarrassed by the association with Scaife. But what’s really funny is that he never refutes or objects to my main point: That his organization advocates a deceptive initiative to covertly disseminate partisan propaganda to desperate news enterprises. I guess that’s something he’s proud of.

With this cease and desist notice Flaherty has gone out of his way to intimidate a blogger exercising free speech over what amounts to a typo and a misappropriation, but he doesn’t bother to counter allegations of unethical journalism. That’s a revealing illustration of conservative priorities.


Bill O’Reilly Needs To Fire His Research Staff

Posted by on April 15, 2010 at 4:37 pm. 3 Comments :

I just had to document this here because it so ridiculous and because Huffington Post has such a great video of it.

Bill O’Reilly confronted Sen. Tom Coburn on his show a few days ago because Coburn had the temerity to point out to his constituents that they should not believe everything they hear on Fox News. The issue specifically addressed an assertion that the health care bill had a provision that would sentence people to jail if they didn’t buy insurance. The truth is that the bill explicitly prohibits such criminal penalties.

However, O’Reilly went to the extreme of insisting that Coburn’s remarks were unfair because nobody on Fox ever said that the bill had such provisions:

O’Reilly: It doesn’t happen here, and we’ve researched to find out if anybody on Fox News has ever said “You’re going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance.” Nobody’s ever said it. So it seems to me what you did was, you used Fox News as a whipping boy when we didn’t qualify there.

Oh yeah? Tell that to PolitiFact who rated O’Reilly’s claim as a “Pants on Fire” lie. Or Media Matters who had no problem finding what O’Reilly’s researchers could not. Or the Young Turks who compiled the video evidence:

Once again O’Reilly makes an ass of himself. He even joked about Coburn’s “mistake” the following night with Dennis Miller. By that time both of them ought to have known that a multitude of people said that the bill could send non-payers to jail – even Glenn Beck said it on O’Reilly’s show! It just doesn’t get any stupider than that.

This is the network that had to issue a memo to its staff warning them of a zero tolerance policy for on air mishaps. And O’Reilly, in particular, frequently boasts that he has never made a retraction on his show. Of course not. He’s made hundreds of mistakes and told thousands of lies, but has never bothered to correct any of them. That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. It just means that he’s comfortable disinforming his audience. And why mess up a perfect record by suddenly being honest? Although there was one prior incident of honesty for which O’Reilly deserves some credit:

Thanks for the entertainment, Bill. I won’t wait around for a retraction.

[Hilarity Update:] O’Reilly began his program tonight with a Talking Points Memo about how NBC and Media Matters are dishonestly smearing him because of this health care/jail time controversy. He tried to exculpate himself from his assholiness with a tortured argument that went something like this: He claimed that all of the examples of Fox folks clearly saying that jail would be the penalty for not having insurance were made at a time when such a penalty was in the bill. But his assertion that no one ever said it was referring to the final bill which had no such penalty. He even played video clips of Obama and Pelosi that he intended as support for his contention that the penalty existed at some prior point in time.

There are only three things wrong with that. One, O’Reilly, in his remarks, made no distinction between different versions of the bill or time periods of debate. He simply made a flat statement of “fact” using unambiguous words like “never” that pretty strongly imply not ever. Two, there weren’t ANY drafts of the bill that had a jail penalty in it. NONE! So O’Reilly’s excuse is pure bullshit. And three, in the clips of Obama and Pelosi, neither of them said anything about such a penalty. In fact, responding to direct questions about it, they both explicitly declined to confirm that any such thing was in the bill or that they would support it. It’s surprising that O’Reilly even bothered to play the clips when they in no way supported his argument.

The bottom line is that O’Reilly is now lying to cover up his prior idiocy. This is something that he has gotten pretty good at over the years due to the many times he’s had to do it.


Say It Loud: They’re Tea Baggers And Now They’re Proud

Posted by on April 15, 2010 at 11:25 am. 2 Comments :

For several months now, Tea Partiers have been indignantly whining whenever anyone referred to them as Tea Baggers. Set aside the fact that they came up with the term themselves, when they discovered that it had another connotation, they insisted that they had nothing to do with it and accused those who used the term of everything from character assassination to sexual harassment. Many Tea-zers were convinced that it was a plot to destroy their movement that was being orchestrated by the media and the White House. How soon they forget…

GOP Tea Bagging
[OK…I added that last option]

Well…no more. Some brave members of the crowd I call Tea Crusaders (because it aint no party), have decided to embrace the appellation they once regarded as vulgar. It may be more of a reach-around than an embrace, but whatever you call it, they are asserting a new-found pride and demonstrating that they have the balls to squat down for their beliefs.

This courage comes just as the Tea Baggers are descending on Washington to complain about liberals, taxes, and foreign-born, socialist presidents. It’s a big day in Teabagdom and an appropriate kickoff for their new commitment to an identity they previously scorned. And lest you think this is a prank dreamed up by mischievous lefties, the Rightosphere is giddily adopting the course correction and proudly declaring themselves to be proud Tea Bagging Americans. Fox Nation, Hot Air, and Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment, have all featured the coming out video.

So we should all wish them well as they march forward under the banner that best describes them. It took guts to embrace their nuts. Tea Baggers now and forever. Or at least until they decide to be offended again.


Sinking Fast: Sarah Palin And The Tea Bag Sag

Posted by on April 14, 2010 at 3:47 pm. 4 Comments :

In a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, the ephemeral nature of the Tea Party movement is once again revealed. When asked for their opinion of Tea Parties, respondents were decidedly unenthusiastic.

  April January
Strongly Support 12% 15%
Moderately Support 15% 20%
Moderately Oppose 6% 8%
Strongly Oppose 21% 11%
Don’t Know Enough 45% 45%

While the total numbers for support and opposition are tied at 27%, the support numbers have declined since January and those strongly opposed have doubled. A mere 4% reported having attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. And, although little attention is usually paid to the “Don’t Know” response, 45 is a pretty high figure. Nearly half the country has no opinion at all about the Tea Party.

These numbers confirm previous polling that shows the Tea Party to be a much smaller phenomenon than the impression given to it by the media. It incorporates a tiny percentage of the population and is widely disliked. This disparity between the reality and the press coverage is something I detailed in two previous reports:
The Tea Party Delusion and The Phony Populism Of The Tea Crusades

The Red Palin
Malice in Wonderland

The Tea Bag sag coincides with the plummeting popularity of the Tea Bag Hag, Sarah Palin. The CNN poll showed Palin’s favorability rating at 39% (55% unfavorable). 69% of respondents said that she is not qualified to be president. She came in third in preference rankings following Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. And while Obama beats all three in head-to-head match-ups, Palin fares the worst losing 55% to 42%. This confirms the findings of a Fox News poll in January that had Obama over Palin 55/31.

The facts notwithstanding, many in the media will continue to push the Myth of the Bagged Teasers as if it were a credible force in contemporary politics. They will saturate the air with coverage of tomorrow’s tax day Tea Bagging and pretend that this fringe (and often vulgar and violent) group deserves recognition. And Fox News will, once again lead the parade with its top anchors dispatched around the country to herald the phony movement that they helped to invent.

It’s particularly telling that Fox, and their partners in talk radio, have invested so much time and money in the Tea Crusades and have so little to show for it: 4% participation and overwhelming unfavorability. By any measure, that’s a lousy return on investment.

[Addendum] CBS also released a poll that asks Tea Partiers about themselves. The short story: They are old, white, Republican, Fox News junkies who believe that Obama is a foreign-born socialist. Surprise!

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WorldNetDaily Sues To Attend Press Party

Posted by on April 14, 2010 at 11:44 am. NO Comments :

WorldNetDaily, the rabidly right-wing Internet site most famous for its obsession with President Obama’s birth certificate, is suing the White House Correspondents Association. WND asserts that they’ve been insulted because the press group has agreed to allocate only one table at their annual party to WND, rather than the three tables they requested. Where WND got the impression that that they had a right to as many tables as they want is a mystery. But an even bigger mystery is why they care so much at all.

WND is a fierce critic of the President and all things liberal. They exhibit overt disdain for the press which they frequently castigate in the most disparaging terms. Last year, one of their columnists, David Limbaugh, described the WHCA as engaging in…

“…behavior no one can rationally dispute as hateful at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.”

Yet this is the organization whose party they are now so desperate to crash that they will resort to a lawsuit because they didn’t get enough tickets. And furthermore, it is not just a snub by the press association, it is an assault on the Constitution, because WND blames the the White House for pressuring the WHCA into denying the additional seats. As usual, WND offers no evidence whatsoever of White House involvement in the guest list for the private press club.

WND asserts in their suit that they will be materially damaged as a result of not being permitted to attend in the numbers they would like. Their complaint says that they have been “shut out” (which is false), and as a result will lose credibility in the news business. First of all, that would suggest that they had any credibility to begin with. Secondly, it is curious as to how not attending an event crammed with people you regard as disreputable would harm your public image. And finally, if it is detrimental to not be in attendance, then most of the media has been harmed, because the majority of journalists don’t make it to the party.

What we have here is the petulant behavior of a childish malcontent who, although he hates the other kids in school, is still pissed off that he isn’t going to the prom. It is a sad and pathetic gesture that will probably be laughed out of court – literally.


Pulitzer Winner: How To Speak Tea Bag

Posted by on April 13, 2010 at 11:22 am. NO Comments :

Amongst this year’s honorees for Pulitzer Awards is Mark Fiore, the editorial cartoonist for the SFGate web site. He gained some heightened exposure last year with a piece called “How to Speak Tea Bag”:

Interestingly, this cartoon did not make a big splash at first. It wasn’t until it was posted on the web site of National Public Radio that it became a sensation. And even then it was two months after the posting until some conservatives discovered it and turned it into a cause terrible. The right-wing cacophony of criticism echoed across the blogosphere and on up to Fox News where Bill O’Reilly called NPR a “left wing jihadist deal.” The familiar (and delusional) cry of “liberal media” wafted through the wingnut press.

Sadly, even NPR took the complaints to heart as they bent over backwards to mollify the hurt feelings of the right. NPR ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, wrote in response:

“Fiore is talented, but this cartoon is just a mean-spirited attack on people who think differently than he does and doesn’t broaden the debate.” […and…]

“Some good came from the feedback deluge. NPR’s top editors responded quickly. The word “opinion” was greatly enlarged above Fiore’s cartoon to make it clear it was not a news report.”

I wonder what Shepard’s view would be today, now that the artist has been given a Pulitzer for his work that she said was “not actually funny.” But what IS actually funny is that this cartoon, which mocks the shallow, knee-jerk, substancelessness of the Tea Bag movement, required that the opinion label be enlarged so that the Tea Baggers wouldn’t mistake an animated satirical piece for an actual news report. Isn’t that more insulting than anything in the cartoon itself?

Congratulations are in order for Fiore. He was subjected to some heavy criticism, including death threats, from the Tea Bag contingent. So this tribute was earned the hard way, and is well deserved.


Tea Party Rallies: A Cauldron For Conspiracy Theories Per Fox News

Posted by on April 12, 2010 at 6:44 pm. 1 Comments :

Tea CrusadeColumnist Cristina Corbin has wandered dangerously far away from the wingnut campground we know as Fox News. She authored an article today that is certain to inspire a spit-take or two from the Tea Bagger contingent. The article achieves something that is rarely seen at Fox – it approaches the truth about the Tea Crusaders:

“[W]hile organizers have held the tour as a way to stay front-and-center as a political force, the rallies have also attracted the kinds of mistruths, exaggerations and conspiracy theories that make Tea Party leaders cringe.”

This may be the first acknowledgment by anyone at Fox that the Tea Crusades are the epicenter of right-wing hysteria, delusion, and dishonesty. Corbin accurately reports that these events have hosted some of the fringiest characters this side of Heaven’s Gate. From those who are convinced that Obama is a socialist or Muslim, to those who carry signs associating him with Hitler, to those who doubt his citizenship, Corbin documents the lunatic stylings of a movement that began when a bunch of commodity traders chafed at having to pay taxes even with representation.

Unfortunately, Corbin falls short on a couple of measures. First, she asserts that the Tea Party leaders “cringe” at being associated with the cracked tea pots. To the contrary, they are commonly in full agreement with them and often encouraged them. Dick Armey, the head of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party sponsor, was a vociferous opponent of the so-called “death panels” that never existed except in the minds of the gullible and the liars.

Secondly, Corbin fails to point out that most of the conspiracy theories that infected the Tea brains were heavily disseminated and promoted by the very news enterprise that signs her paycheck. It is impossible to ignore the part that Glenn Beck has played in promulgating the notion that Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate who aspires to destroy America. And Beck is supported by his colleagues Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Brit Hume, etc. A real journalist would have included that angle in the story. But, of course, a real journalist wouldn’t be working for Fox News.

Still, it is interesting to see Fox publish a column that at least attempts to represent a slice of reality. It will also be interesting to see how long Corbin has a job there.


Fox News: We’re Only In It For The Money

Posted by on April 10, 2010 at 3:49 pm. NO Comments :

The string of confessions coming out of Fox News is shaping into a pattern of greed and deceit that ought to attract some attention from their viewers. You know, the people who regard Fox as a beacon of truth in a mediasphere contaminated by alleged liberal propaganda. What should those people think if Fox admits that they have been playing them for chumps and are only interested in squeezing them for advertising dollars?

That is precisely what Fox has admitted on several recent occasions. Here are some of the more egregious examples:

Roger Ailes: I’m not in politics, I’m in ratings.

Rupert Murdoch: I’m not averse to high ratings.

Glenn Beck: I could give a flying crap about the political process. […] We’re an entertainment company.

On the surface, it appears that these are stipulations that the ideological prejudice of Fox News is a calculated ploy to garner the sort of devoted viewers that translate into higher ratings. If that’s true, then Fox’s viewers ought to feel manipulated and insulted by this blatant exploitation, not to mention the offense at having been deliberately misinformed.

However, there may be an entirely different reason for these recent assertions. Fox has been taking a considerable amount of heat lately for their glaringly unbalanced and unprofessional coverage of the news. They are losing advertisers on some of their top programs. There are thoughtful conservatives expressing their distaste for the hysterical extremism the network has come to represent. And they are becoming the laughing stock of broadcast journalism.

Consequently, it may be the intention of the Fox hierarchy to separate themselves from their disreputable and embarrassing departure from ethical journalism. And by asserting that their mission the whole time was to provide entertainment and increase ratings, they think they can shield themselves from the charges of shoddy and biased reporting. They are saying, in effect, that they have not been taking sides politically, they have merely been staging a performance aimed at an audience hungry for theater.

That’s a lose/lose argument. In effect they are conceding that they produce shoddy journalism, but they’re only doing it to lure gullible viewers. So this argument shows neither an appreciation for ethical reporting, nor respect for their audience. And the sad thing is that their audience will never accept or understand this, even if they were to hear about it. Which is unlikely if they stay tuned to Fox News.

Personally, I don’t buy this argument. While it is obvious that Fox plays to the gut for entertainment value, the political bias runs so deep that it could not possibly be incidental. So in the end, Fox is guilty of both exploitation and partisanship. It’s the worst of both worlds.