Day: 3/12/2009

Fox News Lies About Carville For Limbaugh

Posted by on March 12, 2009 at 12:50 pm. 3 Comments :

Obviously Rush Limbaugh’s infantile tantrum regarding his hope that President Obama fails has not gone over well with most Americans. But it has warmed the hearts of dittoheads, Republicans, and Fox News personnel. At the top of that list would be the Fox News Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon.

In his zeal to to defend Limbaugh, the leader of the Republican Party, Sammon dug up a comment by James Carville in 2001. Referring to President Bush, Carville was quoted as saying, “I certainly hope he doesn’t succeed.”

That mere sentence fragment is the whole of Sammon’s reporting on Carville’s comments. Carville said a great deal more which was reported elsewhere, but Sammon chose not to include any of it because it didn’t support the impression that Sammon wanted to create – which was to associate Carville’s statement with Limbaugh’s. Well, here is the rest of Carville’s comments:

“People basically like this president as a person and they want him to succeed, but they have some pretty serious doubts that have not crept in but are sort of there. You have almost half the country saying he is in over his head. Over half the country saying he is for the powerful. And as much as I would like for it or wish for it, they are not going to pull away completely from him months into his administration.

“I don’t care if people like him or not, just so they don’t vote for him and his party. That is all I care about. I hope he doesn’t succeed, but I am a partisan democrat. But the average person wants him to succeed. It is his country, his life or their lives. So he has that going for him. There is a lot that is going to happen between now and next November. It is not that people don’t like him. It is not that people don’t want him to succeed but it is also not that he doesn’t have some serious underlying problems.”

It seems abundantly clear that the only thing Carville is talking about was succeeding electorally. He was not saying that he hoped Bush’s policies fail, he just wanted Bush and other Republicans to lose elections. Contrast that with Limbaugh’s repeated assertions that it is President Obama’s agenda that he hopes will fail. What’s more, Limbaugh encourages others to adopt the same hope for failure, and disagreeing with Limbaugh is tantamount to treason. Carville is directing his comments to results from polling that express public opinion. He is not attempting to persuade anyone to adopt his opinion. And if he were, there would be no repercussions for those who disagreed.

It is also abundantly clear that Sammon deliberately truncated Carville’s statement to slant the story against Carville. Furthermore, Sammon included responses from Limbaugh regarding this story, but didn’t give Carville the same opportunity to respond.

Fair and balanced? Uh huh. And remember, Sammon is a news executive at Fox, not a commentator. But even he must bow down to kiss Limbaugh’s ring.

Prediction: I want to go on record as the first to predict that Fox will launch a new TV program starring the leader of the Republican Party. Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes previously produced a syndicated show for Rush Limbaugh that failed miserably – perhaps because TV required that viewers actually look at him. But Glenn Beck has proven that Fox viewers are less discriminating than the broader syndication audience. Ailes and Limbaugh will try again, this time on a more friendly platform.

What’s Up With CNBC?

Posted by on March 12, 2009 at 11:50 am. 2 Comments :

The cable news wars have been raging for years. But for the most part the combatants have been confined to the big three: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. Headline News and CNBC have been regarded as niche players that weren’t really on the front lines.

All of a sudden CNBC has become the most talked about cable news network, just as the nation has inaugurated a new president and tries to weather a fierce economic storm. Much of the attention is couched in ridicule. Rick Santelli’s rant, that cast a bunch of elite commodities traders as emblematic of average Americans, was only taken seriously by the likes of Michele Malkin and her mush-brained followers. Jim Cramer was exposed as the clown that he is by a much better and more professional clown, Jon Stewart.

The backwash of this publicity parade is a boost for CNBC’s ratings and visibility. But why is it happening now?

CNBC has long been a friend to the business community. Its reporting rarely alerted viewers to imminent crises (like the the one we are enduring now) or corporate malfeasance (like Enron and Madoff). The anchors were openly chummy with CEOs, whom they courted for access, and some, like Larry Kudlow, were overtly partisan. CNBC elevated the art of bloviating by introducing the Octo-Pundit, where as many as eight self-styled experts yelled at each other from their respective video cages.

But with a lineup like Fox News and current events that favored their niche, they still needed a little extra push to get the recognition they felt they deserved. So along comes Santelli and Cramer and a concerted effort to expand their conservative profile.

Despite the blathering of Bill O’Reilly, the NBC News division has never been left wing. MSNBC was once the cable home of Michael Savage, Oliver North, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and it still features Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan. The rise of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow occurred strictly because of their success, not ideology. Nevertheless, in the past NBC has demonstrated its cowardice in the face of criticism. They are the network that canceled their own number one rated program, Phil Donahue, for fear of being tagged anti-war.

By ramping up the rightist rhetoric on CNBC, NBC News is attempting to harvest popular outrage from both ends of the political field. They can continue to throw liberals a bone with their primetime MSNBC schedule, while cozying up to their natural right wing allies on the business-oriented CNBC. And neither network will have its programming muddied with ideological balance. As an ancillary benefit, NBC will try to tamp down the criticism they receive from the right by pointing to their new heroes of ham-handed conservatism.

In the end, CNBC just hopes to siphon a few viewers away from Fox News, and to smother the new born Fox Business Network in its crib. Unfortunately, the way they have chosen to do that is to emulate the Fox model which is focused on aggressive conservatism, and hysterical, paranoid personalities. That won’t work for CNBC in the long run because Fox viewers are too cult driven. They won’t abandon the comfort of that with which they are familiar for a subsidiary of that which their Fox masters have convinced them is evil.

Now, more than ever, CNBC needs to concentrate on providing responsible financial journalism. By making themselves truly indispensable in the field for which they claim expertise, they will be far more likely to succeed and to serve the interests of their viewers.