Day: 5/5/2010

Fox News Is Afraid Of Confusing Their Viewers

Posted by on May 5, 2010 at 5:52 pm. 2 Comments :

An advertisement from VoteVets that promotes clean energy was rejected by Fox News, although it is currently running on CNN and MSNBC. The reason given for the rejection was that the ad is “too confusing.” What do you think?

I don’t think I’ve ever heard the confusion standard for declining ads before. There are standards for profanity, violence, libel, nudity, and even factual accuracy. But confusing? That’s a new one.

Idiot FoxI think that what Fox may be concerned about is that this ad is from an organization of American veterans. It advocates enhancing domestic security by reducing our dependence on foreign oil. It features unflattering pictures of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are three of the top bullet points right-wingers harp on in pursuit of their pseudo-patriotic Americism. The confusion that Fox is worried about is that their carefully trained viewers might wind up agreeing with these vets that our security is threatened by enriching our enemies in Iran and other unfriendly oil oligarchs. This ad could undo so much of Fox’s painstakingly hypnotic propagandizing.

So Fox’s solution is to censor the ad and protect their gullible audience from hearing any argument that might conflict with the Fox News world view. Fox undoubtedly regards this as their obligation to shield their viewers from the anxiety of having to think for themselves. Heaven knows that’s often confusing and so does Fox’s standards and practices department.

What Fox didn’t say is that Saudi oil tycoon, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owns 7 percent of News Corp. He is the largest shareholder outside the Murdoch family. That wouldn’t have anything to do with Fox’s reluctance to air an ad proposing to reduce expenditures on Middle-East oil, would it? Or is this just confusing the matter?

Neil Cavuto Romances Rupert Mudoch, Investors Get Screwed

Posted by on May 5, 2010 at 10:13 am. 3 Comments :

The News Corporation released their quarterly earnings yesterday after the market closed. On the surface there was good news as News Corp beat the estimates of analysts. So Rupert Murdoch visited his own studio to be interviewed by his employee, Neil Cavuto.

Cavuto introduced the segment with a bootlicking recitation of the financial powerhouse that is News Corp. It was a gloating exercise that portrayed News Corp as the savior of the economy and even attempted to recruit viewers to some sort of News Corp pep squad, suggesting that they…

“…count yourself maybe a News Corp booster. The parent company of this fine network, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins, and on and on, reporting much, much, much, better than expected earnings in the latest period that dwarf well past some of the estimates in there.”

The problem is that, in this eleven minute interview (25% of his program), Cavuto and Murdoch glossed over the most important part of the earnings announcement, so far as investors are concerned – the outlook going forward. As it turns out, News Corp actually issued a warning that they would fail to meet earnings expectations in the next quarter. This information was divulged in the conference call with analysts, but Fox News viewers wouldn’t hear it. Consequently, if you were relying Fox for accurate reporting on the News Corp earnings, you would have lost a pile of money this morning as their stock plummeted six percent.

Watching this spectacle of Cavuto and Murdoch grinning and lying to viewers about the prospects for News Corp’s stock you can’t help but wonder if they crossed a line into deliberately misleading shareholders. Why wouldn’t they? Misleading their viewers is their core competency. If it isn’t weapons of mass destruction or death panels, it’s their stock performance. And when Cavuto got around to asking Murdoch what was driving the company’s unparalleled “success,” Murdoch detoured entirely away from economics to his political obsession:

“Well, as far as Fox News goes it’s very simple. It’s very powerful, it’s very good, and it’s very balanced. And everybody else, every newspaper other than ours, it may be an over-generalization, but by far the most newspapers, and certainly the other television networks, are sort of all on one side, the liberal side of anything. I think the population of this country is pretty worried about its direction and, you know, they turn to Fox News.”

See that? News Corp is successful because of the liberal media. Not because they gouged cable operators for higher subscriber fees and favorable channel placement. Not because of the one-time phenomenon of a little movie called Avatar. Not because of the monopolistic domination they enforce in media markets around the world. But I will agree with Murdoch on his last point, that the population of this country is pretty worried. However, that isn’t why they turn to Fox News, it’s BECAUSE they turned to Fox News. Anyone who watches Fox, and is foolish enough to believe what the see, is a prime candidate for an anxiety attack or an aneurysm.

It is also interesting that Murdoch conducted his interview with Cavuto on the Fox News Channel. Cavuto is also the anchor and Senior VP for Murdoch’s struggling Fox Business Network. But when Murdoch decided to make a television appearance to discuss his company’s earnings, he chose not to visit his own financial news network. Cavuto was reduced to playing the FNC tape on his FBN show. Does that say something about Murdoch’s commitment to FBN?

More Proof That No One Pays Attention To Fox News

Posted by on May 5, 2010 at 12:20 am. 1 Comments :

For several years now, Fox News has been trying to vilify the word “progressive” by using it disparagingly and associating it with people or policies they regard negatively.

It started with Bill O’Reilly making repeated references to what he called secular progressives. These were the folks he accused of waging a war on Christmas and weakening family values. They are the reason he became a Culture Warrior.

More recently, Glenn Beck has mounted a full-on assault against progressives, whom he has called a cancer on America. Virtually every episode of his Acute Paranoia Revue makes reference to one or another of his imaginary progressive bogeymen – from the classics like Woodrow Wilson, to the modern like SEIU and, of course, President Obama himself.

Pew WordsDespite all the firepower that Fox has devoted to this progressive bashing, America isn’t buying it. The Pew Research Center just released a study that asked respondents to say whether they had a positive or negative view of a variety of terms. About two thirds (68%) said that they have a positive reaction to the term “progressive.” That’s 16 percentage points higher than those who reacted positively to “capitalism.” Even a majority of Republicans (56%) have a positive impression of the curse of progress.

I wonder what Beck and O’Reilly would say if they were honest enough to even acknowledge that the survey exists. It would also be interesting to hear their response to the fact that 29% of Americans view “socialism” positively. On the not-particularly-surprising scale, 36% of Republican men like militias. That’s the highest favorable of any of the groups surveyed. It compares to just 21% of all respondents.

The bottom line is that Fox News may be exhausting themselves in their campaign to denigrate progressives and liberals and Democrats, but they are failing miserably as the nation proves to be smarter than the idiots at Fox had assumed. This is just their latest failure having previously been unable to thwart Democrats from taking control of Congress, winning the presidency, or passing health reform. So while they may make a lot of noise as they pump their propaganda into the atmosphere, they aren’t changing any minds. It’s rather comforting to know that instead of being effective and persuasive, they are just being annoying as hell. I can live with that.