Day: 11/9/2011

Americans Ditching Big Banks By The Tens Of Thousands

Posted by on November 9, 2011 at 9:28 pm. 10 Comments :

The Occupy Wall Street movement has had a profound effect on changing the topic of debate in this country. A couple of months ago the only subject the media would entertain was the national debt and federal spending. Today the conversation has veered to economic inequities and the abuse of corporate power.

An ancillary to the Occupy agenda that arose a few weeks ago is the call for Americans to Move Your Money from big, impersonal banks, to local community banks and credit unions. That initiative climaxed last Saturday as the day designated “Bank Transfer Day.”

By any measure it was a resounding success. The Credit Union National Association reports that $80 million was moved into their member institutions on Saturday alone. For comparison, the CUNA notes that on an average day in 2010, they opened 1,643 new accounts. On November 5th, they opened 40,000 new accounts. Could anyone have predicted this level of success?

Move Your Money

One person whose predictions were typically some distance from reality was Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. Last Friday he engaged Geraldo Rivera in a debate that ended with a brief discussion of the Bank Transfer Day.

Rivera: “Tomorrow there’s a Bank Transfer Day. This is a concrete thing. They are saying ‘Take your money out of the Bank of America. Take your money out of J. P. Morgan Chase. Take your money out of these big banks and put them in small credit unions.’ What if that comes out to tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers?”

O’Reilly: Let me just tell you something. Nobody’s gonna do that. Number one, those people don’t have any money and nobody’s gonna listen to them because they lost credibility.

Ya think O’Reilly will acknowledge his error now that he has been proven to be a lousy prognosticator? Do you think he will address the fact that 650,000 new accounts were opened in the month prior to Bank Transfer Day? That’s more than the total number of new accounts opened in all of last year. Do you think the big banks will stop pretending they don’t care about customers fleeing because they aren’t profitable customers? Yeah, me neither.

Fox News Commentator Secretly Worked On Michele Bachmann Book

Posted by on November 9, 2011 at 11:29 am. 1 Comments :

Politico reported this week that Fox News commentator Jim Pinkerton is a paid co-author of GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann’s new book.

This sort of collaboration would be a problem for any journalist who failed to fully disclose the relationship. But the problem is compounded by the fact that Pinkerton is a regular on Fox’s Media Watch, a program whose purpose is to monitor malfeasance in the media. It is precisely this sort of affair that a program like Media Watch would expose, instead they are accomplices.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Pinkerton told Media Matters that he does not regret his failure to disclose the relationship and that he had cleared it with his bosses at Fox who approved the deal. This is further evidence that the unethical behavior of anchors and commentators on Fox is not restricted to the whims of the on-air personnel. The editors and executives at Fox are fully involved in this perversion of journalistic standards. It’s just the way they do business.

Media Matters has compiled comments from a variety of press veterans and academics condemning Pinkerton’s actions. What do you think the adds are that Fox’s Media Watch will cover this story next Saturday?

Fox News Lies: Obama’s Christmas Tree Tax

Posted by on November 9, 2011 at 10:14 am. 9 Comments :

It’s Wednesday morning, the day after Election Day. A number of significant issues were decided yesterday including the repeal of an anti-union law in Ohio, the defeat of an anti-choice “personhood” initiative in Mississippi, and the recall of State Senator Russell Pearce (the author of the anti-immigrant bill) in Arizona. But what made it to the top of the Fox Nation web site?

Fox Nation

That’s right. The Fox Nationalists virtually ignored the electoral results. In fact, the only item they ran was one about the Ohio contest, but you had to count down 18 stories before you found it. FoxNews.com also featured the Xmas tax story just below their headline about disgraced coach Joe Paterno.

The story that trumped the election (and all other breaking news, including Herman Cain’s press conference) concerned a fifteen cent tax on Christmas trees that Fox’s headline labeled “Obama’s” tax. As usual, Fox’s reporting was somewhat less than credible.

The tax was actually a fee requested by the National Christmas Tree Association during the Bush administration. It was passed by a Republican controlled Senate and House, and was co-sponsored by John Boehner. It’s purpose was to fund research into, and promotion of, the Christmas tree industry which had been struggling to compete with artificial trees imported from China.

It was this pro-business, American job supporting, Republican legislation, that Fox chose to turn into a political cudgel with which to bash the President. It is this fee, that was proposed and supported by growers to enhance the image and sales of live Christmas trees, that Fox is implying is anti-Christian. And at the same time Fox has deployed this phony story to divert attention away from the news that conservatives had been slaughtered at the polls.

Fox has completely given up even pretending that they are engaging in honest journalism. How can any thinking person continue to regard Fox as a legitimate news enterprise?

[Update] Fox Nation updated their web site with late breaking news that pushed the Christmas Tree Tax story out of their headline position. Did they replace it with election results or Italy’s debt/political crisis? Nope. The new headline story is “Jon Stewart Makes Mincemeat Out of Jon Corzine.”