Day: 2/17/2012

OMG: Rush Limbaugh Destroys The Liberal Media

Posted by on February 17, 2012 at 9:02 pm. 6 Comments :

Well it’s all over folks. It was a nice run, but now we have to resign ourselves to reality. Pack it in, people. We’ve been destroyed.

Fox Nation - Rush Limbaugh

I really don’t know what’s worse: The third grade mental capacity of whoever wrote that headline for Fox Nation, or Rush Limbaugh’s puerile logic.

A couple of months ago I wrote a column that featured some of the hysterical hyperbole plastered on Fox Nation day in and day out. I noted that, by Fox News standards, any time someone criticizes someone else they are either obliterated, demolished, destroyed, annihilated, crushed, torched, or nuked. But this just broke all records for Olympian Asininity.

Limbaugh thinks that by rattling off the names of three Republican women and three Democratic men he proves that the GOP is all in for feminism (or as he calls them, feminazis). Never mind that the women he chose would set back women’s rights 100 years if they had the chance. And the Republican men he declined to name include misogynists who would like nothing better than to force women back into the kitchen and relegate them to pumping out babies. A good example would be the current GOP frontrunner for their party’s nomination for president, Rick Santorum, who has been known to complain about women working outside the home and earning pay that is equivalent to men.

For the record, it is Democrats who drafted and passed just about every pro-woman piece of legislation including the landmark Violence Against Women Act that was authored by then-senator Joe Biden and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. And it was generally Republicans who opposed such legislation including the reauthorization of VAWA this year that is being held up by Republican Chuck Grassley.

For Limbaugh to complain that the media doesn’t give Republicans enough credit for all they’ve done for to women is a joke. But for the Fox Nationalists to praise his lame rationale is downright delusional. I’m not sure they know what winning an argument means.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Gas Price Myth

Posted by on February 17, 2012 at 2:32 pm. 3 Comments :

Fox Nation has joined Fox News and most of the right-wing noise machine in attempting to slow President’s Obama’s increasing popularity due to the recent trends in the improving economic and employment numbers. They have settled on the issue of rising gas prices as a means of disrupting the President’s positive momentum.

Fox Nation

The only problem with asserting that Obama is responsible for a massive spike in gas prices is that it doesn’t happen to be true. The 83% figure was derived from calculating gas price changes from Obama’s inauguration to the present. But that doesn’t take into account that in the weeks prior to the inauguration there was a worldwide economic meltdown that was the catalyst for a precipitous drop in gas prices. As noted by economists at the time, “The overwhelming cause of the collapse in oil prices has been the faltering world economy, which has fueled the drop in consumption.”

Here are the facts: Gas prices peaked at $4.12 per gallon in the summer of 2008. By the time Obama was inaugurated the following January, the Bush recession that began in the fall had caused prices to drop to $1.61. While everyone likes lower gas prices, nobody wants them to decline due to people being too poor to purchase it. But that’s what happened in late 2008.

Arguably, the rise in gas prices since then validates the Obama economic revival that has produced higher retail fuel consumption. So a proper comparison would not begin at the lowest point of a recession that Obama had nothing to do with. It would begin from the pre-recession market until the present. By that measure gas is 17% lower.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Fox News to present these facts, or any others that make the President look good. Their mission to destroy this presidency and anything that resembles progressivism is more important to Fox than facts.

Fox News Steps Up Their Anti-Media Matters Campaign

Posted by on February 17, 2012 at 4:46 am. 6 Comments :

For much of this week Fox News has been engaged in a scorched earth campaign to smear the reputation of Media Matters timed to the release of a new book from the watchdog group (The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine). They have blanketed their news properties with stories sourced from The Daily Caller (TDC), which is run, coincidentally, by Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson. Never mind that TDC’s “investigation” has uncovered nothing of significance and almost everything it has published was either old news published elsewhere, or laughably obvious and not news at all (i.e. the latest installment that jolts its readers with the surprise revelation that Media Matters receives funding from progressive donors. Shocking, I know). To date Fox has featured the story twelve times on its Fox Nation web site and at least as many times on the Fox News Channel. And all of that “news” activity occurred in just three days. You’d think this was the equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down.

On Thursday the story made the leap online from Fox Nation to the mothership, FoxNews.com.

FoxNews.com

This promotion took the form of three articles on the same day – one in the opinion section and two categorized as “Politics.” The subject matter for the articles covered two angles that any enterprising journalist would regard as evocative of nothing but boredom. All of the articles failed to produce anything that could be considered newsworthy, and even fell short of the tabloid appeal that Fox usually exploits so well.

First up was an article reporting that Media Matters had received a $50,000 grant to scrutinize religious media. Fox framed this as some sort of attack on religion, a topic it has been hammering on recently anyway. However, the work done by Media Matters in this area has focused exclusively on religious broadcasters who feature news as a part of their programming. For example, Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. Robertson is a veteran of political activism and even ran for the GOP nomination for president. His program routinely discusses political issues and has its own news segments. The story, as reported by TDC and Fox, contained no examples of any work done by Media Matters that was critical of religious content from Robertson or any other religious broadcaster. Media Matters has remained true to their mission of monitoring bias in the news, regardless of the venue on which it appears and TDC produced nothing to show otherwise.

Secondly, there as article on FoxNews.com that sought to manufacture some controversy over an allegation that “Media Matters Took Gun-Control Money While Boss Paid A Bodyguard…Packin’ Heat.” The first point that should be recognized is that TDC has produced no evidence whatsoever that this allegation is true. It was made by a single anonymous source and is uncorroborated by any other documentary proof. But even if we accept the allegation hypothetically, so what? Advocates of gun control, contrary to the frantic hyperbole of right-ringers, are not opposed to the existence of guns. They are, as the label makes clear, advocates of “controlling” access to weapons so that they are not easily available to people who would use them to commit crimes or harm others. A gun in the possession of a bodyguard is entirely appropriate and would not be objected to by gun control advocates or the pro-gun-control Media Matters donor.

So once again, Fox News has succeeded only in pumping up their highly coordinated and self-serving campaign to misinform their audience about Media Matters and to damage their reputation. And this campaign is all taking place the week prior to the release of a book by Media Matters that pulls the curtain aside to reveal the makings of The Fox Effect. I’m sure that the timing of the Fox smear is totally unrelated to the book’s release.