Day: 9/17/2012

Fox & Friends Gets Punked – But That’s Not The Real Story

Posted by on September 17, 2012 at 5:09 pm. 2 Comments :

This morning on Fox & Friends (the stupidest ensemble, pseudo-news team on American TV), a prankster convinced the show’s producers that he was a college graduate who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but who is now disappointed and intends to vote for Mitt Romney this November. The video of this train wreck appears to be the work of a stoned slacker who got a kick out of outsmarting the bigwig TV producers. And that may be true.

However, It was not my intention address this prank at first because it doesn’t really appear to be particularly well thought out or executed. What’s more, Gretchen Carlson seemed to quickly pick up on the fact that something was amiss. However, new information has emerged that is far more interesting than the event itself.

It seems that Fox News was determined to invent a story about disillusioned young people who were abandoning the President. This was not a “fair and balanced” study of attitudes among recent college grads, it was a deliberately biased piece of propaganda that jettisoned all journalistic principles in order to deliver their preconceived result.

Max Rice, the aforementioned prankster, spoke with various reporters after the fact and revealed the shoddy quality (or lack thereof) of Fox’s research. Rice told the bookers that he was a college graduate, but that could easily have been debunked by a Google search that would have found a video from his high school graduation only two years ago. Rice also gave contradictory answers to biographical questions, telling them at first that he was an English major, and later that he majored in Engineering.

Fox News let all of this go by because Rice fit the profile of a disaffected former Obama supporter. That was all they cared about. But even worse, Rice says that Fox coached him on what to say during the interview.

“They gave me a paragraph full of bullshit talking points. … They basically gave me a speech and they thought I was supposed to have it memorized.”

Rice is not a very good prankster, but his antics have allowed us to peer into the Fox machinery and see how their phony sausage is made. And that’s worth something all by itself. The news emanating from this episode should have less to do with the stunt that was pulled on the Fox & Friends crew, than with their dishonest attempt to fabricate a story with the intent of damaging Obama’s reputation.

Fox’s determination to manipulate their viewers and spread false information was clearly more important to them than doing proper research and fact-checking. And when all is said and done, this was not a story about a news team getting punked. It’s a story about a news network punking their audience.

The REAL Mitt Romney Just Stood Up: He Calls Half Of America Freeloaders

Posted by on September 17, 2012 at 3:28 pm. NO Comments :

Mother Jones has posted videos of Mitt Romney at a fundraiser earlier this year. The video was taken secretly amongst a group of millionaire donors whom Romney was begging for buckets of cash.

If these videos get the broad exposure that they deserve, we may look back on this as the moment Romney’s campaign died and went to Kolub

In this segment Romney tells his wealthy backers that…

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.”

Mother Jones has four more videos wherein Romney paints himself as the out-of-touch elitist that we all know him to be. He praises his consultants because of their experience running campaigns in Armenia, Africa, Israel (whatever happened to his campaign slogan “Believe in America?”). He answers a donor’s question about how they can help appeal to Hispanics by saying “Frankly, what I need you to do is to raise millions of dollars.” He offers his stock market prediction saying…

“If it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president’s going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you’re talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back and we’ll see—without actually doing anything—we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.”

Romney knows damn well that the market has more than doubled under the Obama administration, despite their being commies who hate business. Surely one of the reasons he won’t release his tax returns is he doesn’t want people to find out that he is way better off than he was four years ago, since most of his income is from investments.

David Corn summed up the gist of these videos nicely by writing…

“With this crowd of fellow millionaires, he apparently felt free to utter what he really believes and would never dare say out in the open. He displayed a high degree of disgust for nearly half of his fellow citizens, lumping all Obama voters into a mass of shiftless moochers who don’t contribute much, if anything, to society, and he indicated that he viewed the election as a battle between strivers (such as himself and the donors before him) and parasitic free-riders who lack character, fortitude, and initiative.”

If that’s how Romney thinks he will capture the hearts of voters and ride an electoral wave to victory, he is going to be sorely disappointed. It’s fair to say that insulting the vast majority of voters and their family and friends is not a particularly sound campaign strategy. But it’s not as if his strategy has ever been well thought out. Early on he said he likes to fire people, who he also thinks are corporations. And just last week he accused the President of sympathizing with terrorists and blamed the diplomats who had been attacked for the violence committed against them.

Of course, nothing in politics is certain, and Romney could still pull off some sort of miracle. So Democrats need to stay vigilant and work as hard as if they were underdogs. But it seems like every day Romney personally pounds a new nail into his campaign’s coffin, and for that we should thank him on November 7.