Day: 7/29/2013

Fox News Inadvertently Proves Phoniness Of Phony Scandals

Posted by on July 29, 2013 at 11:13 pm. 18 Comments :

When President Obama correctly noted that Republicans have spent an inordinate amount of time obsessing over so-called “scandals,” rather than addressing the real issues that matter most to Americans, it touched off a spate of pundits spending an inordinate amount of time obsessing over Obama’s remarks, rather than addressing real news.

Fox News, of course, created a bunch of fancy new graphics with scary fonts alerting their perpetually frightened viewers that the President had called a bunch of phony scandals phony. Which makes it all the more delicious that a Fox News contributor pulled the veil aside this morning and exposed the fallacy at the center of one of the alleged scandals.

Radio loudmouth Lars Larson squared off with Democratic strategist Mark Hannah over the question of whether the IRS targeting of Tea Partiers was a legitimate scandal. The answer is obvious in that the GOP, despite a concerted witch hunt, has never found the least bit of evidence that the White House was connected to any of it.

The real scandal in all of this is that most of the groups seeking tax-exempt status, whether from the left or the right, should never have received it. They are overtly political operations disguising their activities as educational or charitable. They deserve to be scrutinized and rejected. They are the detritus of the Citizens United decision that effectively legalized special interest and corporate influence peddling. But this larger question always seemed to get lost in the skirmish over trivialities. Until today.

Near the end of what was otherwise a typical cable news spitting match, Larson let his guard down and expectorated some truth:

Did you catch that? Larson admitted that the activities of the Tea Partiers are political. And as Hannah astutely noted, that is not permitted under the law that governs tax exempt organizations. Here is the transcript:

Larson: The fact is that those groups were delayed. The law says that they are supposed to get an answer within 180 days. Some of them were delayed up to 27 months. And they described in detail to congress what those delays do in an election year to the ability of political groups to engage in politics, which is protected by the Constitution.

Hannah: You mean social welfare organizations, right?

Larson: No. I’m telling you that when they go out to educate people about the issues.

Hannah: They’re not allowed to be political.

To be clear, this was not a gaffe. This was an accidental articulation of the truth. Larson even brushed back Hannah’s polite (and somewhat snarky) correction before stumbling toward a step-back. The IRS is entirely justified in denying preferential tax treatment to these sort of groups, and they should be even more aggressive in doing so. And now we have a conservative on Fox News making the need for enforcement and reform abundantly clear.

This is precisely why Citizens United is so dangerous. It allows Super PACs to game the system, collect unlimited donations from conflicted parties, and keep their identities secret. And while pretending to be non-partisan, social welfare organizations, they brazenly engage in political activities. Everyone in politics knows it and, on occasion, when they aren’t carefully watching their words, it slips out.

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Limbaugh And Hannity Getting Heaved From 40+ Radio Stations: Glenn Beck Nervous

Posted by on July 29, 2013 at 8:30 am. 15 Comments :

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Earlier this year a fierce feud broke out between Rush Limbaugh and one of his radio distributors, Cumulus Media. The Cumulus CEO, Lew Dickey, went public with his observation that Limbaugh’s vulgar misogyny and hate speech was sending advertisers fleeing. Dickey told the company’s shareholders that they were losing millions of dollars as a result of an audience and advertiser boycott that began after Limbaugh had called student activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute”

Limbaugh took umbrage at the suggestion that his boorishness was responsible for the lost ads and threatened to take his program elsewhere. However, it seems that Cumulus has beaten him to the punch according to sources who spoke to Politico, who say that Cumulus will drop both Limbaugh and Sean Hannity by year’s end:

“Cumulus has decided that it will not renew its contracts with either host, the source said, a move that would remove the two most highly rated conservative talk personalities from more than 40 Cumulus channels in major markets.”

There is the possibility that the parties are still posturing in an attempt to secure better deals, but Politco’s sources say that Limbaugh’s syndicator is unlikely to come down to a figure that Cumulus would accept. Cumulus, in the meantime, has been scouting new talent for replacement hosts. And when 48 of your 50 biggest advertisers have directed that their ads not be placed on Limbaugh and Hannity, Cumulus has little incentive to negotiate.

If Limbaugh and Hannity are evicted from their radio perches at the Cumulus stations they currently occupy, their distributor, Clear Channel, will likely find them new digs on their own Premier network. This move will not be without a fair amount of turbulence. The shows could go dark for some weeks or months while new stations are found and the contracts of the hosts residing there are unwound. Which raises another problem that is probably keeping Glenn Beck up tonight. That’s because Premiere already distributes Beck who broadcasts at the same time as Limbaugh. So if Limbaugh is moved to the Premiere stations it may be Beck who is shoved aside.

While there is a certain amount of schadenfreude derived from watching these rightist dinosaurs flailing in the tar pits of their own making, the end result is not much prettier a picture. Limbaugh and Hannity are likely to land somewhere eventually. And Cumulus could replace them with Mike Huckabee, Mark Levin, and/or Michael Savage. So the airwaves will end up with just as much repugnant blather. But the show will have an entertaining, if too brief, intermission.