Day: 1/30/2014

Wrong Again! Bill O’Reilly’s State Of The Union Prediction Fails

Posted by on January 30, 2014 at 11:27 am. 2 Comments :

The biggest ego on cable news is fond of propping himself up and exalting his intellect and insight. Unfortunately, Bill O’Reilly is so often wrong that he becomes a parody of himself.

Bill O'Reilly

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On his program Monday night, O’Reilly embarked on a mission to belittle President Obama and the State of the Union speech that would be delivered the following night. Consistent with the Fox News philosophy of disparaging all things Democratic – even before they occur – O’Reilly asserted that the American people wouldn’t care about the speech, but would be enthralled by Papa Bear himself.

O’Reilly: There is no question that President Obama’s first five years in office have been troubled. Tonight he will try to regroup, but Talking Points believes that few Americans will be paying close attention to him. In fact, I predict that this broadcast you’re watching right now, will be higher rated on the Fox News channel than the president’s actual address. We’ll see.

Yes, we shall indeed see. But first of all, isn’t it cute that O’Reilly refers to himself as “Talking Points,” as if it were an anthropomorphic entity with opinions separate from his own? Well, Mr. Talking Points might be disconcerted to learn that 33 million people watched the State of the Union speech. That is actually fewer than watched in recent years, but still a hefty chunk of viewers that exceeds all other conventional programming.

More to the point, O’Reilly’s prediction that his own show would outperform the speech has blown up in his face. The Factor drew only 3.5 million viewers, which means he was off by a mere 90 percent. O’Reilly’s broadcast didn’t even beat just the viewers who watched the speech on Fox (4.7 million). And since there was no rational way to spin his prognostication failure, O’Reilly simply ignored it last night in his first post-speech broadcast.

This is typical of O’Reilly’s pompous conceit as he strives to present himself as an omnipotent and infallible observer of human events. It recalls his dreadfully wrong prediction that the Supreme Court would overturn ObamaCare, when he promised to admit that he was an idiot if he were wrong. He was wrong, and he broke his promise. But that came as no surprise to those who pay attention to his daily blather.

Frank Rich: Fox News Has Been Defeated On The Media And Political Battlefield

Posted by on January 30, 2014 at 12:50 am. 8 Comments :

New York Magazine columnist Frank Rich believes that the war on Fox News is over – and Fox News lost. His article published this week is titled “Stop Beating a Dead Fox,” and counsels liberals and media critics to retreat from the battle against Roger Ailes & Company because we have already won.

Rich is both right and wrong, but through it all he is clear-headed and thought provoking. But in the end his conclusion is faulty, and I will explain why along with some highlights from his article.

Pray for Fox News

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“The most interesting news about Fox News is that for some years now it has been damaging the right far more than the left. […] Democrats have won the popular vote five out of six times. You’d think they’d be well advised to leave Fox News to its own devices so that it can continue to shoot its own party in the foot.”

The fact that Fox has been a dead, stinking albatross around the wrinkled neck of the GOP is a point I made more than four years ago in an article with the understated headline “Fox News Is Killing The Republican Party.” Finally, the mainstream media is catching up with me. Rich continues…

“The million or so viewers who remain fiercely loyal to the network are not, for the most part, and as some liberals still imagine, naive swing voters who stumble onto Fox News under the delusion it’s a bona fide news channel and then are brainwashed by Ailes’s talking points into becoming climate-change deniers. They arrive at the channel as proud, self-selected citizens of Fox Nation and are unlikely to defect from the channel or its politics until death do them part.”

This is another revelation I made when I exposed “The Cult Of Foxonality” five years ago and observed that “Fox viewers are married to the channel and couldn’t care less what’s playing down the dial.” The Fox audience are hardened partisans with a devotional attachment to their tele-church. And finally, Rich says that…

“Rather than waste time bemoaning Fox’s bogus journalism, liberals should encourage it. The more that Fox News viewers are duped into believing that the misinformation they are fed by Ailes is fair and balanced, the more easily they can be ambushed by reality as they were on Election Night 2012. […] we should start considering the possibility that it now works to the Democrats’ advantage that Fox News does manufacture its own facts.”

Here is where Rich and I part company. While there may be some entertainment value in watching floundering wingnuts desperately trying to make sense of a reality that contradicts their delusions, in the end it is bad for the nation to encourage ignorance. And even though the antics of Fox News have been proven to drive down the approval ratings of Republican politicos, we would still be better off if there weren’t a disinformation factory poisoning the minds of our friends and family and neighbors.

That’s why the need to be vigilant in exposing the lies and bigotry of Fox News and other rightist propagandists is still vitally important. It is crucial that the record be set straight because an unanswered lie can too easily become a perverse version of the truth. It isn’t a mission embarked upon out of concern that the Republican Party is getting its ass whooped in national elections. It’s out of love for those who do not deserve to be exploited and abused by the mouthpieces of corporations and nationless plutocrats. So laugh, if you will, at the dunces who spew their hate-filled rhetoric of greed and bigotry, but never surrender to it.