Month: March 2021

Rachel Maddow Topped All Cable News Programs for the 1st Quarter of 2021

Posted by on March 31, 2021 at 4:03 pm. 6 Comments :

One of the more pompous predictions of the former guy (Donald Trump) was that without him “all forms of media will tank.” Although there is some truth to that in the sense that he attracted eyeballs in the same way that a bloody highway crash does. He insisted on constantly being the center of attention even if that meant making a fool of himself, which he did more often than not.

Rachel Maddow

However, what Trump failed to predict was the rise of progressive media and particularly MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Her performance has been a bright light in a media environment that has been shrouded by a global pandemic. During the first quarter of 2021, Maddow rose to become the number one cable news program, beating her competition on the prior leader, Fox News. For part of the quarter Maddow was the number one program on all of cable, not just cable news. She marked that milestone on March 3rd:

During the quarter Fox News was the biggest loser, having dropped 40 percent into third place behind both MSNBC and CNN. By comparison CNN was off 32 Percent, and MSNBC fell only 19 percent. It isn’t surprising that viewership was down this year. It was being compared to an unusually eventful prior year that was bombarded with profoundly significant developments like the pandemic, the second impeachment, and the presidential election.

This year by contrast has been languid, in the most pleasant way. President Biden has sought to make his policies the story, rather than himself. The ponderous presence of a psychotic narcissist has been banished from Washington, although it still emits it’s pitiful, emasculated roars from its new lair in Palm Beach. This sea change is a big plus for journalism. As Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute noted…

“Now, for the most part, Trump can be ignored. Which means stories that really matter can be covered. Maybe it won’t draw the audience we’ve seen in the past, but it will be important.”

The standings in the ratings are likely to be volatile in the coming months, Fox News may regain its leading post when viewers who abandoned it for more radical pastures (Newsmax, OANN) return. They may find those other outlets tiresome, specious, and devoid of substance. And Trump isn’t around to promote them anymore.

Fox’s CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, is confidant that Fox News ratings will increase because its viewers will appreciate Fox’s unethical commitment to right-wing propaganda. Murdoch recently admitted that Fox’s role is to be “the opposition” to Biden and the Democrats, saying “That’s what our job is now with the Biden administration, and you’ll see our ratings really improve from here.”

Maybe. But the fact that MSNBC and Rachel Maddow prevailed during one of the most competitive seasons in modern times is evidence that many viewers hunger for honest and informative reporting. Fox’s approach to journalism as an ultra-conservative confirmation bias generator can only succeed on a temporary basis. And its reporting will have no lasting impact anywhere other than in the minds of the indoctrinated wingnuttery.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Tucker Carlson Freaks Out Over Fake Plot to ‘Pack the Electorate’ with Immigrants

Posted by on March 31, 2021 at 12:32 pm. 4 Comments :

In the wake of the election of Joe Biden as President, Fox News has clearly made an editorial decision on how best to disparage him and the Democratic Party. Fox’s CEO Lachlan Murdoch even admitted publicly that he regards his network as “the opposition” saying “That’s what our job is now with the Biden administration.”

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Klan

Consequently, the network has focused intensely on an issue that is near the bottom of the American people’s priorities. Fox News is rabidly attacking immigrants – mostly children – and the Biden administration’s handling of the border and detention facilities. While there are serious problems in that regard, Fox’s campaign is a blatant attempt to demean Biden and distract from polling that shows overwhelming approval for the President, particularly with his handling of the COVID pandemic, which is near the top of the people’s concerns.

Chief among the killjoys is the Fox News Senior White Nationalist, Tucker Carlson. His program seems to be dedicated to anti-Democratic bluster and conspiracy theories that appeal to his audience of QAnon disciples. On Wednesday Carlson visited with the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends. The discussion was predictably filled with fear mongering of “others’ invading America to destroy it. The segment began with a question from Ainsley Earhardt:

Earhardt: What do you make of what’s happening now on the border? Is that our biggest issue right now?
Carlson: Well, yeah. Unlike so many issues we face, this one we know for certain will change the country forever. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The question is a central question. This is a democracy. So when you change the population, you change the outcome of the vote, which means you change the way the country is run. And that of course is the whole point of this. […]

This is an effort, basically, to pack the electorate. So if you open the borders and then sponsor legislation giving citizenship and voting rights to the people you’ve just admitted illegally, what are you doing? You’re trying to change election outcomes and that’s what they [Democrats] are doing.”

Carlson isn’t just against immigration. European immigrants have come to America for decades, becoming citizens and voters. What Carlson believes will “change the country forever” is the prospect of non-white people becoming a larger part of the American electorate. So he has invented a conspiracy theory that Democrats are plotting to grant undocumented immigrants immediate citizenship and register them as Democrats. There is, of course, no such plot, no such legislation under consideration, and no Democrat advancing this malarkey.

Carlson is pretending to be worried about “packing the electorate” in order to “change election outcomes.” And he’s frightening his viewers with his wholly contrived horror story of aliens seeking to “change the nature of the people who live here.”

“The Democratic Party is extremely frustrated by the idea that there are Americans who don’t vote for them, who reject their programs so if you change the nature of the people who live here, then you win forever.”

The notion that it is Democrats who are frustrated by a lack of voters is especially bizarre while Democrats are sponsoring legislation to expand access to the polls for all American citizens. The bill (H.R. 1) is a historic and comprehensive solution to election problems that have plagued the nation for decades. It includes reforms for campaign fundraising, gerrymandering, registration, security, and much more.

So naturally, the Republican Party is committed to killing it. Likewise, Fox News is serving as the GOP’s PR division to disseminate flagrant falsehoods intended to deceive voters. They persist in propagating debunked allegations of widespread election fraud as their justification for opposing these critical reforms.

Tucker Carlson is at the forefront Fox’s campaign to spread these racist lies. His only concern is keeping America’s rapidly declining white majority in power, despite the inevitable demographic changes that are already taking place. And rather than seeing those changes as the positive contributions that they are, he maligns people of color as “dirty,” and diversity as a threat to “traditional” America. And he’s doing it all with the knowledge and approval of his bosses at Fox News.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Inadvertently Admits He Caused Hundreds of Thousands of COVID Deaths

Posted by on March 30, 2021 at 2:28 pm. 9 Comments :

Having Donald Trump, a barely articulate. petulant crybaby, as president has produced innumerable instances of cringeworthy comments. Often his wrath caused him to say things that had very different meanings than what he intended. And Trump has continued his vengeance driven malaprops as ex-president. However, he has scaled up the idiocy quotient considerably.

Donald Trump, Coronavirus

On Sunday, CNN aired a special presentation of interviews with several of Trump’s top advisors on his Coronavirus Task Force (which was little more than a propaganda vehicle to promote Trump). On Monday Trump issued a lengthy and rambling response to the program that was rife with the infantile Trumpisms we’ve come to know and dread. It went something like this:

There’s a abundance of aberrant asininity in that tirade. It starts in the first sentence where Trump reveals that he actually does watch “fake news” CNN, if only to keep track of his former pandemic advisors, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. Trump’s feelings were clearly hurt by the pair who he demeaned as “two self-promoters.” Which is rich coming from someone who famously plasters his name on everything and takes credit in the next paragraph for “saving the entire world.” Trump also accuses the doctors of “reinventing history,” another character defect that is more accurately attributed to Trump.

However, the most jarring part of that first sentence is Trump’s dismissal of what he calls “faulty recommendations,” that he “fortunately almost always overturned.” In other words, Trump is confessing that he rejected the advice of the experts that he hired to mitigate the deadly potential of the COVID pandemic. Therefore, Trump is conceding that the tragic results that took the lives of more half a million Americans are wholly his responsibility.

Trump has entirely absolved the others of blame. And since their recommendations were discarded by Trump personally, he is unselfishly taking all the “credit” for the horror that followed. For the record, the common sense, CDC approved recommendations that he overturned were replaced by his own favorite (albeit fraudulent) therapies that included injecting bleach, hydroxychloroquine, ultraviolet light, and herd “mentality” (sic).

This might be a good time to repeat that all of that was in the first sentence of Trump’s run-on statement. And it affirms the conclusions of a new study by a UCLA economist that “estimates that 400,000 people in this country died of COVID who could have been saved,” but for Trump’s ignorance, negligence, and deliberate malfeasance.

The rest of the statement was littered with lies, insults, and vain, undeserved tributes to himself. He bragged about having “developed American vaccines by an American President,” although he certainly had no role in developing the vaccines, and the first one approved (Pfizer) was developed in Germany without U.S. aid. He seemed to mourn only for those who suffered financial losses, rather than those who lost their health and/or lives.

Trump then went after Dr. Anthony Fauci for participating in a “fake interview” (whatever that means). Then Trump mocked the 80 year old doctor’s baseball throwing skills, as if that has anything to with with his medical expertise. It was just a cheap shot by childish loser. But it does make you wonder why every president since 1910 has thrown out at least one World Series first pitch during their presidency, with the exception of Trump. Trump also criticized Fauci for trying “to take credit for the vaccine,” which Fauci didn’t do. However Trump did take credit in the next sentence saying “I was the one to get it done.” It’s curious that Trump is so anxious to own the vaccine that he won’t promote to his dimwitted, anti-vax disciples, and which he got himself, but secretly.

Then Trump moved on to Dr. Birx, whom he labeled “a proven liar with very little credibility.” Birx has some serious mistakes and misjudgments to account for. However, they mainly involve her reluctance to tell the truth about Trump’s dishonesty and obstruction. Trump, meanwhile, lapsed into the pettiest of gossip about alleged private conversations that he can’t verify. And given his reputation as a pathological liar, nothing he says can believed without proof.

Trump’s whining statement is just further evidence of his bloated ego controlling his vindictive and vexatious outbursts. He has demonstrated his psychotic tendencies to lash out the people that he previously praised profusely when he hired them. They were always among “the best people” that he promised to surround himself with, but who he later disparaged viciously. They included top administration officials like General Jim Mattis, General John Kelly, General H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Jeff Sessions, Anthony Scaramucci, and Rex Tillerson, to name just a few.

And let’s not forget the shining examples of bootlicking loyalty that Trump latched onto whose sterling reputations were scarred only by their criminal convictions of crimes against the United States. Among that crowd were Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Steve Bannon. Those “best people” all got pardons from Trump. Which only goes to show that the more you put Trump ahead of honesty, ethics, and patriotism, the farther you’ll go in Trump World.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Lara Trump Joins Fox News Just in Time to Boost Her Campaign for the Senate

Posted by on March 29, 2021 at 10:45 am. 5 Comments :

It’s not like anyone needed additional proof that Fox News is the PR division of the Republican Party, and more recently, of Donald Trump and the bootlicking political cabal that hungers for his ascension to dictator. But more proof is what we got as Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, is welcomed into the Fox News family of shameless sycophants.

Fox News, Lara Trump

The mission of Fox News has been obvious for decades. It was founded by an ultra-conservative newspaper baron (Rupert Murdoch) and GOP media consultant (Roger Ailes). And it only grew more biased and partisan as the years went by. Now they have taken another step toward total integration into the politics of authoritarian propaganda. Monday morning Ainsley Earhardt of Fox and Friends made the big announcement:

Earhardt: Let’s bring in Lara Trump, Former senior advisor for the Trump campaign and, we have a big announcement, she is a new Fox News contributor. Welcome to the family Lara.”
Trump: I’m so so excited, first of all, to be joining the Fox family. I sort of feel like I’ve been an unofficial member of the team for so long. You guys know it was kind of a joke. Over the past five years I would come there so often that the security guards were like, ‘Maybe we should just give you a key.'”

This is an especially bizarre reception with Trump admitting that her prior appearances on Fox were so numerous and affable that “it was kind of a joke.” They are conceding that she was a de facto member of the Fox “News” team even throughout the 2020 presidential campaign while she working as a senior advisor for it. A legitimate news enterprise wouldn’t think that was funny.

In addition to the flagrant skirting of journalistic ethics, it is notable that this hiring comes at a time when Trump is dangling the proposition of a senate campaign in every media appearance she makes. She recently confirmed to Sean Hannity that “Yes, I am still considering [running for the Senate]. Absolutely!”

It’s impossible to dismiss that this hiring is related to that campaign. Most news organizations wouldn’t consider bringing on someone who has been openly promoting their candidacy. Why do so for the short term unless the purpose was to publicize the candidate and boost their electoral prospects? The matter was raised in this segment with Trump affirming that…

“Fox has been very generous with me, and they have said if that’s something that you ultimately decide to do, they’re gonna work with me on that front, and make sure that everything – all the rules are followed and we do everything properly.”

So Trump has a commitment from Fox News to “work with” her as she develops her campaign plans. and she’s foolish enough to admit it on the air. That’s not surprising for someone who was caught ripping off a dog rescue charity, and whose husband (Eric Trump) stole funds from a children’s cancer charity.

Lara Trump isn’t the only member of the deposed Trump administration to join the Fox News family. Trump’s former press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was announced as a Fox contributor last month. And Trump’s former top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, has replaced the creepy, Trump-fluffing, Lou Dobbs, who was fired as a stop-gap measure in response to the billion dollar defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by the voting software company, Smartmatic.

Clearly, the revolving door between Fox News and Republican politics is still spinning wildly out of control. They have apparently abandoned any pretense to being a news network. Not they they have ever acted as one. But now the biases are not so broadly defined as GOP-centric. They are now crossing the line into Trump cult territory.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

WUT? Eric Trump Tells Fox News His Father ‘Fixed’ Immigration and it’s ‘Not a Problem Anymore’

Posted by on March 28, 2021 at 2:35 pm. 3 Comments :

After the American people resoundingly evicted Donald Trump from the White House, there might have been some hope that he and his cult followers would recede to the background for a while and let the American people bask in the luxury of what Fox News calls Joe Biden’s boredom. Especially after inciting riots in Washington that he still believes were populated by patriots who posed “zero threat.”.

Fox News, Maria Bartiromo, Eric Trump

Unfortunately, Trump appears to be as determined as ever to thrust his torrent of lies and self-serving propaganda down the throats of a weary nation. He couldn’t even wait until he launches his Alt-Twitter social media platform.

On the latest episode of Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures, the Senior Trump-fluffer on Fox News visited with Trump spawn Eric Trump, for a weekend worship service. It was a tedious segment of sermonizing and softballs. But most of all, it overflowed with falsehoods that bordered on delusion (video below).

Bartiromo led off by criticizing President Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris for their alleged refusal to travel to the Southern border. That’s the issue that Fox News is struggling desperately to turn into the crisis of the century. It’s not as if we don’t already have a worldwide pandemic, multiple mass murders, insurrectionists attacking Congress, and totalitarians attempting to suppress voters and undermine democracy. Nope, Bartiromo is more concerned with Biden’s travel plans. She ran a video clip of Biden explaining why such a trip would not be advisable at present:

“He doesn’t want to be the issue. And Vice-President Kamala Harris, who says now that she’s not doing the border, despite President Biden putting her in charge, also has also has no plans to go.”

Immediately following that Bartiromo plays a video in which Harris was asked if she will visit the border and she says explicitly that “I have before and I’m sure I will again.” So Bartiromo’s own video proves that she’s lying about Harris. And yet she repeated her lie that “the Biden/Harris administration does not want to to visit the border.” Then, after introducing her guest, Bartiromo entered into this bizarre exchange with little Eric:

Bartiromo: It’s worth noting that Biden spent this weekend in Delaware, his fifth trip home since becoming President. That’s his sixth weekend away from the White House. We’re not even a hundred days in. Your reaction to this new administration, Eric?
Trump: I don’t even know where to begin First of all, Maria, it’s heartbreaking to us. I saw how much time and effort my father put into the job.

What’s worth noting is Bartiromo’s flaming hypocrisy and purposeful dishonesty. She knows full well that Trump made at least four times as many junkets to his own resort properties at the beginninging of his term. He played golf 19 times in his first 100 days, and spent many weekends at Mar-a-Lago. These were all trips that cost taxpayers million of dollars, including expenses for staff and Secret Service, that went straight into Trump’s pocket.

As for Eric, he spent his time stealing funds from a children’s cancer charity. And America mourns for his “broken” heart, because Daddy isn’t being sufficiently adored for all his hard work, which mainly consisted of angry tweeting, staging self-congratulatory photo-ops, and watching Fox News. Trumpette continued his embarrassingly incoherent rant saying that…

“I mean, Biden saying, ‘You know well, I’m not gonna go down there because I don’t want to inconvenience the Secret Service. And then you look at Kamala Harris who’s standing in front of literally Air Force Two in that last picture, where you’ve got the greatest ecosystem … You know how many times my father went down to the border? Because it’s a serious issue that plagues this country.”

Oh my. Harris stood “in front of literally Air Force Two.” As opposed to standing there figuratively? And Notice that Eric didn’t answer his own question about how many times Daddy went to the border? Either he doesn’t really know, or he knows it was just a handful. And he’s probably counting the campaign rallies and trips to Taco Bell. But he still wasn’t through making a fool of himself:

“And you see it, you see these children. My father had this issue fixed, Maria. […] My father had fixed this problem. Illegal immigration was not a problem anymore. […] A system that was working and was perfect and was fixed, turned into absolute junk.”

This is gaslighting on a grand scale. Trump’s own Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) reveals that immigrants were crossing the border in record numbers during Trump’s term. He holds the current monthly record of 144,116 in May of 2019. And the most recent numbers for the last fiscal year of Trump’s presidency are 458,088. If that’s what Eric thinks is “fixed” than the COVID pandemic was also fixed during Trump’s term when American fatalities hit half a million.

Equally as nauseating is Eric’s phony sympathy for the children. He exhibited none of that when kids were forcibly ripped from their parents arms, some never to be reunited. And that wasn’t a policy failure, it was their intention. Trump admitted that the cruelty was a deliberate tactic to discourage other migrants who were already suffering and desperate to flee violence and poverty in their home countries. None of the Trump’s, or their facilitators in the Republican Party, were bothered by any of that.

Now Eric, and Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro (who hosted Trump Saturday night), are all praising Trump’s assertion that he will go to the border “over the next couple of weeks.” Is that like his promise to produce a healthcare plan in two weeks for over four years (which never materialized)?

Why would Trump even bother to go? He has no power to do anything. He can’t keep whining about the wall he never built, while wasting billions of dollars that Mexico never paid. The only plausible reason is that he has a psychotic compulsion to always be the center of attention.

That’s the curse of the malignant narcissist who craves the adulation of his dimwitted, glassy-eyed disciples. Even at a time when all other former presidents would step back for the sake of the nation and allow the new administration to chart their course. But Trump has never cared about what’s best for the nation. He is, and always has been, only concerned about himself. And he just keeps on proving it.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

DUH! GOP Tweet Admits that ‘The Republican Party Isn’t Going Anywhere’

Posted by on March 27, 2021 at 4:21 pm. 6 Comments :

The Republican Party is unarguably mired in a historically deep trench of disinformation, division, and cultist devotion to a deranged former reality TV game show host. They are at each others throats, voting to censure those deemed to be insufficiently loyal to Dear Leader, Donald Trump, as he conspires to skim donations from the Party to his own coffers.

Donald Trump, Republican, GOP

In the midst of this intra-party uncivil war, the party honchos are struggling to hold things together despite their pitiful incompetence. Remember, this is the party that chose to keep the leaders who presided over losing the House, the Senate, and the presidency. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone when the Party’s official Twitter account unloads this pathetic cry for help:

The video in that tweet features a brief exchange from President Biden’s press conference that Fox news found so appalling and boring. the GOP was so shaken by that, they felt compelled to respond. It provided nothing particularly newsworthy, other than a snarky quip by Biden about the GOP’s tenuous status as a political entity:

Reporter: Do you believe you’ll be running against former president Trump [in 2024]?”
Biden: Oh come on. I don’t even think about … I have no idea. I have no idea there will be a Republican Party. Do you?”

The GOP’s official response to that was the inadvertently honest observation that “The Republican Party isn’t going anywhere.”

Well, DUH! It’s been painfully obvious to most of the sentient world for the last five years (many more to be precise) that the GOP is going nowhere. They have been hijacked by an intellectually vacant television celebrity who pretended to be a billionaire, but who’s only real asset was his skill at running con games. And their agenda utterly ignores the needs of the American people, focusing instead on more guns and less voting.

Now the GOP (Groveling Old Parasites) are bowing down to Trump and making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring. They are scared witless of angering him for fear that he might aim one his illiterate insults at them, or sic his cult followers on them during a GOP primary. It’s a display of cowardice unseen before in American politics.

Meanwhile, Biden’s throwaway line about the the GOP’s future has tied the party up in knots. But they utterly missed the more substantive remarks Biden made immediately afterward. And that’s the part that truly devastates the core raison d’etre of the Republican Party. He began by observing the hypocrisy of the GOP. “My Republican friends,” Biden noticed, “were worried about … the act that we just passed which puts money in people’s pockets.” He was referring to the popular American Rescue Plan that not a single Republican voted for. Biden continued…

“Did you hear them complain when they passed close to a $2 trillion Trump tax cut — 83 percent going to the top 1 percent? Did you hear them talk about that all? I love the fact that they’ve found this whole idea of concern about the federal budget. It’s kind of amazing.

“When the federal budget is saving people’s lives, they don’t think it’s such a good idea. When the federal budget is feathering the nest of the wealthiest Americans — 90 of the Fortune 500 companies making billions of dollars not paying a cent in taxes; reducing taxes to the point that people who are making — you know, if you’re a husband and wife, a schoolteacher and a cop, you’re paying at a higher rate than the average person making a billion dollars a year is — something is wrong. Their newfound concern.”

So the GOP ignored Biden’s eloquent criticism of the their elitist disregard for the welfare of the American people, and his attack on their flaming hypocrisy. But they latched onto his light-hearted recognition that the future is unknowable. Particularly for a party that has sold its soul to a carnival barking grifter. And that’s the sort of attention to detail that the GOP thinks will secure them victories in 2022 and 2024. Which is great news for the Democratic party.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Poor Peter Doocy Whines that Biden Didn’t Let Him Ask a Loaded Fox ‘News’ Question

Posted by on March 27, 2021 at 11:45 am. 2 Comments :

The fact that Fox News continues to wonder why they aren’t respected as a journalistic enterprise is actually further evidence of why they aren’t respected as a journalistic enterprise. A real news organization would recognize how far removed they are from credible journalism. But Fox seems to be either completely unaware of it, deliberately dishonest about it, or desperately in denial.

Fox News, Peter Doocy

On Friday Fox News demonstrated perfectly why no one takes them seriously as a news source. Following President Biden’s press conference on Thursday, which suffered Fox News’ predictable, knee-jerk criticism, the right-wing propaganda network focused intently on the most significant news produced by the event: Mean Mr. Biden didn’t call on Fox’s pouting Peter Doocy for another one of his petty inquisitions. But Doocy wasn’t having it. So he complained to the manager (press secretary Jen Psaki), who promptly ate his lunch:

Doocy: Any time that the President has an event where he’s given a list of reporters to call on, Fox is the only member of the five networks in the TV pool that has never been on the list in front of the President. And I’m just curious if that is an official administration policy.
Psaki: We’re here having a conversation, aren’t we? And do I take questions from you every time you come to the briefing room? Has the President taken questions from you since he came into office?

Psaki responded to Doocy like he was wayward child, which was entirely appropriate. Any other news organization would have been embarrassed by such a petulant display of hurt feelings. What’s worse is that Doocy wasted his time in the White House Briefing Room to register his self-serving complaints, rather than asking substantive questions that might actually address important issues. He could have saved his whining for a private conversation with Psaki. But he wasn’t through yet. He later made the same lament on air:

“The President would have a list, usually of about five people, and those are the ones that he would call on […] If he decides to just stick to the list, then we are left out.”

So this is the clearly the overarching issue in America today, at least on Fox News. It must be resolved before considering any discussion of the COVID pandemic, immigration, voting rights, or mass murders. And Doocy’s confederates at Fox agree. Media Matters reports that “Eleven different programs have combined to mention how Biden did not call on Fox White House correspondent Peter Doocy at least 24 times.” They included Jesse Watters calling Biden “chicken,” and Sean Hannity complaining that Doocy didn’t get to ask his “important” questions. Even Donald Trump brought it up in his “interview” with Laura Ingraham.

No one at Fox News bothered to mention that the New York Times didn’t get called on either. And they didn’t whine about it afterward. And Fox conveniently forgets that, if anyone was chicken it was Donald Trump. He never once gave CNN or MSNBC an interview in four years as president. And he’s already done four phone-ins with Fox News from his Mar-a-Lago bunker since leaving office.

The real question isn’t why Biden didn’t call on Fox News. It’s why would he ever do so? You’re only supposed to call on journalists during a press conference. In a world where journalistic integrity was honored, Doocy and his ilk wouldn’t even be allowed on the press room. And the fact that he and his Fox gripers are making such a big deal of this is only further proof that they don’t deserve to be treated as bona fide reporters.

Biden’s press team recently articulated certain principles that, if followed, would result in having to ban Fox News from White House briefings. Which would surely make them more informative. In the meantime, enjoy this video where the Daily Show “FOX-splains” Biden’s 37,268 scandals so far in his two months of being president:

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. And you can follow this surrogate Twitter account here. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Insanely Claims on Fox News that His Capitol Rioters Posed ‘Zero Threat’

Posted by on March 26, 2021 at 10:27 am. 15 Comments :

Immediately following Joe Biden’s first presidential press conference on Thursday, Fox News launched into their knee-jerk chorus of carping and condemnation. But that was just a prelude to how it was amplified in primetime by Fox’s professional haters and their triumvirate of yapping pundits.

Laura Ingraham, Fox News

Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity both sought to portray Biden as struggling cognitively, which they’ve been doing unsuccessfully for months. Polling consistently found that most Americans considered Trump as the candidate who was mentally unsound (including this poll by Fox News). However, Laura Ingraham topped her confederates by booking an actual example of mental infirmity with her guest, the former reality TV game show host, Donald Trump.

No one will be surprised to learn that Trump predictably lashed out at Biden’s performance at his press conference. Trump can’t comprehend how a leader can calmly answer questions without lying, insulting reporters, or bragging about imaginary achievements. Trump also complained that the press was throwing softballs, something he gets every time he’s “interviewed” by suck-ups like Ingraham on Fox News, and yet he still swings and misses.

Ingraham’s Trump-fluffing segment was a tedious replay of pretty much every other appearance Trump has made on Fox News (four so far since he was evicted from the White House). He whined about how badly he’s treated by the media. He paid tribute to himself and the miracles he thinks he accomplished. And he spun bizarrely distorted versions of events that bore no resemblance to reality. That was particularly true with respect to his twisted recollection of the Capitol riots that he incited in an attempt to unlawfully and violently overthrow the election. He engaged in the following exchange with Ingraham:

Ingraham: Are you concerned that the U.S. Capitol after January 6th, has become a fortress, protecting the Capitol from the people who are actually supposed to be the ones in charge here, not the people who are sitting in the Capitol surrounding themselves by razor wire?
Trump: I think it’s disgraceful. It looks for the world to watch -.absolutely, it’s a political maneuver that they’re doing. It was zero threat. Right from the start it was zero threat. Look, they went in. They shouldn’t have done it. Some of them went in and they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards. They had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in and they walked out and, I’ll tell you what, they’re doing things to those – they’re persecuting a lot of those people.

Ingraham’s brazenly biased framing of her question began with the falsehood that Washington “has become a fortress.” She apparently hasn’t been paying attention as the fencing that was installed due to the violence of the Trump Insurrectionists, has already come down. When she finally got around to her question it was slanted to portray the besieged members of Congress, their staffs, the police, and other victims, as the invaders, and the hostile Trump Insurrectionists as “the people who are actually supposed to be the ones in charge.”

Trump naturally thought it was all “disgraceful,” a word that he spits out with deranged frequency as an all-purpose snitty adjective. And we’ll just set aside the “hugging and kissing” asininity as too ludicrous for a response. But what’s truly disgraceful is that Trump thinks the Capitol rioters posed “zero threat” as they rampaged through the seat of America’s democracy.

To Trump it was just some folks on a pleasure stroll, smashing windows and breaking down doors and battering people with flag poles and fire extinguishers, and assaulting them with tasers and bear spray. In Trump’s account, “they went in,” seriously injured about 120 cops, killing at least one, along with four other fatalities. Then “they walked out” after vandalizing public property and stealing items from the offices of Congress. That included a laptop computer stolen from the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, that the thief sought to sell to the Russians. See? Zero threat. They’re being persecuted.

These are the people that Trump praised as patriots saying that they were waving the flag (when they weren’t using it as a weapon) and they love their country (that they were literally attacking). For her part, Ingraham called the rioters “law abiding Americans” on her Wednesday program. Clearly Trump and Ingraham are suffering from the same psychotic delusions. If their idea of “patriotism” includes murder, assault, theft, vandalism, and malevolent chaos, they are the threat, on a level way above zero.

UPDATE: In the same interview, Trump tried to peddle his Big Lie about election fraud again. But Ingraham cut him off. Ya think that had anything to do with the just announced $1.6 billion dollar lawsuit that Dominion filed against Fox News?

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Dominion Voting Systems Files $1.6 Billion Defamation Lawsuit Against Fox News

Posted by on March 26, 2021 at 8:59 am. 10 Comments :

The bill is coming due for Fox News for having recklessly, repeatedly, and maliciously spread flagrant falsehoods to support Donald Trump’s Big Lie over election fraud. Dominion Voting Systems has just announced that they are suing Fox for defamation to the tune of $1.6 billion.

Fox News Sad

The Associated Press is reporting that Dominion’s case argues that “the cable news giant falsely claimed in an effort to boost faltering ratings that the voting company had rigged the 2020 election.” The story goes on to note that…

“The lawsuit is part of a growing body of legal action filed by the voting company and other targets of misleading, false and bizarre claims spread by President Donald Trump and his allies in the aftermath of Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden. Those claims helped spur on rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a violent siege that left five people dead, including a police officer. The siege led to Trump’s historic second impeachment.”

This lawsuit against Fox News follows on to Dominion’s previously announced suits against Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell (who is adopting the Tucker Carlson Defense), as well as Mike Lindell, the infamous MyPillow Guy. And Fox News has also been sued by Smartmatic, a voting software services company that alleges similar defamation in Fox’s election reporting.

Fox News is going to have a hard time defending itself from these lawsuits. There is an abundance of evidence that supports the claims, and most of it consists of video from Fox News itself. Their program hosts and guests relentlessly made baseless charges against Dominion on the air. Media Matters has documented some of the more egregious episodes:

  • Dominion Was Used to Rig the Election for President Joe Biden and the Company Has Done This Before
  • Dominion Is of Venezuelan Origin, Created at the Request of Hugo Chavez to Alter Election Results in Furtherance of an International Conspiracy
  • Dominion’s Scheme Was Run by a Deputy of George Soros
  • Kickbacks Were Paid to State Officials — Including Those in Georgia – to Utilize Dominion Machines
  • Smartmatic Owns Dominion and Its Software Is Embedded in Dominion Machines
  • Dominion Machines Are Unreliable and Cannot Be Truly Audited

This video has a summary of some of just a few of the Fox News references to Dominion Voting Systems:

In addition to this lawsuit, Dominion’s lawyers say that they are continuing to explore legal options that could include naming Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and more. [NOTE: Dominion has added Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN) as defendants] The list of defendants could even extend to include Trump. Which would only be fair. There must be consequences for knowingly disseminating slanderous lies. And that is what Fox News does every day. This lawsuit should just be the first of many more to come.

UPDATE I: Trump tried to peddle his Big Lie about election fraud again on Laura Ingraham’s show Thursday night. But Ingraham cut him off. Ya think that had anything to do with this lawsuit?

UPDATE II: In April of 2023 Fox News settled this lawsuit for a whopping 3/4 of a billion dollars.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

SURPRISE! Fox News Dishonestly Slams Biden’s First Presidential Press Conference

Posted by on March 25, 2021 at 1:25 pm. 2 Comments :

For several weeks Fox News has been incessantly complaining that Joe Biden hasn’t held his first press conference as President. Never mind that for most of his two months as President Fox News has failed to air any of Biden’s speeches, or the White House’s daily press briefings, or any other of this administration’s media events, including the COVID-19 Response Team.

Fox News, Joe Biden, Fake News

On Thursday afternoon President Biden did hold a press conference (video below). And Fox News predictably covered it with open animosity and a strident negative bias. Immediately following the press conference Fox News got right to work complaining. The first commentary out the mouth of Fox’s John Roberts was that Biden had referred to notes a couple of times. That was so he could be certain he was giving accurate data on statistics.

So Fox News was, in effect, criticizing Biden for being too prepared. Donald Trump never had to worry about that since he was lying more often than not. When you’re making up answers accuracy isn’t much of a concern. One Fox shill whined that Biden scheduled his press conference for 1:15 pm ET, rather than prime time, which he said was standard. First of all, that isn’t true. Secondly, Trump’s first press conference was 20 minutes earlier. But most of all, fox News was hurt because Biden didn’t call on their in-house shill, Peter Doocy, for a loaded question:

Biden spoke for more than an hour, providing detailed responses to a broad array of questions. The topics ranged from the economy to the pandemic to foreign policy to voting rights to immigration to gun control to the filibuster, and more. But true to form, Fox News could only find fault, even where there was none.

For instance, Sean Hannity was lying in wait (with an emphasis on the “lying’) for one of the verbal gaffes that everyone knows Biden is prone to making. Hannity ignored all of the substantive answers Biden gave without ever once insulting the reporters, whining about fake news, bragging about phony achievements, or flinging flagrant falsehoods.

Hannity’s sole observation was that Biden misspoke about his preference for a filibuster rule that was in effect when he was a senator. Biden referred to his having “come to the United States Senate 120 years ago.” He was conflating the fact that the filibuster was implemented about 120 years ago with his point about prior Senate rules. This was an unremarkable flub for a life-long stutterer, and in context his meaning was clear.

Hannity, like most of his Fox News confederates, was only concerned with whatever distortion he could manufacture that aligned with his obsession to portray Biden as mentally unfit. One his colleagues, former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, set up the press conference hours earlier asserting that Biden was “prepared to just entirely ignore whatever is asked of him, and to pivot.” That turned out to be completely wrong. But it was exactly what one would expect from a professional liar like McEnany.

Sadly, Fox News viewers will likely only see the distortions they provide and never watch the entire hour of Biden’s fully coherent, detailed, and honest address. It’s a deliberate editorial policy to malign Biden and Democrats at every opportunity. And it’s why viewers of Fox News have been documented to be even less informed than people who watch no news at all.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.