During a segment of Happening Now on Fox News, anchor Jon Scott hosted conservative Jim Pinkerton and liberal Alan Colmes to debate the latest pet scandal at Fox. Having abandoned Benghazi after it failed to tarnish President Obama’s standing with the American people, Fox is now harping on the events at the Internal Revenue Service.
One thing that can be said for this pseudo-scandal is that it has united the ire of both sides of the controversy. Democrats and Republicans alike have repudiated those at the IRS who employed politically partisan criteria to determine which organizations applying for tax-exempt status would be subject to stricter scrutiny. But like all of the past scandals, no one has been able to tie this affair to the White House either. And that fact is driving the right batty (or battier than usual).
Right out of the gate, Scott primed the discussion by quoting ultra-right Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto saying…
“Never has the prevailing bias of the media been so closely aligned with the ideological aims and the political interests of the party in power.”
Is that so? Apparently Taranto was in a vegetative state during the Bush administration when the media, and particularly Fox News, was sucking Bush’s Dick Cheney-led propaganda straight from the bottle. Fox was an unabashed cheerleader for the war in Iraq. And they were not alone. Even MSNBC fired Phil Donahue when he was their top rated host due to his skepticism about the rush to war mongering. And does anyone remember the press criticizing Bush for cutting the taxes of millionaires and transitioning the Clinton budget surplus into a deficit?
The truth is that Fox is the first and only major media enterprise that was built from scratch to proselytize on behalf of a political Party. Fox’s devotion to the people and policies of the right extend far beyond merely parroting their agenda (which they do non-stop), but Fox actually employs Republican operatives and candidates in an effort to advance their prospects. And of course, Fox’s CEO, Roger Ailes, was himself a Republican operative before he took the reins of international corporatist Rupert Murdoch’s cable news network.
Adding to the epic irony of this cognition failure is that the anchor, Jon Scott, is hardly one to raise the issue of media alignment with party politics. Scott was caught red-handed reading GOP talking points on the air as if they were his own news reporting. He even included a graphic that contained the same typos that were in the original Republican memo. And now he has the gall to cast aspersions of bias on what he describes as the liberal media, but without offering a single example.
The remainder of the debate was a mashup of inane accusations that liberals were not condemning the IRS misbehavior. Colmes had to repeatedly prove that they were, eventually offering to write it in blood after Scott and Pinkerton seemed oblivious to the facts Colmes presented numerous times. And when all else failed they raised the specter of George Soros who had nothing to do with any of this. Wingnuts just go through withdrawal if they don’t say his name every two minutes.
Here’s the video for your amusement:
And for a little added fun, check out these screen grabs from the segment where Fox featured Tea Party protesters with signs saying “America is a Christian nation,” and “911 was an inside job.” Way to push the doctrine, Fox.
This weekend the Fox News farce “News Watch” featured its customary panel of four slobbering ultra-rightists and one alleged Democrat. This week’s lefty lamb was Kirsten Powers, who did her job of pretending to be a liberal while denigrating everything liberals stand for.
In a segment about an NPR story on wasteful spending for disability programs, the discussion suddenly veered off course to attack Media Matters with the program’s host, Jon Scott, calling it “that liberal media watchdog group funded by George Soros.” Scott complained that Media Matters had “a problem” with NPR’s report because “it has become fodder for the right wing.”
Right off the bat it should be noted that Jon Scott, whom Fox inexplicably installed as host of a media analysis show, is the Republican Party’s man at Fox News. He was caught red-handed (by Media Matters) reading “news” copy that had been cribbed, word for word, from an RNC press release.
Scott also suffers from a malady that has infected most of Fox News that could be called “Soros Tourettes Syndrome.” Its primary symptom is the uncontrollable shouting out of the name George Soros whenever some organization is mentioned that he might have made a donation to in the past five decades. Given that he is a well known billionaire philanthropist, that’s a pretty long list. In this case. Soros did make a donation to Media Matters exactly one time two years ago, which hardly puts the organization in his pocket. What Scott failed to report was that NPR, whom Scott is alleging was attacked by the Soros-funded Media Matters, also received a hefty donation from Soros. In fact, it was nearly twice what he gave to Media Matters. So Scott seems to think that Soros is attacking one of his front groups with another.
Which brings us to fake Democrat Kirsten Powers. When asked about the NPR affair, she detoured to make this baseless observation: “I just want to say first of all, Media Matters is not a legitimate organization. And they do not exist to be a media watchdog group.” She provided no support whatsoever for her allegation, however, it was enough to attract the adoring gaze of Breitbart’s John Nolte. He posted a short item fawning over Powers for her “honesty” and gushed “I disagree with Powers on almost everything, but she’s good people.”
The assertion that BreitBrat John had substantive disagreements with Powers struck me as peculiar given her overt conservative leanings. So I looked up some previous references to her on the Breitbart web site for evidence of how starkly their opinions differed. This is what I found:
Liberal Kirsten Powers Fights Back Against Obama’s War on Fox News
Kirsten Powers: Obama Nominating Rice As Secretary Of State ‘Would Be His Undoing’
Kirsten Powers: Obama’s ‘You Didn’t Build That” Comments Offended Me Too
Kirsten Powers: What Did Obama Know and When Did He Know It?
Kirsten Powers: ‘Obviously, There’s A Bias Behind’ Cable News Not Covering Catholic Lawsuit Against Obama
Liberal Pundit Powers: Obama Removing Work Requirement From Welfare Huge Issue For Romney
Liberal Columnist: Double Standard In Media’s Attack On Rush
These were just the articles that referenced Powers in the headlines. There were many more plaudits for her on the site within various articles. So all of this admiration and accord raises an obvious question. When Nolte says that he disagrees with Powers on “almost everything,” what the hell is he talking about?
Powers is plainly another right-wing plant in the Fox News garden. She consistently rips the President and other Democrats and rarely offers enthusiastic praise or defense for progressive policy or people. She is only on Fox representing the left because Fox couldn’t get Ann Coulter to do it believably. But Powers is in the same conservative bag as Coulter, even going so far as to outrageously accuse Obama of sympathizing with terrorists. No wonder BreitBrat John is so infatuated.
Fox News has long been a source of blatant dishonesty and partisan propaganda. Most conscious observers are aware that much of what is broadcast on Fox is tainted and unreliable. That accounts for why so many independent surveys show that Fox News viewers are significantly less informed and/or misinformed, than consumers of other news media. Some studies even show that Fox News viewers know less about news events than people who watch no news at all.
But now Fox News has taken a step over the edge into pure Wackoland by linking to a known conspiracy theorist on their Fox Nation web site.
The article on Fox Nation, headlined “Soros Promotes UN Control Over Gun Ownership,” links directly to the Infowars web site run by Alex Jones. Jones is a noted proponent of some wildly off-kilter (and debunked) notions including FEMA-run concentration camps and 9/11 Trutherism. His imagination is boundless and he has provided the raw material for other looney fabulists like Glenn Beck. In fact, Jones accuses Beck of ripping off most of his material, such as the delusional fear mongering of a global caliphate engineered by a cabal of radical Muslims and western socialist atheists.
It’s not surprising to see the Fox Nationalists glom onto this nonsense because this single fable hits on three of the conservative community’s favorite phobias: George Soros; the United Nations; and federal agents coming for their guns. And in every case there is not even a sliver of reality to their nightmarish ravings.
First of all, the core issue centers on a United Nations initiative to address the proliferation of international “illegal” arms trading. There is nothing in the proposal that would infringe on the rights of any nation to set their own standards for gun ownership. The actual resolution explicitly states that countries will “exclusively” maintain the right within their borders to, “regulate internal transfers of arms and national ownership, including through national constitutional protections on private ownerships.“
Secondly, George Soros has nothing whatsoever to do with the UN’s activities in this matter. The only association that Jones/Fox News can assert is that the media watchdog group Media Matters has written about the NRA’s obsession with this issue and Fox’s frequent promotion of that viewpoint. Jones writes that…
“George Soros is financing the fight to give the United Nations control of your guns.
“Through his Media Matters organization, Soros is dumping pro-UN gun control propaganda into the mainstream media to coincide with the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty”
Soros has contributed to Media Matters and therefore, according to the conspiracy theorists, Soros is exerting his omnipotent control over every charitable organization to which he has donated. Since Soros has given away billions of dollars to hundreds of organizations, he must be busier than God as he enforces his will on a defenseless world. Never mind that there has been no “dumping” of “pro-UN gun control propaganda.” All that Media Matters has done is to respond to the pro-NRA propaganda that Fox News has been disseminating.
Finally, if there is any conspiracy to be unveiled, it is the one engineered by Fox News to advance the agenda of the NRA. The NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, is a fixture on the Fox network, and his commentaries are never challenged by guests with opposing views, and certainly not by Fox hosts. Fox permits LaPierre to express his irrational belief that Obama is determined to confiscate all of the guns in America. His proof of that is that Obama is trying to lure us all into a sense of false security by doing nothing to inhibit gun ownership. It’s a demented logic that argues that the more Obama refrains from any gun control, the more his gun control aspirations are revealed.
That’s the sort of absurdity that makes for the most entertaining, albeit dangerous, conspiracy theorism. And it’s the sort of thing that has made Alex Jones a leading figure amongst conspiracy theorists. The fact that Fox has now joined up with Jones says a lot about the direction that Fox is heading during this election year. Apparently the lunacy and lies generated by the Fox News regulars is not sufficient for the current situation, so they have called in reinforcements from the masters of mayhem at Jones & Company. Just when you thought that the credibility of Fox News couldn’t get any lower.
Yesterday was the day that the video Andrew Breitbart promised of a racially divisive Barack Obama in his days as a student at Harvard was released. It was almost universally panned as a pathetic and desperate boatload of nothing. After first yammering that the video posted by Buzzfeed (scooping Breitbart) was “selectively edited,” the Breitbartians posted what they said was the “uncut” video. Their version contained about two seconds more that consisted entirely of Obama hugging Prof. Derrick Bell, whom he had just introduced at a rally.
Since the video itself was proven to have no material evidence of anything the least bit detrimental to Obama, much less the cataclysmic data that would doom his career, the Breitbartians resorted to Plan B: Demonize Prof. Bell and tie him around Obama’s neck. This was a coordinated plot that began with Breitbart editor-in-chief Joel Pollak robotically repeating the mantra that “Derrick Bell was the Jeremiah Wright of academia.” Pollak even went on CNN and admitted that the video was irrelevant, and when Soledad O’Brein asked him “Then where’s the bombshell, I don’t see it?” Pollak responded that “The bombshell is the revelation of the relationship between Barack Obama and Derrick Bell.” But that wasn’t any revelation at all.
The argument that the Breitbartians are making rests on their assertion that Bell’s writings on Critical Race Theory define him as a racial radical. In fact, CRT is an aggregation of legal concepts that bring together law, politics, economics, etc., in a broad-based study of race and power in society. It posits that there are institutional barriers to eradicating racism that must be addressed at the root level. Those barriers are evident in things like employment practices and school admissions. Another example is the judicial system that incarcerates a higher percentage of African-Americans than their representation in the population. Affirming that example is the fact that crack cocaine, used by more African-Americans than whites, is punishable by sentences ten times more severe than powder cocaine, for which you find more white offenders.
Nevertheless, the Breitbartians are deliberately misinterpreting the legal theory in order to condemn its proponents, including Bell. In this way they can assert that Obama, as a result of his having studied at Harvard, is also a racial radical. The object is to incite fear among those who are ill-informed that Obama aspires to threaten their status in society. He is coming after your jobs, your schools, your churches, all the trappings of your comfortable, privileged lives.
In the wake of the initial flop of the video’s release, the right-wing media has been redoubling its efforts to stir up a phony controversy. Fox Nation has posted multiple stories on the subject (it has been at the top of their page for two days running). Fox News has featured it on their broadcasts, notably the video “exclusive” presented by Sean Hannity. Ironically, Fox Nation posted a video of a debate about Bell between Michelle Malkin and Juan Williams, but edited out Williams entirely.
Note the edit at about 2:20 where Hannity says that Juan’s gonna disagree, but then fades to Malkin saying “No, no. no.”. What Williams said in between was…
“Well, first of all, I must say, I thought this was going to be so much more. I thought this was going to be the smoking gun, as you describe it. But it really didn’t come too much. I mean, I just don’t think that there is.”
And that’s all that Williams was permitted to say in the entire segment, but they even cut that out when they put it online. And then they have the nerve to complain, falsely, that others “selectively edited” video.
Pollak and his Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro have been making the rounds on the lamestream media. On CNN they argued with Soledad O’Brien over the meaning of Critical Race Theory, but spoke very little about what any of it had to do with Obama, despite O’Brien’s attempts to steer them back to the topic. That’s a tactic designed to keep the focus off of substance and aimed squarely at innuendo and slander. For good measure they threw in a bashing of the media for trying to suppress the video (for what reason, they never make clear), and to silence them (even while they are speaking on the air).
For its part, the Breitbart web site has been piling on with articles that reek of racism. One article was authored by J. Christian Adams, a notorious race-baiter who has accused Eric Holder’s Justice Department of coddling civil rights violators if they happened to be black. He wrote that…
“Both Obama and Bell demanded that Harvard hire professors on the basis of race. […] The Obama-Bell connection is the latest in a pattern of Barack Obama’s associations with individuals who promoted a racially divisive America.”
That’s an open assault on affirmative action, which was not developed to produce hiring on the basis of race, but to put an end to it. Adams also repeated the lie that Obama had appeared with a member of the New Black Panther Party. In fact, Obama attended a civil rights rally that was attended by thousands of people, one of whom happened to be an NBPP member. Obama had no control over who came to a massive, public rally. Adams also characterized cases of civil rights abuse as “crackpot racial grievances.” That pretty much reveals his personal bias.
Another story posted by the Breitbartians alleged that “Obama Forced His Students To Read Bell at the University of Chicago Law School.” Their evidence was a document describing a course that Obama was teaching. The course was “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” It would be difficult to teach such a class without the textbook materials by one of this generations most respected scholars on that subject. But the allegation is made even worse by that use of the word “forced” as if it were under duress. By that measure isn’t every student forced to read something? In fact, many of the references to Bell’s writings specifically said that they were optional reading.
Meanwhile, over at NewsBusters, there was an article that alleged that the non-event video was being suppressed as part of a conspiracy orchestrated by George Soros (Isn’t it always?). The evidence of that was that Soros’ foundations had made donations to Harvard (where the video took place) and WGBH (the public TV station that owned the video). Using their logic I can surmise that the Koch brothers are behind this whole phony video scandal because they have made contributions to NewsBusters.
And, believe it or not, they even have a Plan C: It’s a Cover Up! The video was a bust. The racial attacks could backfire. So if all else fails, blame it on a massive cover up. The Breitbartians took on another black Harvard professor, Charles Ogletree, by posting a video wherein he said that “We hid this during the 2008 campaign…” He was referring to the video of Obama at Harvard. Of course there would have been no reason to do that since, if anything, the video shows Obama in a positive light. The truth is that Ogletree was joking. He even laughed immediately after, which proves that he was humorously dismissing the throw-away line. but, not surprisingly, the humor-challenged righties didn’t get, even though Ogletree’s audience did.
The absence of any substance on the video has led to a redirection by the right to their usual stance against Obama – he’s black. His associates are black. And they advocate for radical concepts like equal justice under the law. They support fairness in hiring and other social contracts. They oppose discrimination.
If anyone is advancing a racialist philosophy, it’s the right-wingers who are peddling this repulsive nonsense. And if there is anything positive to take away from this, it is that they have once again shown their true colors. It isn’t about a video of a young future president. It isn’t about health care or oil prices or deficits. It is, and always has been, about one thing for these meatheads. They just can’t accept a black man in their White House.
Ordinarily Fox News is the strongest advocate on behalf of the Greedy One Percent (GOP). They fiercely defend the the privileged class that they have endearingly tagged “job creators” (although that is far from true). They relentlessly oppose efforts to reform the tax code into something more equitable. And even though billionaires like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates agree that people like themselves are not paying a fair share, Fox News shouts nonsense about a class war that they invented.
But nothing comes as close to psychotic derangement as the right’s obsessive hatred of George Soros (except maybe Saul Alinsky and President Obama). In today’s FoxNews.com opinion section is an editorial titled: George Soros — the rich man who is hated around the world. What’s really interesting about this column is that the author, Dan Gainor of the uber-conservative Media Research Center, is actually correct.
Gainor has done his research and discovered that there are many nations in the world where Soros has cultivated a profound dislike. Gainor even provides a list of some of them. They include: Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union. The thing that most of these places have in common is that they all suffered under oppressive regimes prior to Soros coming to the aid of the people.
So what we have here is Fox News complaining bitterly that the dictators and communists who were deposed by the freedom-loving citizens of their countries, with help from Soros, do not now regard Soros affectionately. Fox is literally taking the side of the former tyrants who, not surprisingly, are somewhat upset with Soros. By extension we must assume that Gainor would prefer that Soros had minded his own business and let the tyrants continue their rule and their reign of terror.
This is the same sort of deranged thinking that resulted in Fox finding fault with the Seal Team assault on Osama Bin Laden. If Obama had anything to do with it, it must be bad – no matter how good it is. And the same goes for George Soros. So even though Soros helped to defeat the bad guys, the only thing Fox notices is that now all the bad guys hate him, and somehow that make Soros a bad guy.
This twisted criticism, however, is not the only point that Gainor sought to make with his article. He is also emphatically opposed to Soros’ philanthropic activities. Gainor complains that Soros has committed $8 billion to his Open Society Foundation that aids a diverse variety of international charitable organizations. But Gainor sees no irony in the fact that he is the Boone Pickens Fellow at the Media Research Center. That means that his position was endowed by another billionaire who bankrolls international charitable causes. What’s more, the Media Research Center is the beneficiary of millions of dollars from the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers, and the Scaife family foundations – all wealthy philanthropists with designs on influencing the direction of certain nations, particularly the United States. And we can add Rupert Murdoch to that group as his news enterprises are among the biggest customers of the Media Research Center.
Dan Gainor is a profoundly inept critic. He once condemned an imagined conspiracy by Soros and, in the process, implicated himself. He further embarrassed himself recently by declaring that Arianna Huffington is “the most powerful propagandist since a guy named Goebbels.” Then he penned a column upbraiding Rachel Maddow for a mistake made during her program, apparently unfamiliar with the cornucopia of on-air gaffes that Fox News seems to add to daily.
Fox News has made preaching the divinity of capitalism a staple of its programming. And they love nothing more than a wealthy individual who they can promote as proof of their Randian orthodoxy. But whatever you do, do not become a liberal billionaire. Fox has an entirely different standard for those practitioners Satanism. In fact, Fox hates them. What is it that Fox hates about rich people that actually care about people who are not rich?
The Tea Party contingent of the right-wing Republican set has long regarded George Soros as the mastermind of every evil they imagine has been perpetrated in America for the last half century. It is full-on fixation that connects Soros to everything from the Holocaust to Global Warming. And, like most psychotic fixations, it has no basis in reality.
Consequently, what could be a more damning allegation against a Republican than that they are allied with Soros? It’s the knockout punch. It’s the death blow. It’s the Newtron bomb. And it’s what Mitt Romney is staring down this morning. In an interview in Davos, Switzerland, Soros finished Romney off with these words:
“Well, look, either you’ll have an extremist conservative, be it Gingrich or Santorum, in which case I think it will make a big difference which of the two comes in. If it’s between Obama and Romney, there isn’t all that much difference except for the crowd that they bring with them.”
That settles it. Romney is toast. How could he possibly survive such a wound?
But there must be more to this than what is observable on the surface. After all, if Soros is the evil genius the right believes him to be, then to what end would he make such a comment? He certainly knows how his opinions are magnified through his web of media minions. There can be only one possible answer. Soros is deliberately sabotaging Romney. He wants Gingrich to be the GOP nominee because he knows that Gingrich will not only lose the race for president, but he will also likely cause the loss of the GOP control of the House and much of their power in the states.
It’s a devious plot that has already taken in Gingrich, who quickly jumped on the story and is excitedly pushing this quote to the press. It will probably become a part of his stump speech, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it featured in his next TV ad. It’s just too juicy a plum to leave dangling.
The Soros Fixation is so toxic that it causes hallucinations in those infected. For instance, conservatives are convinced that Soros commands a media empire that blankets the planet despite the fact that he has zero interest in any prominent media enterprise. He may have donated large sums of money to Media Matters and NPR, but he has no editorial authority over them, and they are not exactly the equivalent of Time Warner or NBC News. That is starkly distinct from the influence of a mogul like Rupert Murdoch who is directly in charge of a worldwide criminal … I mean media conglomerate.
The depths of the Soros fixation are nearly immeasurable. Cliff Kincaid, the director of the right-wing Accuracy in Media actually argues that Soros is pursuing an acquisition of Fox News and that he is “getting his way.” Kincaid believes that it was Soros who pressured Fox to dump Glenn Beck, and he is now trying to launch an effort to force the network to rehire Beck. Says Kincaid…
“It’s time for Glenn Beck, now on Internet TV, to return to the cable channel so that he can continue his investigative journalism into the rapidly expanding influence of the Soros network of organizations.” […He continues…] “Fox is moving to the left and filling its ranks with the kind of shallow commentators we have come to associate with the little-watched cable channel MSNBC.”
That quixotic fantasy reveals just how severely the fixation has damaged some sufferers. When someone can seriously portray Beck as an “investigative journalist” and Fox as “moving to the left,” you know it’s time to increase the dosage. And the notion that any of the brass at Fox want Beck back is belied by the fact that, in their separation announcement, they said there would be specials and documentaries from Beck, but none have materialized.
The question is: Will the right be fooled by this attempt by Soros to deep-six Romney and, subsequently, Republican hopes for retaking the White House? And the answer is: Of course they will! Once the name Soros has entered their psyche they lose what little cognitive ability they had. For Romney to recover from the devastating impact of this blow will take superhuman strength (which Romney lacks) or buckets of cash (which Romney bathes in).
Either way it affirms the mental and strategic superiority of George Soros who is capable of upending his enemies anytime he wants. Other political players could learn from this example. Nancy Pelosi, for instance, could doom the career of any Republican she chooses by simply endorsing them. And if President Obama were to come out against raising taxes for the rich, there would be a GOP drafted bill to do just that on his desk by the next morning.
You gotta love this. When Michele Bachmann was introduced on last night’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, the show’s house band, played a particularly appropriate number as she walked out onto the stage:
Yep, that was “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” by the incomparable Fishbone. This was an inspired selection by The Roots that went undetected by Bachmann. However, Glenn Beck took note and was overwhelmed with apoplexy. He called Fallon a “despicable human being,” and insisted that Fallon fire the band, saying…
“Fire them! You won’t. You know why? Because you’re a girl.”
Way to go, Glenn. The best insult you can come up with is one that shows contempt for all women? And this is what you use for your defense of a woman running for president. Would Bachmann also be incapable of terminating an employee? What would your pal Sarah Palin say?
Beck claimed that he never would have done such a vile thing. He said that he wouldn’t even do that to Michelle Obama or George Soros. But Beck’s phony indignation is repudiated by the fact that he has been far more repulsive in his attacks. He routinely insults Michelle Obama’s appearance and refers to her as a dictator just because she advocates healthy diets for children. And speaking of children, Beck has called the Obama kids stupid. And after apologizing for that he called John McCain’s daughter, Meghan, fat.
As for George Soros, Beck produced a three day series on his Fox News show dedicated solely to Soros whom Beck labeled the “Puppet Master,” an old Nazi slur for Jews. Beck also falsely accused Soros, a Holocaust survivor, of sending fellow Jews to the gas chambers. Soros was nine years old at the time.
And then there’s Beck’s comments on President Obama. Beck has called the President a liar, an idiot, a racist, and a traitor. While the Fallon show, a comedy program, merely played a few bars of a song with a provocative title without ever mentioning the title or the lyrics, Beck has used explicit language to express his repulsive thoughts and he did so on a so-called “news” network.
Does Beck really think that his direct and repeated insults are less abhorrent than a suggestive musical introduction for Bachmann? It should also be noted that this morning Beck made an announcement on his radio program that, although he does not endorse candidates, he would vote for Bachmann, and then he spent several minutes explaining why she is now his choice for president.
This disgusting little hypocrite continues to prove that he has no moral center whatsoever. He behaves like an emotionally stunted delinquent who mocks people he despises but shrinks back into a defensive crouch if anyone should mock him or his idols. I can’t wait for him to appear on Fallon’s show. The band wouldn’t even have to learn a new song. Beck is at least as much a lyin’ ass bitch as Bachmann.
Yes, Fox News lies on a daily basis. Yes, Fox News is utterly unethical. Yes, Fox News flagrantly promotes Republican dogma. But today they demonstrated how utterly shameless they are and how little regard they have for journalism. Take a look at this headline they posted:
“Reuters Under Fire For Confusing Report Alleging Soros Connection to ‘Occupy Wall Street’
On the surface this seems like a respectable effort to hold Reuters accountable for sloppy reporting. In fact, Reuters did publish a story that implied a connection between the Occupy Movement and George Soros. The substance of the article did not support that implication and Reuters received some criticism for the article. Later the same day Reuters removed the story and replaced it with one that made it clear that there was no such connection. The lede of the new article stated that…
“George Soros isn’t a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics including radio host Rush Limbaugh that the billionaire investor has helped fuel the anti-capitalist movement.”
Reuters is still deserving of some criticism for replacing the flawed story rather than correcting it and acknowledging the error. That’s generally how reputable news organizations handle mistakes. But what Fox did is simply mind boggling.
When the original Reuters story ran yesterday, the headline was “Who’s behind the Wall Street protests?” But Fox Nation ran the item with a differnt headline that they composed themselves: “Is Soros Behind ‘Occupy Wall Street?'”
I reported this mangling of the truth yesterday pointing out how Fox went out of their way to distort a weakly sourced article by Reuters. But it isn’t enough for Fox to merely twist a set of non-facts in order to “cast doubt on the authenticity of the movement.” Now that Reuters has been shamed into revising their article, Fox is stepping forward to chastise Reuters while letting themselves off the hook.
What we have here is Fox calling out Reuters for publishing an inaccurate article that they themselves republished after making the error even worse. So if Reuters is under fire for a “confusing report,” Fox should be a blazing inferno for their deliberate deceit. Yet the Fox Nationalists fail to acknowledge their own malfeasance as they wag their finger at Reuters. What a pathetic bunch of disreputable losers.
With the ongoing success of the Occupy Movement, Fox News is exhibiting their desperation and fear. They know that the American people are waking up and recognizing the dishonesty and corruption of the conservative media, big corporations, and kept politicians. That’s why they are resorting to tactics like this nonsense aimed at George Soros:
The Fox Nationalists featured this article with the headline, “Is Soros Behind ‘Occupy Wall Street?'” It’s a question they never get around to answering. That’s because they aren’t really interested in the answer, they only want to plant the suggestion. The Reuters article they link to doesn’t provide any further evidence of a Soros connection to the Wall Street protests. However, it does contain a direct denial of any affiliation. So the Fox Nation inquiry is simply a thinly veiled lie.
This transparent attempt to falsely link their favorite liberal billionaire to a grassroots movement on behalf of poor and middle class citizens is notable in that Fox has never bothered to reveal the actual moneyed interests who bankroll the Tea Party. The Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity, and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks have spent millions on shiny, custom painted buses they send around to the country to AstroTurf rallies featuring conservative celebrities like Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity. If Soros were indeed financing the occupation of Wall Street, what was he spending his money on? Cardboard and Marks-A-Lots?
Soros is one of a growing number Patriotic Millionaires who have the integrity to want to see the country recover economically, and to be a part of that recovery. He is proof that the Occupy Movement is not against success, it is just against corruption, greed, and unfair practices.
After fabricating nightmarish tales of a Hungarian Puppet Master who controls the media and the banks and topples nations in his pursuit of tyrannical power, Fox News is now advancing the assertion that George Soros is trying to buy America’s courts.
You’ve got to hand it to Fox – they have managed to assemble almost every anti-Semitic slur against Jews into the persona of a single man. Soros, by their estimation, fulfills the racist stereotypes of Jewish dominance of money and media, and now they add legal shysters to the mix. And note that this is actually Fox News, not the rabidly partisan Fox Nation, who is propagating this vile perversion of journalism.
The substance of the controversy involves reported donations to legal reform groups who advocate “merit selection” of judges rather than elections. Many states already use merit selection which, proponents say, takes politics out of the judicial system so that judges don’t have to raise funds or mount campaigns to retain their seats. Elections open up the judiciary to judges pandering to contributors or partisan voter groups rather than staying focused on the neutral application of the law.
The Fox article is based on a report that even Fox’s research debunks. The study by Colleen Pero asserts that Soros has spent $45,000,000 on this issue. A merit selection advocate says the amount is closer to $2,000,000. And Fox itself reported that they could only find $5,000,000, or about 11% of Pero’s figure.
But Pero’s analysis misses the mark on an even more fundamental basis by asserting that if judges are picked by committee it will give left-wing judges the upper hand. How so? The committees already in place are composed mostly of lawyers and former judges chosen by state representatives and governors. That means there is just as much opportunity for the judiciary to be stacked by conservatives as liberals. Ideally the selection committee would be constructed in a way that prohibits partisan influence.
Since the truth is that merit selection would give conservatives just as much potential influence over the process as liberals, why are they so adamantly opposed to the notion? Simple. They prefer a process that allows them to funnel their abundant funds from rightist activists like the Koch brothers into campaigns so that they are the ones who are buying the judges. If Soros actually did want to stack the courts he would line up with right and support judicial elections where he could throw money at liberal candidates. But Soros is advocating a position that would actually give him less influence.
These facts, however, don’t interrupt the relentless Fox News machine’s unsupportable allegations and twisting of the debate to falsely portray Soros as the one manipulating the process. And Fox deftly maneuvers their political advocacy in a manner that insults Jews along with the intelligence of their viewers.
