When Will Fox News Fire Bill O’Reilly For Lying About Combat Duty?

Posted by on February 7, 2015 at 1:34 pm. 19 Comments :

Conservatives have tenaciously sunk their fangs into the juicy scandal that is engulfing NBC News anchor Brian Williams. The fact that he has admitted (and apologized for) some false statements he made several years ago regarding his experiences covering the war in Iraq is troubling and particularly so for people who make their living on their reputation for honesty.

However, the degree to which the right has gone overboard with their overt hostility is a spectacle that is worth watching for the sheer entertainment value. Although it’s not as if they wouldn’t be showering their hatred on Williams and the rest of the so-called “lamestream” media even if their weren’t some budding scandal. For its part, Fox News has been exhibiting a Benghazi-like obsession with their relentless coverage of the story.

What’s missing from all of this is any sense of perspective or context. Has Fox given equal time to the false assertions by their own Geraldo Rivera who excused his lies as being the fault of the “fog of war?” Of course not. Neither do they make a distinction between the lies advanced by mis-remembering a distant event in the past in order to enhance one’s own personal image, and the lies perpetrated deliberately by national leaders (i.e. George Bush, Dick Cheney, etc.) that resulted in the violent deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combatant Iraqis.

Brian Williams, George Bush

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Nearly every discussion about Williams in the Conservative Media Circus includes outright demands for his termination. Never mind that the false statements made over a decade ago were not made during a newscast or presented as part of his duties as a journalist. The wingnut brigade wants Williams fired for having said some things on David Letterman’s late-night comedy program.

Well, if that’s the standard they are embracing, then let them apply it to Bill O’Reilly as well. Back in 2006, O’Reilly took an extended book promotion tour to Kuwait where he visited with soldiers and signed copies of his book. Reports at the time described how “servicemembers asked O’Reilly about his own tour of duty in Kuwait during Desert Storm.” That might have been an interesting story except for the fact that O’Reilly never did a tour of duty in Kuwait during Desert Storm, or anywhere else since he never served in the military at all.

More recently, O’Reilly told his radio listeners about how he would have coaxed information out of an enemy soldier based on his personal experiences in combat (video below):

“I tell you what, I’ve been in combat. I’ve seen it. I’ve been close to it. And if my unit is in danger and I got a captured guy and the guy knows where the enemy is and I’m looking him in the eye, the guy better tell me. That’s all I’m gonna tell you. If it’s life or death, he’s going first.”

As noted above, and contrary to his statement, O’Reilly has never been in combat. Consequently, he has never commanded a unit or had to contemplate how he would deal with an enemy prisoner. His pretend bluster and machismo is all just a bunch of fantasizing of himself as a hero. So how is that any different than the offenses for which Williams is being pilloried?

There are, however, some very real differences between Williams and O’Reilly. Williams has been found to be less than truthful on this one occasion. O’Reilly has lied repeatedly over his career at Fox News with plenty of documentation to prove it. What’s more O’Reilly has demonstrated himself to be an arrogant, rude, bully who shoves his usually inane opinion down the throats of his guests and his viewers. That’s something that cannot be attributed to Williams.

So if anyone should lose their job over any of this, it would be most advantageous to the television viewing audience, and to society in general, if it is O’Reilly. But don’t count of Fox News to do the right thing. It would be against everything they hold dear.

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h/t Meteor Blades at Daily Kos for the video.

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RepubliCare: The GOP Alternative To ObamaCare Is A Corporatist Sham

Posted by on February 6, 2015 at 12:48 pm. 16 Comments :

Republicans in Congress just held their 56th vote to repeal or cripple the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). It is a pointless waste of time and taxpayer dollars that will never become law, but the wingnut obsession with this boondoggle never seems to let up.

Throughout the debate over ObamaCare, conservatives have tried to pretend that they are concerned about the welfare of the American people and that they intend to replace ObamaCare with their own version of reform. But more than four years have elapsed since ObamaCare was rolled out and there has not been a single bill introduced as an alternative.

ObamaCare Ruling

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Now the Republicans with a newly fortified majority in Congress are promoting a plan that they say can replace ObamaCare. There are, however, two major problems with their initiative. 1) It isn’t actually a draft of legislation at all and will not be voted on. And 2) it illustrates their bias toward corporations and their animosity to the American people they profess to support. Here is a summary of their “plan:”

The GOP’s Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility and Empowerment – or CARE – Act

  • Calls for the outright repeal of President Obama’s signature health care law, and with that, the individual mandate to buy insurance or pay a fine.
  • Provides for targeted tax credits to individuals and families up to 300 percent above the poverty line to encourage people to buy plans in the market place.
  • Allows insurers to sell plans across state lines.
  • Caps the amount of monetary damages that can be awarded in medical malpractice litigation.
  • Calls for a specific ‘continuous coverage’ protection where individuals moving from one plan to another cannot be denied.

What this amounts to is just another ObamaCare repeal bill decorated with gifts to the insurance industry. There is no realistic way to make insurance coverage affordable without broadening the customer base via mandates. The GOP plan would shrink the base and result in premiums that would be out of reach for most people due to the dominance of high-risk patients in the system. The provision to cap damages in lawsuits has been on the corporate wish list for decades and does nothing to help patients. To the contrary, it would result in people who suffered actual harm not being compensated fairly.

Most disturbing is the hoax that the GOP is proposing as their version of a coverage guarantee to people with preexisting conditions. In the RepubliCare model you would already have to have insurance and then you could not be denied a continuance. Of course they never explain how you got the insurance to begin with. And if you were attempting to get insured for the first time, the companies could reject you without consequence. In other words, it is no protection at all.

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The GOP likes to complain that ObamaCare is a government-run healthcare program, despite the fact that the government has no role whatsoever in providing healthcare. It merely sets standards for insurance companies to make certain that everyone has access to coverage that is effective and affordable. Meanwhile Republicans claim to favor a more “patient-centered” approach, but then offer this fraud that was very likely written by insurance company lobbyists.

If these Republicans are successful, millions of Americans will lose their current insurance and suffer both medically and financially as a result. In its place will be a windfall for corporations that expands their profits at the expense of the American people, particularly those who are already sick. Nice work, RepubliCare.


Obama Condemns All Acts Of Barbarism Due To Perversion Of Faith – Fox News Freaks Out

Posted by on February 6, 2015 at 8:30 am. 14 Comments :

In a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama acknowledged the “sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith,” and broadly condemned the use of religion to justify barbaric acts of terrorism. So leave it to Fox News to surgically extract a fragment of the speech in order to disparage the President.

Fox News

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The portion of the address that ruffled Fox’s fur was a snippet wherein Obama referenced the Crusades to remind the audience that “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Fox News latched unto that phrase and, for much of the day, used it to distort the President’s meaning in order to denigrate him as anti-Christian. But the President’s remarks were much more inclusive of the evil done by all perpetrators of violence in the name of religion. Here are some more extended excerpts of what he actually had to say:

“From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism. […] We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe, so often perpetrated in the name of religion. […]

“And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Any reasonable person would have to agree with what was expressed in the whole of the speech. But, as usual, reasonableness was not in attendance at Fox News. As a representative example of the departure from reason and fair discourse, Fox’s Neil Cavuto brought in Catholic League extremist Bill Donohue to rant feverishly about Obama’s alleged insult to the world’s Christians (video below):

Donohue: Had he said just said that, that people have killed in the name of their God and it’s not unique to one religion, who could argue with that? But he didn’t do that, did he? He spoke with specificity. he singled out the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Actually, Obama did not single out anyone. Quite the opposite. He specifically identified numerous religions that have all had issues with violent extremism. But the only thing that Donohue heard was the bit about the Crusades. The same is true for Cavuto who later demonstrated the essence of a loaded question by asking “Do you think [Obama] is dismissive of religion in the aggregate?” Huh? Did Cavuto even bother to listen to the speech which was dripping with piety and deference to God? The ludicrous question gave Donohue the opportunity to further slander Obama’s commitment to faith by excitedly responding that Obama is “a thoroughgoing secularist. I don’t think he believe’s in anything.”

This is typical of the Fox News editorial mission to cherry-pick Obama’s remarks and present them in the most negative way possible. It furthers their criticism of the President for his reluctance to associate the terrorists of ISIL with Islam. In that regard, he got some support today from Jordan’s Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, who said that “If there was any doubt that this is an organization that has anything to do with any religion on the face of this planet, that doubt is gone.”

Judeh’s comments are additional proof that the world’s Muslims are united in rejecting the violence of terrorism and the false accusation that it is inherently connected to the Muslim faith. In fact, the only people who are determined to make that link are the terrorists themselves and Fox News, which has the disturbing effect of putting Fox squarely on the side of the terrorists.

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To top it off, the following morning Fox’s Gregg Jarrett made the wholly delusional statement that “It struck some people in an odd way that the President was justifying ISIS.” Really? Which people? Jarrett doesn’t say. And how could these imaginary people reach that insane conclusion? Jarrett doesn’t say. But just to keep things fair and balanced, Joe Scarborough on MSNBC also took up the criticism of Obama for telling the truth about religion’s bad actors.


Fox News Airs Fake Story While Slobbering Over Another Foreign Dictator

Posted by on February 5, 2015 at 2:20 pm. 8 Comments :

It doesn’t take much to bring out the veneration for tyrants among the wingnut characters on Fox News. The conservative DNA is predisposed to favor authoritarianism. Last year it was Vladimir Putin who got them all hot and bothered, even to the point of wishing that the Russian dictator was the leader of the United States.

Fox News

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Now it is King Abdullah of Jordan who warms their cockles. During a segment of Fox & Friends (video below), the Kurvy Kouch Potatoes let their emotions spew forth about the Jordanian he-man who they were fooled into believing had personally stormed into battle against ISIL. The news that King Abdullah piloted air strikes in Syria was never authenticated, but that didn’t stop Fox from trumpeting the bravery and conviction of the monarch. Steve Doocy led off with the undeserved praise, followed quickly by an overheated Elisabeth Hasselbeck:

Doocy: Now this morning there is news that the King, who is also a trained pilot, the Jordanian media is reporting that there is a possibility that the King could have taken part in some of the air strikes.
Hasselbeck: He is stepping up with strong leadership and clarity. So what is our president doing?

First of all, a Jordanian spokesman made it clear that the King did not participate in the air strikes. What’s more, they said that it was incorrect to suggest that he is or ever was a fighter pilot. So virtually everything that Doocy said was wrong. That’s a state of affairs with which he should be quite familiar by now.

Secondly, the slap that Hasselbeck took at the American president was evidence of both her ignorance and her utter disrespect for America and its leadership, as well as her adulation of foreign dictators. The argument that Jordan has done more to fight ISIL is rooted in open disdain for President Obama.

The truth is that Jordan executed a couple of prisoners who were already sentenced to death, and then flew some missions to bomb terrorist fighters in the field. Obama has been doing that for months. His campaign against ISIL has already resulted in over 6,000 terrorist casualties, including more than half of their top commanders.

And yet, the Fox News crew thinks that Obama should be more like King Abdullah. For Obama to do that he would need to scale back his current efforts considerably and only step forward when some tragedy occurs. For the record, the U.S. score vs. ISIL is about 6,000 to 3.

Let’s face it – Nobody at Fox is going to give this President credit for anything, even when the facts show that he is by far outperforming the international community’s response to global terror. Their only goal is to belittle the President, and by extension, America, in order to advance their bitterly partisan and purely political agenda. How exactly do they think that it helps our nation when they insult our Commander-in-Chief and accuse him of being weak? It’s a veritable invitation to the enemy to escalate their attacks. And that is how patriotism is practiced by the right-wing zealots who run and watch Fox News.

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Where’s The Outrage? Bill O’Reilly Calls Millions Of Americans Stupid

Posted by on February 4, 2015 at 3:32 pm. 4 Comments :

One of the most over-hyped (and idiotic) stories of 2014 was the spleen-venting offense that was taken over remarks by Jonathan Gruber, an M.I.T. economics professor who consulted on the drafting of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). Gruber had told a conference that it may have been “the stupidity of the American voter” that contributed to the tortured way the health insurance reform bill was written. That’s actually an accurate point, but not a particularly savvy way to express it.

The result was a tsunami of miffed conservatives busting blood vessels at the thought that anyone would insult the universally recognized genius of the American public. At Fox News, of course, the issue took over the network’s programming with a force that made Benghazi look like a cat-rescued-from-a-tree story. An analysis by PolitiFact found that mentions of the Gruber affair in the following week occurred 779 times on Fox News. That’s once every fifteen minutes, 24 hours a day, for eight straight days.

Fox News Gruber Brainwashing

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Well, last night on the O’Reilly Factor, Uncle Bill delivered his Talking Points Memo to open the show. His topic was the 2016 presidential race, for which he appeared not to have much respect for the process or the voters. At one point he lamented that “The media will play a huge role and unfortunately the press has been corrupted in America by money, the Internet, and ideology.” Then he almost immediately contradicted himself, playing down the influence of the media:

O’Reilly: Informed voters will not be swayed by media coverage, but millions of Americans are simply uninformed.”

What? How dare he insult the intelligence of the people whose intelligence he was previously so upset about somebody else having insulted. How is it any different to say that millions of Americans are uninformed when it comes to the patriotic act of voting, which millions of Americans do, than it is to say that some of the American people are stupid with regard to the process of drafting legislation, which almost none of them do?

Later in the program O’Reilly brought in Monica Crowley to speak for conservatives and phony liberal Kirsten Powers to pretend to take the other side. Crowley and O’Reilly made the case that the media is predominantly liberal because “the brightest conservatives go into business and the brightest liberals go into entertainment and the media.” Setting aside that ludicrous notion, O’Reilly next turned to Powers who wavered on agreeing with that and then demonstrated why she is a flagrantly anti-liberal representative of the liberal position on Fox News:

Powers: I think there are a lot of different things that play into it and now also what’s happening is that it’s reinforced by these left-wing groups like Media Matters that harrass these media outlets every time they cover anything that isn’t positive.

That could not have been said better by Ann Coulter. Powers has long been disparaging Democrats (including President Obama) and progressive enterprises, although she has yet to provide any substantive support for her complaints against Media Matters, a watchdog group that doesn’t do much more than document the biases and dishonesty of the conservative media. And true to form, Powers had nothing to say about O’Reilly’s insult to the intelligence of the American people. I guess she agrees with that too.

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Here We Go Again: The Media Needs To Stop Promoting Terrorist Propaganda

Posted by on February 3, 2015 at 9:13 pm. 2 Comments :

The execution of a Jordanian pilot by Islamic State terrorists has once again shown the world that they are a repulsive, inhumane band of murderers with no agenda other than inciting panic and fear. Unfortunately, it has also shown us that the media is an irresponsible purveyor of propaganda that unambiguously aids our terrorist enemies.

Fox News ISIS Flag

The first thing that people need to realize about these heinous executions is that the terrorists aim is to inflame emotions and draw western powers into a quagmire on their battlefield in the desert. And as if to validate that goal, war hawks among American conservatives are falling for the tactic and calling for an increased military presence in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc. It is a pathetic and dangerous submission to the will of the enemy.

Why would anyone want to give the terrorists exactly what they are hoping for? To be sure the method of the executions is gut wrenching and stirs a desire for a visceral response with a measure of brutality that equals that of the terrorists. But succumbing to that vengeful instinct clouds our minds and distorts reality. For instance, many of the those acting on pure instinct have already appeared on television asserting that unless we escalate our military involvement we are losing the war.

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That’s nonsense. What people are forgetting (or not bothering to learn) is that there have been a total of eight executions by the Islamic State in the past six months. During that same time the United States and its allies have conducted bombing campaigns that have killed more than 6,000 ISIL fighters, including more than half of their top commanders, according to the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, Stuart Jones. In what playbook does a 6,000 to 8 kill ratio signify a military loss?

Nevertheless, the media is hyping the death of a Jordanian that, while tragic, is in no way an incentive to escalate activities with more American soldiers deployed to the Middle East in combat roles. We are already beating the enemy by any standard and we just need to be persistent and make decisions based on reality rather than emotion. We need to steel ourselves from the enemies tactics which are devised to cause us to make faulty judgments that benefit them.

Fox News

In short we need to ignore the propaganda that the terrorists are engaging in. Likewise, we need to ignore the propaganda that the media is engaging in. When members of Congress like John McCain or Lindsey Graham tell us that we’re losing the war, we need to ignore them and continue on the path that is producing real successes. When pundits like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly tell us that President Obama is a weak and vacillating leader, we need to ignore them and stay the course. And even though news outlets like Fox News are helping the terrorists by promoting their propaganda videos, we are not obligated to watch or approve of that journalistic treason.

As I wrote last September after the terrorists executed Steven Sotloff, an American-Israeli journalist…

“The only way to react to these events is to acknowledge that they occurred and then stop obsessing over them. Then we can conduct our retaliatory response calmly and decisively. But by no means should we panic, tear out our hair, and give the enemy the impression (and satisfaction) that they have crushed our spirit and won a victory.”

That remains true today. It’s a shame that we have to undergo the trauma that is inflicted by horrific terrorist acts. But it doesn’t help that our media is advancing the goals of the terrorists. Hopefully they will eventually wise up and realize the harm they are doing by failing to put the whole of this battle into proper context. Seriously – 6,000 to 8.

[Update:] Fox News has posted the full video of the execution of the Jordanian pilot by ISIS. It is the only national TV network to do so. A terrorist expert consulted by the Guardian newspaper said that Fox News is “literally – literally – working for al-Qaida and Isis’ media arm … They might as well start sending them royalty checks.”

[Update II:] Since Fox News posted the ISIL propaganda, more conservative websites are joining in to help the terrorists promote their message of fear. So far Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, Breitbart News, and Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller are now on Team ISIL. They claim that showing the video is the only way that people will be able to grasp the true horror of the execution. That is obviously an idiotic argument, but if they believe it, then why don’t they also post the beheadings of the Americans that ISIL murdered?

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Bill O’Reilly Responds To Vermont High School Students By Calling Them Pinheads

Posted by on February 2, 2015 at 9:13 pm. 9 Comments :

A couple of weeks ago a class at Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, Vermont, took on the awesome power of America’s top rated cable “news” network, Fox News. Using a segment from the Bill O’Reilly show that featured his stalker Jesse Watters, they expertly demonstrated how Fox systematically breaches the code of ethics as stipulated by the Society for Professional Journalism. [See this article for the back story and the students’ video]

Anyone who follows Fox News knows that they do not take kindly to criticism. In fact, they react aggressively and with a viciousness that is generally associated with aberrant behavior like road rage. That appears to be the case even when their victims are high school kids. So it is not particularly surprising that last Friday Bill O’Reilly teased his response to the kids by calling them “pinheads” and Watters promised a “vigourous defense of my journalistic integrity point by point” would be delivered on Monday.

Fox News Jesse Watters

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So today O’Reilly brought Watters back for his defense (video below), which did more to prove the original case made by the students than to exonerate Watters or O’Reilly. The segment was an embarrassing mash of childish attempts at humor, but worse, it was filled with lies and misrepresentations.

Beginning with a claim by the students that Watters made generalized assertions about the state of Vermont after visiting just one small town, Watters rebuttal was a joke (?) that didn’t address the point at all:

“Hold it! Bennington is my town now. I just bought a little hemp farm there this past weekend. Hey neighbors.” […and later added…] Did your nutty professor write this script for you?

Apparently Watters has decided to employ the most juvenile tactics in his defense. Perhaps he thinks these high schoolers are seven or eight years old, because that’s the level to which he is stooping. His “nutty professor” remark insulted both the teacher and the students by implying that they were not responsible for their own work. Then, following a clip wherein the students criticized Watters for predetermining the outcome of his story, Watters tried to shift responsibility elsewhere saying…

“Actually Gallup predetermined the outcome. Now I’ll be waiting to watch that anti-Gallup video.”

Watters then displayed a graphic of a Gallup poll showing that Vermont was the most liberal state in the country. However, that is not what the students were referencing with regard to predetermined outcomes. The actual topic at that point was how Watters’ inserted his opinion in a question about whether Vermonters should apologize for voting for President Obama, as if there were something for which to apologize (i.e. a booming economy? Ending two wars? Access to health insurance? Cutting unemployment in half? Cutting the deficit by two-thirds?).

So Watters deliberately lied in that response by pretending that the students were referring to something else that better suited his agenda. Even worse, he doctored the graphic for the Gallup poll to put Vermont at the top. If you look at the Gallup website the original graphic shows that Vermont’s liberal ranking was actually second behind the District of Columbia.

Next, Watters played a clip from the student video where they called him out for referring to all Vermonters disparagingly, including one who Watters described as a “drifter.” The students noted that Watters never authenticated his assertion about whether or not he was a drifter, or even if he was from Vermont. To that Watters’ replied incredulously…

“So before I do an interview you want me to ask a guest to show me their papers?”

Um, yes. A responsible journalist will at least make an effort to identify their subjects, especially if the journalist intends to draw conclusions about them. Watters seems to think he can put anyone on the air without any vetting and then make slanderous comments at will. Does Watters actually believe that a real journalist wouldn’t verify who they were talking to before putting them on the air? Is that how Fox News selects their “experts” on economics, foreign policy, etc.?

Watters and O’Reilly spent the closing minutes of the segment ridiculing the students for taking Watters seriously. They attempted to justify their rank dishonesty by saying it was all just satirical. That’s an ironic defense since O’Reilly, and most other right-wingers in the media, are constantly bashing people like Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher, and whining about the impact they have on the nation and on the news. O’Reilly once called Stewart “a key component of left-wing television.” Conservatives regard political humorists as part of the so-called liberal media conspiracy, and they take them very seriously. But here they are attempting to excuse their own faulty reporting by dismissing it as humor. Why is it a heinous act of propaganda when others do it, but when they do it’s benignly entertaining?

The truth is that Watters, besides being remarkably unfunny, is just as much a part of the propaganda crusade that makes up the Fox News mission. He uses his allegedly entertaining bits to advance a right-wing message, just the same as O’Reilly or Megyn Kelly or Bret Baier use their allegedly newsy bits. He is deliberately derogatory against liberals exclusively. And if you don’t think that he’s part of the messaging on Fox, you are terminally naive. Even Fox News has observed that Jon Stewart is more fair and balanced with his satire.

The embarrassing rebuttal to the student project just emphasizes the lengths that Fox will go to promulgate their disinformation. It also shows their utter disregard for the truth or journalistic ethics. But most notoriously (and hilariously) it shows that they can’t even defend themselves against valid criticisms made by intelligent amateurs who are still in high school.

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Smacking The Smirk Off Of Tucker Carlson’s Face: Fox News Fails To Smear ObamaCare

Posted by on February 2, 2015 at 12:01 pm. 3 Comments :

For some reason, Fox News has made an editorial decision to segregate their most idiotic hosts to the morning hours on the network on programs like Fox & Friends. It’s where you will find Steve Doocy, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Brian Kilmeade, Anna Kooiman, and today’s special, Tucker Carlson.

In a segment that was undoubtedly designed to malign the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare), Carlson invited a healthcare consumer on to frighten us all with his tale of an insurance catastrophe that resulted in – well, it resulted in no harm whatsoever, but never mind that. There is a horror story to tell.

Fox News ObamaScare

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The segment (video below) began with ominous music accompanying a graphic with a foreboding theme: “Eyes On ObamaCare.” Cut to Carlson’s opening wherein he somberly warned that…

“Not only can you not keep your doctor, but you can’t keep your coverage either. Through a glitch in one of the official ObamaCare exchanges over 3,600 people in the state of Colorado saw their health insurances policies canceled without notice. Kafka comes to Colorado.”

Kafka , for those unfamiliar, was known for writing somewhat depressing novels with characters who were pummeled by heartless bureaucracies. You know, like the ones that make healthcare available to everyone. Yeah, what a nightmare it must be to be able to see a doctor when you need one. But what Carlson seemed to cavalierly skip over is the fact that the problem in the story he is introducing was caused by a glitch, not a government mandated assault on its citizens.

Carlson jumped into the interview by falsely asserting that his guest/victim, Steven Roussel, had suffered a rise in his insurance premium “thanks to ObamaCare.” Of course, there was no evidence that ObamaCare had anything to do with the higher premium which, in fact, are controlled by the private insurance companies, except for the limits that ObamaCare imposes on increases. Furthermore, Roussel himself never said that ObamaCare was responsible for the increase.

While browsing the exchange website and talking to a representative on the phone, Roussel’s policy was mistakenly canceled. As note above, this was not some Kafkaesque bureaucracy imposing it’s evil will on a defenseless peon. It was a computer error, a malfunction, a glitch, that was probably the work of Satan. So Carlson delved deeper into the mystery asking…

“Can you just give us a little background here? Were you happy or dissatisfied with your healthcare before Obamacare?”

Whereupon Roussel delivered a truly nightmarish response – if you’re Fox News:

“Well, I didn’t have any healthcare before the Affordable Healthcare Act went in. And it was because of that, that I was actually able to afford it.”

About this time there was an associate producer at Fox that was sweating and attempting to slither out a back door. Heads will surely roll for not having vetted this socialist subversive guest thoroughly before allowing him to get on the air and praise ObamaCare for creating an opportunity to get health insurance. But it gets even worse. When given a direct opportunity to disparage ObamaCare and its namesake, Roussel committed a Foxian blasphemy:

Carlson: How has this made you feel about the whole ObamaCare experiment?
Roussell: Well, experiments are either a success or fail, and this instance it’s a little bit of a fail. But it’s not necessarily the President’s fault. It’s more the CEO’s fault that knew about the glitch in the system and did nothing about it.

So there you have it. Blame was placed exactly where it belonged. The insurance company was responsible for the rate increase, and combined with the operators of the exchange, permitted a glitchy website to go online that inadvertently canceled some policies.

Carlson responded sarcastically saying that “Well, I betcha he’ll get right on it after this.” Which actually turned out to be true (Tucker got lucky). The exchange is contacting every affected consumer and assuring them that their policies will be reinstated retroactive to January 1, and they will have the opportunity to select any other plan should they decide to switch.

So in the end, this was nothing but a programming mishap that was quickly resolved without anyone suffering any negative repercussions. Which makes it an obvious target for Fox News to invent a controversy where none existed, and to frighten their viewers with false stories of a government gone wild. At some point Fox’s viewers are going to realize that the network was created by the pharmaceutical industry to sell more anti-depressants.

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Video via Raw Story


The Fox News Primary: CNN On Kissing Rupert’s Ring And Other Body Parts

Posted by on February 1, 2015 at 6:30 pm. 3 Comments :

Sunday morning’s media analysis program on CNN, Reliable Sources, aired a segment (video below) that exposed the overtly partisan promotion of Republican candidates on Fox News. The obvious biases that infect the network’s programming have long been known to anyone paying attention, and the necessity to win the favor of the Fox Politburo is unquestioned.

Fox News Primary

Host Brian Stelter introduced the segment saying…

“Will those two guys, Fox News president Roger Ailes and his boss Rupert Murdoch, be picking your next president? It may sound ridiculous. It may sound like some liberal conspiracy theory. But there’s no disputing that they have real power in the GOP primary.”

That’s an understatement. Not only is Fox News a real power in the GOP primary proper, they often launch candidates from among their own employees. Just looking at the 2016 presidential cycle, Fox vets Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, John Bolton, Rick Santorum and John Kasich have all indicated an interested in running. And most of the other prospective candidates (i.e. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Paul Ryan) have staked out territory on Fox’s air on a regular basis. This led Stelter’s guest, Gabriel Sherman, author of the Ailes bio The Loudest Voice in the Room, to say…

“Without a question Roger Ailes controls the largest block of reliable Republican voters. They watch Fox News. They turn out in large numbers on primary day. And the candidates are already kissing the ring.”

For some evidence of the influence imposed by Fox, News Corpse reported this week that Mitt Romney’s departure from the race likely received more than a little push from Rupert Murdoch, whose anti-Romney stance was expressed publicly on more than one occasion. Stelter also noticed Murdoch’s remarks and coyly called it “purely coincidental.” Nevertheless, when the Fox News media analysis program, MediaBuzz with Howard Kurtz, reported on Romney bailing out, they laughably portrayed it as being the result of some ambiguous, negative media coverage, with an on-screen graphic reading “Did The Media Sink Romney?”

Yeah right. No mention of Romney’s negative coverage on Fox. Likewise, no mention of the disparaging comments by Murdoch, or Sean Hannity, or numerous other Tea Party mouthpieces on Fox. Not surprisingly, a conservative guest on Reliable Sources, the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis, dismissed any talk of influence on the part of Fox News. He would have to be seriously oblivious to reality in order believe that or to say…

“In terms of them having some sort of conspiracy to help boost one candidate or another – I mean look, if they had their way the Republican Party would be a pro-immigration reform party right now.”

Lewis must not watch very much Fox News if he hasn’t seen the Republican fluffing that goes on hour after hour. And to suggest that the network that continues to use the word “illegals” in reference to undocumented residents, even after most reputable news organizations have abandoned it (including the Fox Latino website), shows just how warped his view of the network is. Fox News is unashamedly hostile to immigration reform, as well as to immigrants, and so are most of the GOP candidates.

For the next year and a half Fox News will continue to work on behalf of the Republican Party. They are already in league with the Republican National Committee’s plans for primary debates. And during the general election Fox will openly promote the GOP candidate and lie shamelessly about the Democrat. It’s what they do. And the parade of GOP hopefuls kowtowing to Ailes and Murdoch know all too well how important it is to kiss their rings, and other body parts as required.

News Corpse Presents: The ALL NEW 2nd volume of
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


FEAR UPDATE: Fox News Fans Fear Of Taliban Telephones

Posted by on January 31, 2015 at 12:51 pm. 6 Comments :

It must be difficult for Fox News in these first few weeks of a new year that has produced little material for their fear mongering. Just a couple of months ago, prior to the November election, Fox was awash in frightening tales of terrorists, communists, and immigrants with Ebola, all threatening to wipe out the greatest, strongest, bestest nation in the history of the world.

It’s been relatively quiet on the Fox front as they scamper to manufacture some new horror story with which to drench their trembling audience in a sweaty panic. But fear not (or rather, fear). They seem to think they may have found the elusive trigger point with a report out of Qatar regarding some former Gitmo detainees.

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Fox News is feverishly reporting that one of the Taliban 5 (whose singing is a little pitchy and can’t dance at all) was caught trying to communicate with other Taliban operatives with a telephone. In the world of Fox News that represents an existential threat to the national security of the United States. It is never precisely explained why that would be true, but that isn’t important. The only thing that matters to Fox is that it can be quickly spun into a cursed conspiracy of doom.

The narrative from the Foxoids is that there is some sort of heinous plot that is hatching that can only be perpetrated by this newly released Gitmo guy. Never mind that the Taliban, which is estimated to have about 35,000 fighters, would not likely be strengthened much by becoming 35,000 and one. Especially since the new guy has been incarcerated for a decade and doesn’t know any of the current players and is not a part of the leadership that has risen while he was languishing in the Caribbean.

What’s more, the fact that these telephone communications were monitored and revealed publicly is evidence that the former Gitmoans are being surveilled closely and are not likely to be able to engage in any nefarious activities. A Pentagon spokesman made the same points in a statement saying that…

“We have a good security partnership with the government of Qatar. They have provided assurances and I can tell you, we are comfortable at the defense department that we can mitigate any threat that could be posed by any one of the individuals in terms of terrorist activity.”

Nevertheless, Fox News has nothing else readily available, so they are settling for this and struggling to turn it into the sort of fear bait that stimulates their hysteria prone viewers. Sadly, it will probably work.

News Corpse Presents: The ALL NEW 2nd volume of
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.