Fox Nation And The Right-Wing Embrace Of Censorship

Posted by on November 30, 2010 at 2:50 pm. NO Comments :

The release of some 250,000 documents by WikiLeaks has stirred up a hornets nest of protest from the rightist martinets of virtue. There have been calls to shut down the WikiLeaks web site, to arrest its principals, and even to execute those responsible for treason. But what it all amounts to in the end is that the right-wing extremists just simply abhor a free press.

The Fox Nation has been consumed with the issue, promoting it beyond all other news items. The economy, jobs, Iraq, Afghanistan, tax cuts, etc., have all taken a back seat to WikiLeaks. As of this writing the front page of the Fox Nation has six separate articles on this subject.


It is impossible to ignore the fact that in their haste to criticize the WikiLeaks document dump, the Fox Nationalists frame their criticism in a barrage of animus directed at President Obama. The whole thing is somehow his fault. What’s more, they condemn his response to it as “incompetent” and “gutless.” Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly are “livid” – and Lord knows we can’t have that.

But here’s the thing: If Obama had taken a hardball approach to this, cutting off access to the WikiLeaks web site and arresting those involved, the reaction from the right would be to assail him as a tyrant intent on imposing censorship on independent media. They would be shocked that an American president would assert such unprecedented control over a private enterprise. It would be portrayed as fascist or Stalinist oppression (take your pick). So either way, the right would engage in a fevered bashing of the President. It’s what they do.

Since the President has accommodated the right by taking a measured approach to ascertain the facts and proceed with due diligence, the right is free to wail about such imaginary violations as treason. But what they are really condemning is freedom of thought and expression. And it isn’t the first time. During the Bush administration a Republican congress voted to condemn the New York Times for publishing a story that revealed the government’s unlawful spying into the banking activities of American citizens. If Obama’s administration were to propose such an intrusion he would be castigated as a dictator bent on destroying America (again).

Make no mistake, the WikiLeaks affair is being used as a cudgel with which to hammer the President. But it is also being used as en excuse to censor independent sources of information and to intimidate anyone who entertains the notion of revealing to the American people what is being done by government in their name. It doesn’t matter if it’s an obscure, off-shore web site or the New York Times. The right is intent on suppressing free expression. They prove it again and again.

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UNHINGED: Glenn Beck Thinks Government Wants To Starve You

Posted by on November 30, 2010 at 9:57 am. 7 Comments :

Glenn Beck UnhingedIn a rant that raises Glenn Beck’s delusional factor to unprecedented heights, he is now accusing the United States government of seeking to control the people via food safety programs with an ultimate goal of deliberate starvation. If you think that is hyperbole, here are his exact words: “This is about control and, in the end, starvation.”

This hallucinatory screed was spurred by a Senate bill (S.510) that would give the FDA additional authority to address food safety matters. The bill has received bipartisan support in response to the numerous cases of food recalls the past year (peanut butter, spinach, cookie dough, etc.) due to pathogens like E.coli and salmonella that have sickened thousands of Americans and led to dozens of deaths. Beck shrugs this off by asking “Is there a big problem that I don’t know of?”

No Glenn, there isn’t. You DO know, you’re just lying about it. [FYI (pdf): Each year, about 76 million people contract a food-borne illness in the United States; about 325,000 require hospitalization; and about 5,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] And that’s not all you’re lying about.

Beck: Do you know where the FDA’s Deputy commissioner for foods used to work? Just a wild coincidence. The Monsanto company. And guess who the second largest holder was, you know, last quarter, the shares of the Monsanto corporation…George Soros.

Not true. George Soros is not now, and has never been, the second largest holder of Monsanto stock. He has never even been in the top ten. His fund does own approximately $312 million worth of Monsanto stock, which is less than 7% of the $5 billion fund.

As for the FDA official whom Beck didn’t bother to name, it is Michael Taylor, who did indeed work for Monsanto for three years – ten years ago! For the 35 years before and after that he worked for either the FDA or Department of Agriculture. He was also a professor at George Washington University. It appears he took a short break from government service to cash in as a lobbyist. I won’t defend that but, the bottom line is that, whatever his association with Monsanto, it wasn’t recent enough to reasonably assert that he is still lobbying on their behalf.

On a side note, it’s interesting that Beck should take such an antagonistic tone toward Monsanto when his employer engaged in a notorious and unusual defense of the company a while back. In 1997, a couple of local Fox reporters, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, produced a story on rBGH, a synthetic growth hormone developed by Monsanto that boosts milk production and is associated with an increased risk of cancer. After a letter writing campaign by Monsanto to Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, disputing the story and hinting at a lawsuit, the story was shelved and the reporters were fired, despite all the evidence that the story was accurate.

In subsequent litigation Fox argued that under the First Amendment broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox has since taken full advantage of that right by lying and distorting the news every single day. And their lead distorter is, of course, Glenn Beck.

[This Just In:] Despite Beck’s urging that his viewers call Congress and protest, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the Food Safety Act 73-25, including 15 Republican votes. That still means that a majority of the GOP voted against the bill, but it is more bipartisanship than has been seen in the past two years.


Sarah Palin’s Media Persecution Complex

Posted by on November 27, 2010 at 12:06 pm. 11 Comments :

Last week the blogiverse had a field day with Sarah Palin’s gaffe wherein she told Glenn Beck that we must stand with our “North” Korean allies. It was a rather trivial spurt of mockery that was more entertainment than news.

Palin’s reaction, however, was a massive escalation that revealed her acute sensitivity to criticism. In fact, her reaction tells us much more about her than the gaffe that started it all. On her Facebook page (because the “mama grizzly” is still too afraid to peek out of her online cave to talk to real people) Palin complained that the media…

“…couldn’t resist the temptation to turn a simple one word slip-of-the-tongue of mine into a major political headline.”

As Media Matters reports, this was hardly a major political story. It was not reported at all by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, PBS, NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and most other major news outlets. What else is left that would qualify this as a major story of any kind?

So when a bunch of bloggers find humor in Palin’s faux pas, she interprets that as another example of the media unfairly assaulting her. Even though the media she’s fingering had nothing to do with it. It is entirely in her warped imagination. And she advances her complaint to suggest that a string of bloopers by the President were not treated the same as her own miscues. The only problem with that is that his muffs received every bit as much attention as hers did, if not more. It should also be noted that, unlike her flub, none of Obama’s exhibited a potentially disastrous ignorance of foreign affairs.

You have to wonder to whom Palin is referring when she said “Let’s hope that perhaps, just maybe, they might get it right next time.” Perhaps if the media ever gets to ask her a question it might be who “they” are. Although this incident should not diminish the other cases of persecution Palin suffers at the hands of the “lamestream” media. Take this barrage of venom for example:

“Just how Sarah is Sarah Palin’s Alaska, her new hit reality show on the TLC network? It’s soooo flippin’ Sarah, as Sarah would say. And it’s soooo Alaska, which Palin pronounces ‘A-LASK-ahhhh.’ She repeats this on the show over and over again, as though we might forget where she’s from otherwise. She says it in that chirpy honk that, to her legions of fans, represents the music of Mom, apple pie, and flyover country. To her legions of enemies, it is the sound of gum smacking and syntax breaking. As Palin intones in the show’s opening, ‘A-LASK-ahhhh—I love this state like I love my family.’ Except that she didn’t give her family up after governing it for two-and-a-half years, so that she could get a Fox News contract, and make 100 grand per speech, and write two books in a year, and drag her entire family onto a tacky reality show.”

My mistake. That wasn’t the lamestream media. That was Matt Labash in the ultra-conservative Weekly Standard. But Palin is certain to find a way to blame this on liberals in the media who somehow bewitched Labosh and his editors into publishing this screed. No doubt George Soros had something to do with it.


Salon’s War Room: The Thirty Worst Pundits

Posted by on November 24, 2010 at 10:31 pm. 2 Comments :

As with all “Best/Worst Of…” lists, you can argue over names that were included, left off, or ranked incorrectly. But all in all, this is a pretty good list from Salon.com:

About The Hack Thirty

We’re listing the worst columnists and cable news commentators America has to offer. Think of this as our all-star team — of the most predictable, dishonest and just plain stupid pundits in the media.

1. Richard Cohen
2. Mark Halperin
3. Thomas Friedman
4. David Broder
5. Marty Peretz
6. Marc Thiessen
7. Jonah Goldberg
8. Maureen Dowd
9. Laura Ingraham
10. Peggy Noonan		 11. George Will
12. John Fund
13. Roger Simon
14. David Ignatius
15. Mort Zuckerman
16. Michael Barone
17. Bill Kristol
18. Tina Brown
19. Joe Klein
20. Howard Fineman		 21. S.E. Cupp
22. Tucker Carlson
23. Howard Kurtz
24. Dana Milbank
25. Mickey Kaus
26. Jeffrey Goldberg
27. Pat Caddell
28. Andrew Malcolm
29. Matt Bai
30. David Brooks

Some of my additions would be Pat Buchanan, Monica Crowley, Alex Castellanos, Bernie Goldberg, Stephen Moore, Charles Krauthammer, Dick Morris, Juan Williams, Judith Miller, and Ann Coulter. I’m sure there are more I’ve mentally blocked. Feel free to submit your own.


Tom Delay: Dancing Behind Bars

Posted by on November 24, 2010 at 7:02 pm. NO Comments :

Tom Delay GUILTY!

Jury convicts Tom DeLay in money laundering trial

AUSTIN, Texas – Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay – once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress – was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.

I don’t really have anything to add. Just that I hope his cronies in Texas don’t water this down to a slap on his corrupt wrist.


Yet Another Poll Reveals The Tea Party Craze Is A Fraud

Posted by on November 24, 2010 at 3:02 pm. 16 Comments :

Grand Old Tea PartyDespite all the evidence of repeated surveys, the media continues to treat the Tea Party as if it were an influential player in contemporary politics. They salivate at plastering their pages and airwaves with red-meat melodrama that lacks relevance or substance. That’s how they end up so pathetically far off course whenever another poll is taken that casts the Tea Party in a realistic light. And that’s what the Associated Press just did:

Tea party backers fashion themselves as “we the people,” but polls show the Republican Party’s most conservative and energized voters are hardly your average crowd.

According to an Associated Press-GfK Poll this month, 84 percent who call themselves tea party supporters don’t like how President Barack Obama is handling his job – a view shared by just 35 percent of all other adults. Tea partiers are about four times likelier than others to back repealing Obama’s health care overhaul and twice as likely to favor renewing tax cuts for the highest-earning Americans.

Exit polls of voters in this month’s congressional elections reveal similar gulfs. Most tea party supporters – 86 percent – want less government intrusion on people and businesses, but only 35 percent of other voters said so. Tea party backers were about five times likelier to blame Obama for the country’s economic ills, three times likelier to say Obama’s policies will be harmful and twice as apt to see the country on the wrong track.

These aren’t subtle shadings between tea party backers and the majority of Americans, who don’t support the movement; they’re Grand Canyon-size chasms.

My only response to this latest revelation of the Tea Party’s impotence is to quote myself the last couple of times this was revealed:

Dec 19, 2009: The fact that the Tea Baggers have failed to create a significant presence despite being bankrolled by some of the biggest and wealthiest AstroTurf lobbying organizations in the country (i.e. FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity), and having the promotional backing of Fox News, illustrates just how unappealing most Americans regard that brand of disruptive griping.

Oct 5, 2010: [T]he Tea Party is a fringe cadre of extremists who have little in common with average Americans. So why do they get so much attention in the press? Well, partly because the press loves controversy, even if they have to invent it. And partly because the Republican Party is anxious to hitch its wagon to the Tea Party express in hopes of enhancing their electoral prospects. But the main reason the Tea Party gets so much attention in the press is because they have their own press (i.e. Fox News, talk radio, etc.) that pours out their propaganda in a flood of fury, fear, and foreboding.

There is plenty of data available for the press to frame the issues honestly. They just seem to prefer spinning fables. A survey released earlier this week showed that a majority of Americans support extension of the Bush-era tax cuts only for those earning less than $250,000. It also shows that a majority want to keep the new health care bill as it is or expand it. And this is after months of harsh, and mostly false, rhetoric bashing these policies from Tea Partiers and their media accomplices.

It’s been two years now. Is the media ever going to report honestly on this phony “movement.” You would think they would tire of embarrassing themselves over and over again.

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Sarah Palin Like Really Likes Journalism And Stuff

Posted by on November 24, 2010 at 2:44 am. 2 Comments :

Sarah PalinSarah Palin ventured outside of the safety of her Facebook fortress to brave an interview with the pugnacious Sean Hannity on Fox News. The conversation turned to her infamous interview with Katie Couric and the broader subject of journalism. On the latter she offered this critique and her hope to play a role in improving the situation:

“I want to clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism.”

I think it would help if she learned to speak English first. Palin’s glaring ignorance and inarticulate ravings are probably not the best prescription for what’s ailing the media. Nevertheless, she goes on to boast of her credentials:

“And I have a communications degree. I studied journalism. Who, what, when, where and why of reporting.”

First of all, the “who, what, when, where and why of reporting” isn’t exactly college-level journalism studies. I learned that as a freshman in high school. And she earned her communications degree after hopscotching through five different colleges. That was twenty five years ago and she has never worked a single day as a reporter. Yet she has the gall to lecture others on journalism? Indeed she does. And she continues:

“I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation our country has for truth to be reported, and then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us.”

If she actually had any concern for truth in reporting she wouldn’t work for Fox News. And she hasn’t spoken to any reporter in over two years. The person she was saying this to was Sean Hannity. That’s not exactly someone upon whose “facts” you should base your opinions. So it’s ironic that she complains about having to engage with biased reporters:

“So a journalist, a reporter who is so biased and will no doubt spin and gin up whatever it is I have to say to create controversy, I swear to you I will not waste my time with her.”

But she will waste her time with Hannity, who does all of what she just denounced. She was actually referring to the notoriously hardball CBS news anchor, Katie Couric. And the bias and spin to which Palin refers is Couric’s audacity to ask her what newspapers and magazines she reads. That Couric is a real muckraker.

I really can’t comprehend how anyone can take this woman seriously. It is disappointing to know that there are actually Americans who consider her to be credible in any respect, much less qualified to be president. But it is encouraging to know that her fan base is still relatively small and confined to a congregation of Tea Bagging dunces who think Jesus rode a dinosaur.


Fox Spews: Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly And The Simpsons

Posted by on November 23, 2010 at 4:00 pm. NO Comments :

Fox Spews: An irregular column featuring selected morsels of regurgitated nonsense from everyone’s favorite propaganda pit.

Sarah Palin’s Alaska Ratings Plummet
 

After setting a TLC ratings record last week, Sarah Palin’s reality show plummeted for its second episode.

Sarah Palin’s Alaska fell 40% on Sunday night to 3 million viewers.

Not many were in the key adult demo either. Only 885,000 viewers were ages 18-49, dropping 44% from last week.

In fact, the median age of the show is 57 — that’s 15 years older than TLC’s average.

Gee. Who would have guessed that a program featuring a failed VP candidate and half-term governor, whose public approval is on par with herpes, would have trouble holding a television audience?

Glenn Beck’s Media Conspiracy Unraveled
 

During Glenn Beck’s Week of Soros, Beck advanced his theory that Soros was attempting to take control of the media. He offered as evidence a glimpse of a blackboard that he never showed close enough for the audience to see the elements of Soros’ alleged media empire. Well, I finally tracked down the source for Beck’s allegations. Wouldn’t you know, it was an article on Andrew Breitbart’s notoriously dishonest BigJournalism.

Beck’s Blackboard and BigJournalism’s media map (click images to see full size):

For the record, the Soros empire consists of NPR and a collection of mostly Internet media reform organizations. There is not a single prominent radio station or TV network or newspaper. Some empire. For comparison, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire consists of Fox News, Fox Business, the Fox Entertainment Network, FX, Fox Radio, the Fox TV Station Group, 20th Century Fox Studios, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Harper Collins Publishers, MySpace, Hulu, and much more domestically and internationally. Which one sounds like a mogul trying to take control of the media to you?

Bill O’Reilly Strikes Back At The Simpsons
 

Last night The Simpsons took another swipe at their Godfather Rupert and Fox News. The segment had Murdoch arriving at a meeting of media moguls in a helicopter with the Fox News logo and the motto “Not Racist, But # 1 With Racists.” Not surprisingly, Bill O’Reilly took offense at this saying…

“Continuing to bite the hand that feeds part of it, Fox Broadcasting once again allows its cartoon characters to run wild. Pinheads? I believe so.”

Presumably O’Reilly is disturbed that the folks at one Fox division would disparage another. So his reaction is to do the same thing. How is O’Reilly calling the producers and writers of the Simpsons pinheads any different than what the Simpsons did? Except that the Simpsons were joking and O’Reilly was serious. It seems to me that it is O’Reilly who is “biting the hand that feeds” him. And it’s a much bigger and more profitable hand because the Simpsons routinely get about twice the ratings that O’Reilly does.


Election Flawed: Rupert Murdoch Plays Politics For Profit

Posted by on November 23, 2010 at 12:30 pm. 2 Comments :

The present state of the American political process is in dire distress. In order to even contemplate running for any federal or statewide office, a potential candidate must have access to sums of money in amounts that either prevent participation or invite corruption. And if there’s one thing that Washington doesn’t need it’s invitations to be corrupt.

In a new wrinkle, unprecedented quantities of funds are being raised by independent advocacy groups whose donors are allowed to be kept secret, thus depriving voters of information critical to assessing the character and independence of the candidate. The recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United made the situation even worse by permitting corporations to contribute unlimited amounts of money directly to candidates and causes with no transparency or oversight.

I’m not sure, however, that anyone anticipated the prospect of a media corporation turning their ability to make political contributions into a profit center and earning money on the funds they donated to candidates. It’s bad enough when media is simply acting out of greed and failing to serve the public interest. But leave it to News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch to discover a whole new vein to mine that yields results for both his greed and his megalomania.

The Nation just published an enlightening commentary co-written by media reform heroes John Nichols and Robert McChesney titled The Money & Media Election Complex. Their premise is that the confluence of media and wealthy partisans in politics is as dangerous as the military/industrial complex Pres. Eisenhower warned us about. And exacerbating the risk is the fact that, to the extent that independent reporting might once have uncovered suspicious relationships and activities, the press has been gutted in many respects and is incapable of playing their traditional role as watchdogs.

While there has long been a problem with massive infusions of cash polluting the electoral environment, the problems today are unique in the way that the media participates and benefits from the process. This past election cycle is estimated to bring in billions to the television networks airing campaign ads and hosting candidates. Thus they have a vested interest in provoking controversy and manufacturing volatility in order to stimulate more ad buying. Nichols and McChesney wrote that…

The most important yet least-recognized piece of the money-and-media election complex is the commercial broadcasting industry, which just had its best money-making election season ever. […and that…] We have to stop thinking about the crisis of our politics merely in terms of reforming the campaign finance system (though of course it’s important to fight for reforms). It’s a media ownership and responsibility issue as well.

After it was disclosed that Murdoch had contributed a million dollars each to the Republican Governor’s Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it was obvious that these ultra-partisan organizations would be using that money largely to advance the electoral prospects of conservatives and Republicans by producing and distributing television ads. And those ads would likely be placed on networks and stations specifically selected to reach a friendly audience – like maybe Fox.

Rupert Murdoch DonationsAn analysis of data obtained from Media Matters reveals that one of Murdoch’s beneficiaries, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, purchased over $20,000,000 in ads on local broadcast stations across the country. In five of those markets (three in the top ten) there are one or more stations owned by Fox Television. On those stations the Chamber bought $1,223,770 in ads. That means that News Corp earned $223,770 in profits on their million dollar donation to the Chamber.

Looking at this another way, News Corp gave the Chamber a million dollars to buy ads with. Then the Chamber gave the money right back to News Corp with 22% “interest.” So News Corp makes a healthy profit and the Chamber gets their ads broadcast for a 78% discount. And both get to further their shared political agenda. Remember also that the revenue on the analysis above is just from Fox-owned broadcast stations. It does not include ad buys on the cable Fox News Channel. Nor does it include revenue from any other recipient of Murdoch’s largesse, like the Republican Governor’s Association. So there may be millions more in earnings from these allegedly benevolent contributions flowing from the Murdoch media empire.

The fact that this is apparently legal is disturbing, to say the least. It is a thinly disguised kickback scheme. If any other company were to seek to inflate their balance sheet by covertly providing funds to a vendor so that the vendor could purchase that company’s products, somebody would be going to jail. How is this any different? In this scenario News Corp gets to book the revenue, the Chamber gets to air their ads, and the public is subjected to propaganda designed to sway the election. And because of the weakness of the press and the perversion of the current campaign finance legal landscape, the public is also precluded from learning about any of it.

There is the making of a crime syndicate in all of this. Murdoch is not the only media mogul who can employ this scheme. Throw in Richard Mellon Scaife and Philip Anshutz and a variety of other TV, radio, and newspaper barons, and there is potential for significant manipulation and deception through collusion between wealthy media corporations and powerful political operators.

The lesson here is that the media is in need of serious reform, along with campaign finance regulations. If these matters are not addressed adequately, we can expect to see more severe and more frequent corruption of our democratic processes. This is an issue that requires our nation’s immediate attention. And it’s an issue that should be pursued by a true nonpartisan alliance of Americans devoted to fair elections and a free press. The media and political bosses exploiting these loopholes think that the people are too lazy and/or stupid to notice and to challenge them. Are they right?


Glenn Beck Goes Full Blown Contrailer

Posted by on November 20, 2010 at 2:06 pm. 6 Comments :

These are boom days for conspiracy theories. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one. And who do you think killed the cat? Hmm?

We’ve seen the Birthers who demand to see President Obama’s birth certificate. We’ve seen the Truthers who allege that the U.S. government was in on 9/11. We’ve seen the Tenthers who cite the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution as justification for declaring everything from health care to income taxes as unconstitutional.


Now we have the debut of the Contrailers. Let me have Contrailer Creator Glenn Beck explain it to you:

Did you see the story today about the Chinese missiles and military? How many submarines they’re buying and how many missiles they have? And how they can destroy everything here in America with their missiles?

Do you really believe that that was an airplane contrail off the coast of California? Do you really believe that? Really?

That was a two stage missile. And don’t take that from Glenn Beck. Take that from Glenn Beck who knows an awful lot of people in the military.

Who launched that missile? Do you thinks it’s the military? I told you when that happened I don’t know enough about missiles.

Oh I do now. Oh I do now. And I talked to some military experts who know all about missiles.

What they’re telling you on television is bullcrap.

Really? That’s an airplane. Hmm. That’s an airplane. Shooting right out of the water. That’s an airplane. Why is it that it had the little…It had the little flame at the end?

I mean I lived in Florida. I’ve seen space shuttles launch before.

Come on. Two stage missile. That’s what that was.

Beck goes on to offer his theory for what the mysterious trails were:

China launches a missile to let everyone in the world know, including the United States of America, and especially the president of the United States of America, know how impotent you are.

There you have it. China somehow managed to navigate a submarine into the Los Angeles harbor without anyone catching on. Then they fired off an ICBM into the Pacific. And they took that risk and expense in order to emasculate the President. Makes perfect sense. Except for this.

You do know that insanity runs in his family, don’t you?