Megyn Kelly’s Kangaroo Court: Anita Hill Edition

Posted by on October 20, 2010 at 12:29 pm. 6 Comments :

On today’s episode of Megyn Kelly’s Court the subject was a bizarre phone call to Anita Hill from the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Virginia.

Hill received a voice mail on her office phone purporting to be from Ginny Thomas and asking that Hill apologize for “what you did with my husband.” That’s an odd phrasing that implies they did “something” together. Thomas also asked that Hill give a “full explanation,” as if several days of senate confirmation hearings about pubic hairs and Long Dong Silver weren’t sufficiently detailed.

Kelly and her panel took on this raging twenty year old scandal from a uniquely Fox News perspective. They didn’t address the possible motivation of Thomas reigniting this controversy after two decades. They didn’t discuss the propriety of the wife of sitting Supreme Court justice (and herself a Tea Bagging AstroTurf activist) making such a phone call in the first place. No, the issue that got Kelly fired up was that Hill had “called the police” on Thomas.

Well, as usual, Kelly is either lying or ignorant of the facts. Had she read the report that originated with ABC News she would have known that Hill “initially thought it was a prank.” And if it was “thought the authorities should know about it.” Hill clearly did not call the police on Thomas, she was concerned that it was somebody else. Yet Kelly’s Court was all over the phony notion that Hill had overreacted and turned Thomas in to the FBI.

Kelly then concluded the segment with her “ruling” on the case. Not surprisingly, Kelly exonerated Thomas and closed by stating, with typical Kelly indignation, that Thomas had done nothing wrong but that Hill had. This was an obvious allusion to Hill’s testimony regarding Justice Thomas’ alleged sexual harassment. So Kelly has now taken it upon herself to rule that Hill’s testimony was false despite having nothing to affirm that position.

In this one segment Kelly has impugned the integrity of Hill and asserted that she committed perjury. Kelly also misstated the course of events surrounding the phone call and how the authorities were notified. Consequently, my ruling is that Kelly is disreputable and dishonest purveyor of propaganda and should not be regarded as credible in any respect. Case closed.

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Top 10 Reasons George Soros Should Refuse To Debate Glenn Beck

Posted by on October 20, 2010 at 2:57 am. 5 Comments :

In a challenge dripping with sarcasm and scorn, Glenn Beck pretended to invite George Soros onto his show for a one-on-one debate. Of course, it was just another of the phony clown shows Beck puts on to the delight of his fans who think his act is real.

But just in case Soros had an afternoon free and, in a moment of weakness, thought it might be a hoot to jostle Beck’s diseased brain around for hour, I offer the following:

Top 10 Reasons George Soros Should Refuse To Debate Glenn Beck.

  1. Why would he waste an hour arguing with a third rate Muppet imitator?
  2. He’s already booked on The Lying Weasel Crybaby Hour.
  3. Sarah Palin and Byron Williams are hiding in the Green Room with chloroform and duct tape.
  4. He wants to see Beck debate Keith Olbermann first.
  5. Rupert and the other billionaires would make fun of him.
  6. The cast of Jersey Shore would be more challenging.
  7. He’s afraid of catching something before Obamacare kicks in.
  8. His facts are no match for Beck’s delusions.
  9. Being called a socialist 12 times a minute isn’t really a debate.

And the #1 Reason George Soros Should Refuse To Debate Glenn Beck…

  1. Glenn Beck will be there.

😉


Sign The DROP FOX Petition From Media Matters

Posted by on October 19, 2010 at 4:07 pm. 5 Comments :

Glenn Beck - There Will Be BloodMedia Matters is partnering with People for the American Way to apply some of that free market pressure on the companies who are sponsoring Glenn Beck’s crusade of terror.

Petition to tell major advertisers to DROP FOX!

This petition is in response to a recent event wherein a Beck fan, Byron Williams, was taken into custody after a shootout with police. Williams told the officers that he was on his way to kill people at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation after having been “informed” by Glenn Beck of their evil, un-American activities.

Subsequent to Williams’ arrest Beck has actually escalated his attacks on the Tides Foundation and others despite the obvious risk that his rhetoric poses. As David Brock of Media Matters says…

“Instead of recognizing the danger and taking appropriate action, Fox News is allowing and encouraging Beck’s violent rhetoric, abdicating the responsibility the public expects of a powerful broadcaster. That is why targeting Glenn Beck’s advertisers is no longer enough — we need to hold the entire network accountable.”

It is time to tell major advertisers to DROP FOX!

Please take a moment to sign the petition and then tell your friends. The campaign to get advertisers to stop placing ads on Beck’s show has been phenomenally successful with respect to persuading almost 300 advertisers to pull their ads. He is now sponsored by a motley crew of Gold peddlers, senior services, disaster profiteers, and other News Corp enterprises (who, of course, don’t pay).

However, there has not been much effect on Beck’s bosses at Fox News and News Corp who are arrogantly ignoring the voice of their viewers and their advertisers in order to persist in broadcasting irresponsible and dangerous content on their programs. That’s why it is so important now to make our voices heard in the upper floors of the Fox hierarchy. Don’t put it off. Sign the petition now. It could literally save lives.


PBS: A Bastion Of Conservative, White, Corporatist, Men

Posted by on October 19, 2010 at 12:49 pm. 3 Comments :

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has just released a study detailing the diversity, or lack thereof, on PBS programs. The narrow scope of opinion and representation is pretty disturbing. Here are some of their findings.

PBS Be More

  • The NewsHour’s guestlist was 80 percent male and 82 percent white, with a pronounced tilt toward elites who rarely “go unheard,” like current and former government and military officials, corporate representatives and journalists.
  • Viewers were five times as likely to see guests representing corporations (10 percent v. 2 percent) than representatives of public interest groups who might counterweigh such moneyed interests–labor, consumer and environmental organizations.
  • While Democratic guests outnumbered Republican guests nearly 2-to-1 in overall sources, Republicans dominated by more than 3-to-2 in the program’s longer format, live segments.
  • On segments focusing on the Afghan War, though polls show consistent majorities of Americans have opposed the war for more than a year, not a single NewsHour guest represented an antiwar group or expressed antiwar views.

PBS is a frequent target of right-wing critics who attempt to spread the myth that the media is liberal. The proof of the contrary is evident in statistics like these. And further evidence is found in the leadership of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the source for the majority of oversight and funding of PBS. The CPB’s President is Patricia Harrison. She is a former chair of the Republican National Committee and was personally selected for the job by the former chairman of CPB, the irrepressibly corrupt Kenneth Tomlinson.

These Bush appointees formed the cornerstone of the most politicized public broadcasting infrastructure in its history. They presided over the accumulation of conservative programming and made the work of legendary journalists like Bill Moyers infinitely more difficult. Moyers is no longer with PBS. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as surprise to see the stark imbalance that is now ingrained in the network’s core programming.

Harrison’s tenure will be ending next year. Let’s hope that President Obama appoints a more credible and fair steward for our public broadcasting system.


Newsweek Nails Tea Party Constitution Worship

Posted by on October 18, 2010 at 9:41 am. 9 Comments :

Tea CrusadersThis may be the best Conventional Media article of the year: How Tea Partiers Get the Constitution Wrong. It was written by Andrew Romano for Newsweek and is a fairly comprehensive look at how the Tea Party sanctifies the Constitution while simultaneously basking in their ignorance of it. It is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some choice excerpts:

“Tea Partiers engage with the Constitution in such a selective manner, and for such nakedly political purposes, that they’re clearly relying on it more as an instrument of self-affirmation and cultural division than a source of policy inspiration.”

This is demonstrated every time a Tea Bagger makes the fatuous claim that [fill in the blank] doesn’t appear in the Constitution. This can refer to anything from separation of church and state to gay marriage to income taxes. However, it never refers to the FAA, workplace safety, the minimum wage, or corporate welfare like farm subsidies or incentives to ship jobs overseas.

“In the current Congress, conservatives like Michele Bachmann have suggested more than 40 additions to the Constitution: a flag-desecration amendment; a balanced-budget amendment; a ‘parental rights’ amendment; a supermajority-to-raise-taxes amendment; anti-abortion amendment; an anti-gay-marriage amendment; and so on. None of these revisions has anything to do with the document’s original meaning.” […]

“The truth is that for all their talk of purity, politicians like Palin, Angle, and Miller don’t seem to be particularly concerned with matching their actual positions to the Constitution they profess to worship. For them, the sacred text serves a higher purpose.”

Tea Baggers are quick to gush their reverence for the original intent of the Constitution – slavery, sexism, and all. And they are just as quick to disparage it and rush to desecrate it with oppressive and irrelevant amendments that are contrary to its underpinnings of freedom.

“Like other fundamentalists, they seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture and the imagined past it supposedly represents. Like other fundamentalists, they see in their good book only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don’t sweat the details, and they ignore all ambiguities. And like other fundamentalists, they make enemies or evildoers of those who disagree with their doctrine.” […]

“The point is always the same: to suggest that the Constitution, like the Bible, decrees what’s right and wrong (rather than what’s legal and illegal), and to insist that only they and their ilk can access its truths. We are moral, you are not; we represent America, you do not. Theirs is the rallying cry of culture war.”

Umm…..Are you listening, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, et al?

“Thomas Jefferson put it best. In a letter to a friend in 1816, he mocked ‘men [who] look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched’“

The effort to transform the Constitution into a divinely inspired, holy document, and its authors into saints, is not new. I wrote about this last June in an article about the right-wing movement to advance the theory of American Exceptionalism, which is nothing more than warmed-over American Supremacy and just as repulsive as Hitler’s conception of a Master Race.

“[Beck] has declared that the Constitution was the result of divine inspiration and is as immutable as holy scripture. He regards the nation’s founders as saintly. One of those founders, Thomas Jefferson, expressly disagrees with Beck. On the matter of Constitutional immutability, Jefferson wrote that ‘…with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.’ That’s hardly an argument for strict constructionalism. And with regard to the divinity of himself and his contemporaries, Jefferson spoke disparagingly of the arrogance of one generation dictating the terms of existence to their heirs, castigating those who would ‘…ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.’“

It is encouraging to read an article like Romano’s in Newsweek. Hopefully it will be read and heeded by many more and this fallacious notion that the Tea Party has been ordained by God to restore our Constitution will be discarded for its arrogance and complete disconnection with reality.


NewsBusters Lies About Howard Dean Lying

Posted by on October 18, 2010 at 1:44 am. 4 Comments :

It may be time to start a regular feature about the recurring episodes of stupidity on the part of NewsBusters’ associate editor, Noel Sheppard. The latest example comes from his analysis of a debate between Liz Cheney (Dick’s spawn) and Gov. Howard Dean.

The NewsBusters column asserts that “Liz Cheney Exposes Howard Dean In Lie About His Connection To George Soros and MoveOn.org.” Sheppard helpfully provides video of the exchange and a transcript. The only problem is that these documents show that Dean was entirely truthful and that Sheppard and Cheney were the liars. Here is the relevant portion of the debate:

HOWARD DEAN (overlapping): We don’t want anybody buying elections.
LIZ CHENEY (overlapping): I mean George Soros started all of this with MoveOn.org–
HOWARD DEAN (overlapping): I know McCain-Feingold, they weren’t able buy elections.
LIZ CHENEY (overlapping): –which was a big backer of yours, Governor Dean. So I think that, you know–
HOWARD DEAN (overlapping): Who was a big backer of mine?
LIZ CHENEY: George Soros, MoveOn.org.
HOWARD DEAN (overlapping): No he wasn’t. No he wasn’t a big–
LIZ CHENEY: Governor Dean, I think that the notion–
HOWARD DEAN (overlapping): –neither– neither was MoveOn.org, as a matter of fact, just to set the record straight.

As we see in this exchange, Cheney asserted that George Soros and MoveOn were “big backers” of Dean. The Governor denies that. And this is where Sheppard barges in to declare that. “This was a flat out lie by Dean on national television.” Sheppard backs up his claim by revealing that Soros had contributed $1,000 to Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004, and that MoveOn had hosted a web page where Dean solicited donations.

Gov. Dean raised about $50 million for his 2004 primary campaign. Soros donated only $1,000 of that (or 0.002%), which is less than half the amount allowable ($2,500). As for MoveOn, Sheppard admits that they donated nothing at all to Dean. They merely permitted him to solicit their members for donations. Those donations would have been made by the individuals choosing to donate, not MoveOn, and there was no accounting for how much the members may have donated, if anything. But MoveOn donated $0.00.

It is on the basis of this that Sheppard asserted that Dean’s contention was “100 percent false.” However, Dean was actually 100 percent truthful because the facts, even as Sheppard told them, show that Soros and MoveOn were not “big backers” of Dean by any stretch of the imagination. Unless you define “big” as infinitesimally small. So, as it turns out, it’s Sheppard who is lying.

The remainder of the Dean/Cheney debate gave Sheppard additional opportunities for him to make a fool of himself. Cheney kept trying to put words in Dean’s mouth, to the effect that he and President Obama were saying that the Chamber of Commerce was paying for domestic campaign ads with foreign money. However, neither of them said that. The issue was whether the Chamber was receiving money from foreign entities (which they admit), and that because there is no disclosure of those receipts or how they are spent, there is no way to know whether the foreign funds were included in the campaign financing. It is a question of disclosure and transparency. There is a big difference between accusing the Chamber of using foreign funds in the election, and merely criticizing them for not disclosing their financing. It was the latter that Dean was asserting.

Sheppard and Cheney are either too dense to grasp that distinction, or too politically dishonest to acknowledge it – or perhaps a little of both. Cheney, of course, is a political operative and can be expected to spin arguments in her favor. But Sheppard fancies himself a media watchdog and, thus, reveals himself to be utterly disreputable and without credibility.

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Fox Cancels The Future Of All Civilization

Posted by on October 17, 2010 at 10:41 am. 3 Comments :

In a demonstration of precisely why giant media conglomerates must be regulated and broken up, Fox has escalated a contract dispute into an obscene abuse of power. Their action stems from faltering negotiations over fees paid to Fox by Cablevision, a New York area provider of cable TV service.

“Reports indicate that Fox Broadcasting Company, a subsidiary of News Corporation, is blocking Cablevision high-speed Internet customers from accessing Fox.com and Hulu content. Fox’s actions raise important questions about the future of the online video market and the public interest obligations of broadcasters.”

Indeed, it is questionable that Fox would seek to punish Internet users in an attempt to coerce a cable TV operator into forking over twice as much in fees as they presently pay. The Internet users are not a part of this dispute, but because Fox has corporate tentacles that reach around numerous media platforms, they feel empowered to abuse their position. So what’s next?

  • Fox Stops Broadcasting to Hotels And Bars To Keep Viewers From Watching Disputed Programming.
  • Fox Forbids Customers To Visit The Homes Of Friends And Watch Their Dish Network.
  • Fox Blocks Access To Yankee Stadium By Cable Subscribers.
  • Fox Erects Tower To interfere With Radio Broadcasting.
  • Fox Disables Dialysis Machine Of Cable Customer Watching Glee In Hospital Room.
  • Fox Releases Internet Virus To Attack Cable Viewers Of Fox Programs.
  • Fox Hires Al Qaeda To Fly Planes Into Cablevision Headquarters.

When companies control access to every pathway to media content the potential for this sort of abuse is too tempting for them to resist. Fox’s behavior is reprehensible. Cablevision’s Internet users have no part of the television dispute. The fact that Fox would deliberately seek to disrupt that service is a perfect example of why they must not be permitted to have that kind of tyrannical power. And that applies to Time Warner, Viacom, and Disney as well. It is also a foreboding preview of what can be expected from the pending Comcast/NBC merger.

The backstory on this concerns a demand by Fox that Cablevision pay almost twice as much for the same programming they presently provide. Cablevision says that the fees Fox is demanding are greater than those that Cablevision pays to all of their other local broadcasters combined. Furthermore, Cablevision has said that they would agree to comply with the findings of a third-party arbitrator, but Fox refuses to participate in such arbitration.

The channels involved in the dispute include FOX 5, My9, FOX Business Network, and National Geographic Wild. Fox News is not a part of these negotiations. It would be interesting to see what Fox would say if Cablevision decided to cut off Fox News anyway. It would certainly benefit viewers who would be freed from additional exposure to the lies and propaganda that make up most of Fox News.

Some late reports indicate that Fox will be restoring Internet service to Cablevision’s customers, but that doesn’t excuse their first response, nor relieve the risk of future misbehavior. These monopolistic conglomerates must be broken up.


Fox News Advertisers May Have Blood On Their Hands

Posted by on October 15, 2010 at 3:01 pm. 17 Comments :

The Mad BeckDrummond Pike, the founder and CEO of the Tides Foundation, wrote a letter to Fox News advertisers requesting that they withhold their ads from the network:

“I am writing to ask your company to take a simple step that may well save lives in the future. And it is not unimportant that taking this action will remove your company and its products from any connection to what could very likely be an unpleasant tragedy, should things remain as they are today. On behalf of my organization, and many others like it, I ask that you cease advertising on the Fox News Channel.”

This is a significant escalation from previous calls to withhold advertising from just Glenn Beck’s show. It is a much bolder strategy and long overdue. The wildly successful campaign by Color of Change and StopBeck has caused almost 300 companies to pull their ads from Beck. In the UK Beck has been running for eight months with ZERO ads, as all advertisers have abandoned the program.

However, none of this seems to have had much impact on Fox News and their decision to associate themselves with Beck. Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch have been unmoved by this demonstration of disgust for Beck’s hate mongering. It is, therefore, time to take it to the next level and demand that advertisers withhold their ads from all of Fox News and other News Corp enterprises. This letter by Pike is a good start that should inspire further action.

Pike is not a bystander in this debate. He was motivated to take this step as result of the constant hammering the Tides Foundation has endured from Beck. As a result of Beck’s dishonest and violent rhetoric, Pike and his staff nearly became victims of the inevitable result of such hostility. A Beck fan named Byron Williams was apprehended by police while he was on his way to kill people at Tides and the ACLU:

“Imagine, for a moment, that you were us and, had it not been for a sharp eyed highway patrolman, a heavily armed man in full body armor would have made it to your office with the intent to kill you and your colleagues. His motive? Apparently, it was because the charitable, nonpartisan programs we run are deemed part of a conspiracy to undermine America and the capitalist system, which is hogwash.”

Beck has not merely expressed a disagreement with Tides. He has attempted to associate it with a worldwide conspiracy against capitalism and freedom that includes ACORN, SEIU, health care reform, Eco-activists, Bill Ayres, George Soros, and of course, President Obama and his cadre of czars:

“Since his arrival at Fox in early 2009, Beck has repeatedly vilified Tides, suggesting we are intent on ‘creat[ing] a mass organization to seize power.’ He accuses the foundation of indoctrination and says we are ‘involved in some of the nastiest of the nasty.’ Beck tells viewers that Tides has ‘funneled’ money to ‘some of the most extreme groups on the left’ and that our mission is to ‘warp your children’s brains and make sure they know how evil capitalism is.’ In total, prior to the attempted rampage, Beck had attacked the Tides Foundation 29 times.”

There has been an enduring and sustained assault on people whom Beck regards as enemies of humanity. He calls them evil and associates them with Hitler and Stalin and Satan. He has called progressives a “cancer” that needs to be “cut out;” that they are vampires and that his viewers should “drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers.” He warns that his perceived enemies are deliberately going to fly the “plane” of state into the trees, and that they are “taking you to a place to be slaughtered.” He recently told his viewers that “violence is coming” and that there will be “nothing but ugly and destruction.”

And after all of this, Beck’s psychosis permits him to make disingenuous pleas for non-violence. In August of 2009, I wrote an article that noted how disconcerting it was that Beck has to so frequently admonish his congregation to refrain from violence. And if he is in a position to call on them to stand down, can he also order them to advance? But the main point I addressed is that Beck cannot be allowed to maintain that he is opposed to violence when he is inciting his disciples on a daily basis. It’s as if he were saying…

“HEY! There is a mob of rabid, pillaging, Satanists on their way to rape your daughters and kill the rest of you. It’s time to stand up and fight back against these hordes who threaten everything we hold dear. They have spit on your flag and blasphemed your God and now they are here for your honor and your lives. And, oh yeah, when they get here you should be ‘forceful, but peaceful’ with them. After all, I don’t believe in violence.”

Of course he doesn’t. He would never respond with force to an angry mob threatening him or his family. I wonder how then he would explain why he carries a gun with him when he goes to the movies. What does he intend to do with it? Would he use it on mugger even though he asserts that he would not use it on demonic hordes seeking to force America and the world into slavery?

These are deliberately mixed messages. Beck doesn’t want his words to result in him being blamed for instigating a violent revolution, although that’s precisely what his actions suggest he is doing. You simply can’t scare people into believing that they are being mortally threatened without expecting them to defend themselves. And this is something that Tides’ Pike recognizes when he concludes his letter by saying…

Starve the Beast

“The next ‘assassin’ may succeed, and if so, there will be blood on many hands. The choice is yours.”

It is now incumbent on all of us to require that the advertisers subsidizing Beck make that choice. The companies that pay for Beck’s divisive and destructive sermonizing, and the network that carries it, do not deserve our patronage. This is an argument I’ve been making for years (see Starve the Beast) and I am glad that the Tides Foundation is signing on, although I am saddened by the events that precipitated it.

[Update:] Media Matters has started a petition aimed at News Corp shareholders. Take a moment to sign it and then tell your friends. News Corp took a beating today at their shareholder meeting over the multimillion dollar donations to the GOP and the Chamber of Commerce.


Glenn Beck Pimps Chamber Of Commerce – Screws Tea Party

Posted by on October 14, 2010 at 3:47 pm. 9 Comments :

Fox News has lately been escalating their support for rightist, GOP candidates and causes. They have Sean Hannity and Dick Morris traveling around the country to stump for Republicans. They have Karl Rove raising tens of millions for GOP advertising. They even have prospective presidential candidates like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee on their payroll.

And now they have Glenn Beck pitching for the uber-rightist U.S. Chamber of Commerce (CoC). The same CoC that received $1 million from Beck’s boss Rupert Murdoch. The same CoC that is spending over $75 million in support of Republicans running for Congress.

On his radio program today, Beck announced that he was donating $10,000 to the CoC and urged his listeners to donate as well. He declared that he “would like to have this the largest day of fundraising for the Chamber of Commerce ever.” In his pitch he misinformed his audience saying that the US CoC was made up of the struggling local businesses that are downtown. That’s false. The US CoC is not affiliated with municipal CoCs around the country.

Beck’s pitch was largely based on the opposition to the CoC expressed by the administration. And if the administration is against it, well by golly, he’s fer it. However, the administration’s position is not really anti-CoC. It is against the solicitation of unlimited funds, some of which come from foreign entities, without disclosure. But Beck apparently is in favor of secret foreign enterprises influencing our domestic elections. He fervently expressed his affinity by saying that “They are us.”

Unless “us” are giant multinational corporations, I don’t think we are really them. What’s interesting about this appeal is that the CoC was a vocal supporter of some of the initiatives that Beck believes are destroying the country. The CoC backed the passage of the TARP legislation:

“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbied for the creation of the TARP program and continues to support efforts to improve the program to ensure its success.”

And in urging the Congress to pass the Stimulus Bill, the CoC said…

“The global economy is in uncharted and dangerous waters and inaction from Washington is not an option. No package of this size can be perfect but we need a bill that will unlock capital markets, free up credit, and create momentum in the economy.”

TARP and the Stimulus Bill have been castigated by Beck as socialism and Nazism and harbingers of a future of government domination and slavery. They have been the backbone of his delusional tirades against an administration that he is convinced is purposefully trying to bring the nation to ruin. They have been roundly rejected by the Tea Party crowd as evidence of government and business corruption. Yet Beck is now shelling out $10K (a pittance for him) to one of the biggest backers of these policies, and urging his congregants to cough up their hard-earned money as well. Why?

Because Beck is, and always has been, a shill for Republicans and the conservative agenda. He regularly uses his program to advance the campaigns of GOP candidates and never misses an opportunity to impugn a Democrat. His behavior is perfectly aligned with that of his employer, Fox News.

This solicitation on behalf of an organization of big business lobbyists is a slap in the face to his Tea Party followers. If they had the ability to conduct their own analysis they would be horrified at his dishonesty and manipulation. Good thing for him that most of them can’t think for themselves and will follow his advice like the blind and obedient disciples they are. Let’s just hope that the rest of the American populace is paying better attention and has more common sense.


Fox Nation -The White Trash Pravda- Squelches Free Speech

Posted by on October 14, 2010 at 1:09 pm. 8 Comments :

Most fair observers already know that Fox Nation is a cesspool of right-wing propaganda and deliberately dishonest attacks on Democrats and progressives. Their blatantly biased approach to news would embarrass any conscientious journalist. The Fox Nation is the perfect communications model for other nations like China or North Korea. They are publishing what would best be described as the White Trash Pravda.

Fox Nation CensorshipIt appears that their comments section is no more fair and/or balanced than their so-called news. Despite the fact that their logo says “All Opinions Welcome,” the truth is that only opinions that don’t challenge their readers’ sensitive preconceptions are permitted. When attempting to post comments there I am now being rejected with a message that says “Your comment must be approved by a moderator before appearing here.” Then, of course, it never appears. And my comments are always civil and relevant to the topic.

For instance, in an item about Bill O’Reilly’s appearance on The View, the Fox Nationalists noted with shock that Whoopie Goldberg and Joy Behar walked off the stage in response to O’Reilly’s bigoted assertion that “Muslims killed us” on 9/11. Here is my comment on this:

“How come no one on this site seems to have noticed that O’Reilly backed down and apologized for his outrageous bigotry?

He was wrong and even HE knew it. Yet most of the comments here are supporting the bigotry for which he apologized.”

This doesn’t even seem to me like a particularly controversial remark. It simply states a fact that was being ignored by the Fox Nation community. Nevertheless, I made two additional attempts to express this opinion and all were rejected by the Fox Nationalist censors. Comments that were approved included references to the the show’s hosts as “bitches” and to all Muslims as terrorists.

That should tell us something about Fox and their audience. They are clearly afraid of engaging in an open dialog. They have determined that their arguments are too weak to undergo debate and that their readers are too stupid to be allowed exposure to free thought. But when all you have on your side is disinformation and lies, I suppose it’s necessary to shield your feeble flock from frightening concepts like the truth.

This principle is in play throughout the Fox News empire. And it is why Fox News is so harmful to the state of discourse and to democracy.