| Glenn Beck: I could give a flying crap about the political process. […] We’re an entertainment company.
On the surface, it appears that these are stipulations that the ideological prejudice of Fox News is a calculated ploy to garner the sort of devoted viewers that translate into higher ratings. If that’s true, then Fox’s viewers ought to feel manipulated and insulted by this blatant exploitation, not to mention the offense at having been deliberately misinformed.
However, there may be an entirely different reason for these recent assertions. Fox has been taking a considerable amount of heat lately for their glaringly unbalanced and unprofessional coverage of the news. They are losing advertisers on some of their top programs. There are thoughtful conservatives expressing their distaste for the hysterical extremism the network has come to represent. And they are becoming the laughing stock of broadcast journalism.
Consequently, it may be the intention of the Fox hierarchy to separate themselves from their disreputable and embarrassing departure from ethical journalism. And by asserting that their mission the whole time was to provide entertainment and increase ratings, they think they can shield themselves from the charges of shoddy and biased reporting. They are saying, in effect, that they have not been taking sides politically, they have merely been staging a performance aimed at an audience hungry for theater.
That’s a lose/lose argument. In effect they are conceding that they produce shoddy journalism, but they’re only doing it to lure gullible viewers. So this argument shows neither an appreciation for ethical reporting, nor respect for their audience. And the sad thing is that their audience will never accept or understand this, even if they were to hear about it. Which is unlikely if they stay tuned to Fox News.
Personally, I don’t buy this argument. While it is obvious that Fox plays to the gut for entertainment value, the political bias runs so deep that it could not possibly be incidental. So in the end, Fox is guilty of both exploitation and partisanship. It’s the worst of both worlds.
In the journalism game it is often pointed out that bias in reporting is as evident in slanted content as it is in the editorial decisions as to what gets in the paper or on the air. In other words, if you watch Bill O’Reilly interview uber-rightist media critic Bernie Goldberg, you can probably recognize the bias in that coverage. But you won’t witness the inverse bias of lefty media critic Jeff Cohen because O’Reilly won’t invite him in for an interview. The bias that O’Reilly is engaging in is his decision to filter out people like Cohen altogether.
Of course, it is much easier to observe bias when reading or watching a story than it is by having to figure out what has been kept from you. Especially because you often don’t know what you don’t know.
Fox News is adept at the discretionary editorial approach to bias. That’s why they regularly feature folks like Goldberg or Karl Rove or Ann Coulter, but rarely if ever give time to Michael Moore or Paul Krugman. And it isn’t restricted to personalities. Fox News serves as a veritable publicity machine for the Tea Party movement. However, a recent immigration reform rally in Washington that far exceeded the attendance of many Tea Parties was virtually ignored by Fox. Even in stories they deem worthy of coverage, they exercise a selective process for what their viewers are exposed to.
For instance, last February brought record low temperatures and snow storms to much of the east coast, including the Fox studios in New York. Everyone on the network took that as evidence that Global Warming was a hoax that couldn’t possibly be defended by anyone who had gone out of doors. How could climate change science be accurate if it was snowing outside during winter, they wondered on show after show? Of course, climate and temperature are two different things, but that played no part in their analysis. It was simply about the weather at the time.
So why have their been no reports on Fox in the past week that corroborate climate change science considering that the temperature in New York has just hit record highs? Obviously, if it is hot outside, and it isn’t even summer yet, the planet must be dangerously heating up. The reason you won’t see that story is because Fox News only jumps to conclusions that conform to their prejudices.
In another example, Fox News went to great lengths to criticize President Obama’s economic record when he had only been in office less than two months. They dubbed the market decline from inauguration day on January 20, through February “Obama’s Bear Market.”
In the following month of March the market gained over 1,300 points in a record setting advance, yet Fox News found an appropriately derogatory label: Obama’s Bear Market Rally. And now, after a year that saw a 36% rise in the market, Fox News isn’t even reporting on it all. Well, Neil Cavuto did do a commentary on how he was wrong about the administration’s policies, noting that the economy was performing quite well. He itemized actual market metrics that validated the improving environment. But he ended it with a smirk and a nod to the date: April Fools Day. And even though the data he presented was accurate, he turned the whole thing into a joke and scoffed at the notion that he would never say such positive things about this administration. There was no further discussion of the past year’s rapid market ascent.
That, my friends, is selective editing at its worst. If the facts of a story are contrary to your partisan prejudices, just refrain from reporting the story in way, shape, or form. Plus, no one can accuse you of inserting biases into a report that you never made. It’s a win/win for unethical media douche bags.
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The way you can tell if a protest is effective is when the target of the action can’t stop complaining about it. For two days in a row, Glenn Beck has devoted valuable airtime to castigating the proponents of an advertiser boycott that began last year in response to Beck calling President Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred of white people.”
For Beck to divert so much time from fabricating paranoid conspiracy theories to fabricating smears on his perceived enemies is revealing. His anxiety could not be more apparent, even as he pretends that the efforts directed against him are making him happy:
“The fact is, I haven’t felt this good and positive in a long time. Why? Because the boycott attempts are the most transparent AstroTurf attacks I have ever seen or ever heard of.”
Ever? The truth is that the boycotts were initiated by a very small group that most people (including me) had never heard of. Color of Change began the effort with a small email list and a campaign to communicate with Beck’s advertisers. This shoestring effort produced surprising results, getting more than 100 advertisers to refuse to permit their commercials on Beck’s show. [Note: StopBeck later joined the effort further enhancing its effectiveness]
Beck spent the majority of his rebuttal inventing a plot that went all the way up to the White House. The first brick thrown by Beck was at his perennial nemesis, Van Jones. However, while Jones was a co-founder of Color Of Change, he left the organization two years prior to the Beck boycott. That didn’t stop Beck from building his cloud castle of hate.
He then tied Jones to Rev. Jim Wallis of the Sojourners. However, Wallis had nothing to do with the advertiser boycott, then or now. Wallis entered the picture after Beck took an astonishingly stupid stand against social justice and advised his listeners to “run” from any church that advocated it. Wallis responded by calling for Christians who believe in the venerable Christian practice of social justice to run from Glenn Beck.
And of course, Beck had to inject his distaste for working Americans by slandering unions. So he tethered Andy Stern to the boycott effort, although Stern and his SEIU had no part in the year-old boycott until about two weeks ago when they signed on with a new push by MoveOn.org.
After this hallucinatory construction of a widespread cabal attacking him, Beck capped it off with a wild accusation that it was a high level plot that the President was “coordinating from the Oval Office”:
“Is it possible, maybe, that pointing out every night that there are radicals, Marxists, and communists, in the White House, maybe that struck a nerve? Has someone decided that they must destroy my career and silence me because we’ve stumbled onto something? […] Has there ever been a case in American history…where an American president administration tried to destroy the livelihood of a private citizen with whom they disagree. Can’t think of any.”
Beck’s paranoia led to this declaration that nothing like this had ever happened before. He then immediately contradicted himself by comparing it to Richard Nixon’s famous “enemies list.” The only problem with that comparison is that Nixon’s list was documented and Beck’s delusions still only exist in his twisted cranium. What’s more, Nixon sought to use the power of the government against his opponents, but the Beck boycott relies entirely on the efforts of individual citizens engaging in free expression. Nevertheless, Beck elevates this to an absurd altitude wherein he literally compares himself with victims of Nazi atrocities:
“Where’s the media? Do the rest of you in this business think it’s gonna stop with me? Really? Once they get me what happens to you? Is there absolutely no chance whatsoever that you might be a target at some point in the future? What is that poem…First they came for the Jews and I stayed silent…”
Now they are coming for Glenn Beck. It is so like Beck to manifest his Messianic complex in this fashion. He is the persecuted one that suffers for his congregation. And his stylings are getting more televengelical and Apocalyptic by the day. Witness this fire and brimstone sermon:
It is a bizarre world. It is an upside down, inside out, quantum physics world. […] It is the eve of destruction in America.
I believe in God. I believe rights come from man, and this Constitution, and the founding of this nation, were divinely inspired. These are God’s rights and God’s freedoms.
If we appreciate those rights, if we do the right thing […] we are going to have to pay the consequence for our living and mistreating these rights. But in the end, have no fear, because nothing will thwart Him. Because these are His rights. This was His Constitution. This was His country for His purposes, not ours. And nothing…nothing…will thwart Him in the end.
Hallelujah. This may be the first time I have heard anyone declare that the Constitution was “divinely inspired.” To my knowledge, it has not been included in any version of the Bible. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have not been beatified, nor is George Washington a saint. But in Beck’s mind a new holy doctrine has been proclaimed. One that permitted human slavery and denied women the right to vote. If the Constitution was divinely inspired, then what right did later generations have to amend it? Were they also the servants of God? And if so, did God screw up when he ratified Prohibition or the right to levy income taxes?
I have said this before, and it is all too apparent that it must be repeated: I genuinely hope that the people who care for Glenn Beck get him the help that he so obviously requires. It is way too tempting for his family and his producers and his hangers on, to hold back and revel in the riches he generates for them. But they will surely regret it when he self-destructs and splatters them all with the blood of their greed.
Now I’m sounding a little Biblical. And so I speaketh not further for the time is at hand for me to shuteth up. For now…..
The chairman of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has endured many decades as a right-wing purveyor of tabloid pseudo-news enterprises around the world. His power and influence has been felt in the halls of governments and the boardrooms of corporations. His opinions have been sought after and received with great deference. But that’s all over now.
In an appearance at a forum for the public affairs TV series, The Kalb Report, Murdoch exhibited clear signs that he has lost touch with reality. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post was there and reported some examples of Murdoch’s mental decline. It begins with the ludicrous assertion that the staff at his competitors MSNBC and CNN “tend to be Democrats” but that his own Fox News presenters “are not Republicans.” He did not, however, bother to identify a single Democrat at his rivals’ networks, and when pressed, he was also unable to name one on his own.
More importantly, Murdoch seems to have completely forgotten that he employs the most recent vice-presidential candidate of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, as well as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee. And let’s not forget other avowed Republican Fox Newsers Karl Rove, Rick Santorum, Dana Perino, Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris, Laura Ingraham, John Bolton, Dan Senor, Linda Chavez, and Oliver North. Fox is lousy with Republicans, but in his diminished capacity Murdoch is so confused about the political affiliation of his crew that he can declare aloud and in public that there aren’t any such people working for him.
In another departure from reality, Murdoch was asked if it was ethical for Fox to promote the Tea Party movement. For anyone paying attention it is clear that Fox became a virtual publicity machine for the Tea Baggers.
They aired numerous interviews of Bagger spokespeople including their chief strategist and fundraiser, Dick Armey. They had reporter Griff Jenkins riding along on the Tea Party Express bus. They dispatched their top anchors, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, and Neil Cavuto, to host Tea Party events across the nation. They even branded branded some of the events as “FNC Tea Parties.” But Murdoch’s response to the inquiry was rife with bewilderment:
“No. I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party. But I’d like to investigate what you are saying before condemning anyone.”
Either he never watches his own network or his memory and comprehension skills have utterly collapsed. He must also not be paying much attention to that Internet thing. For several months Murdoch has been promising to put all of his online news content behind a pay wall. He has spoken out harshly against what he deems theft by news aggregators like Google. Never mind that he can stop Google from indexing his web sites anytime he wants with just a few lines of code. At the Kalb forum he reiterated his opinion saying…
“We will be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that’s it. Followed by a subscription form.”
You would hope that someone on his staff (or his nurses) would advise him that that is exactly what they do now. If you search Google for news content, you will get only a headline and a couple of sentences. Then you can click the link to go to the full story on the content owner’s web site. Contrary to his misconception, this drives traffic to Murdoch’s site, it doesn’t steal anything. And what Murdoch doesn’t acknowledge (if he even remembers) is that he owns web sites that actually do steal content from other news sources. His Fox Nation, for example, is a news aggregator that does not pay for the articles it features, but reprints much more than a couple of sentences from them – sometimes the whole article.
The general tone of this interview ought to be disturbing to Murdoch’s family and doctors. He really appears to be suffering from an acute cognitive failure. These are not the sort of logical missteps made by someone who has built an international media empire. Murdoch is either profoundly distracted or is losing the mental acuity to perform his duties. It may be time for him to consider stepping aside and let his kids screw up the world for awhile.
Addendum: Additional reporting on the Kalb interview reveals that Murdoch…
- …doesn’t consider Sarah Palin to be a journalist. (Duh!)
- …believes that Greta Van Susteren is a Democrat. (Never mind her adoration of Sarah Palin for whom her husband is an advisor)
- …thinks the iPad will save newspapers. (Right. A $600.00 device possessed by a fraction of American households, that will charge extra for subscriptions, is going to replace a news source that was delivered for pennies a day to any American doorstep)
Keep ’em coming, Rupert.
In a stunning demonstration of clarity, another right-winger has had an epiphany with regard to the influence of Fox News on the public at large and on the Republican Party in particular. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn is joining David Frum in questioning the primacy of Fox News. This is an enlightened stance for the arch-conservative senator because it recognizes the reality that for the past few years, as Fox’s ratings have increased, Republican support has fallen off a cliff. Last year I wrote a fairly detailed analysis of how Fox News is Killing the Republican Party where I noted that…
Fox has corralled a stable of the most disreputable, unqualified, extremist, lunatics ever assembled, and is presenting them as experts, analysts, and leaders. These third-rate icons of idiocy are marketed by Fox like any other gag gift (i.e. pet rocks, plastic vomit, Sarah Palin, etc.). […and that…] By doubling down on crazy, Fox is driving the center of the Republican Party further down the rabid hole. They are reshaping the party into a more radicalized community of conspiracy nuts. So even as this helps Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line, it is making celebrities of political bottom-feeders.That can’t be good for the long-term prospects of the Republican Party.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is not your ordinary Republican. He is amongst the most extreme faction of the fundamentalist wing of the party. He is a member of the secretive politico-Christian cabal known as “The Family,” and a resident of its scandal-plagued C-Street House. He is a fierce opponent of abortion. He endorsed Alan Keyes for president in the 2000 Republican primary. He is a prolific abuser of the senatorial “hold” that allows members to anonymously block legislation. And now this icon of rightist orthodoxy is committing the ultimate sacrilege. It began with a response to a constituent at a town hall gathering who complained that the health care bill would result in people going to jail for not purchasing insurance. Coburn corrected her her saying that…
“The intention is not to put anybody in jail. That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that aint the intention.”
Coburn also defended the conservatives’ favorite target for demonization, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, against the knee-jerk hecklers in the crowd. He insisted that she was a “nice person” and then again called out Fox News for cultivating a culture of incivility:
“What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what’s going on and make a determination yourself. So don’t catch yourself being biased by FOX News that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don’t know what they don’t know.”
But Coburn didn’t stop there. He went on to encourage his audience to seek out diverse sources of news and information and not to be locked in to the narrow perspective of a single, agenda-driven enterprise. He appealed to them to…
“…stay informed on the issues. Don’t just watch Fox News or CNN. Watch ’em both. […] I do a lot of reading every day and I’m disturbed that we get things like what this lady said, and others have said on other issues that are so disconnected to what I know to be the facts. And that comes from somebody that has an agenda that’s other than the best interests of our country.”
Coburn has just asserted that Fox’s agenda is unpatriotic. He may face some pushback from Sean Hannity on that. Glenn Beck may brand him a communist. But what we are witnessing here is not a political reversal by Coburn. He is still the ideological Dark-agist he has always been. What’s happening is that he has recognized the fact that Fox News has been demonstrably harmful – not to the interests of the country (which it has) – but to the interests of his Party. He is afraid that the fringe brigade will overtake the mainstream conservatism that he espouses and drive voters to the Democrats, the Tea Baggers, or discourage them from voting at all.
When someone as far right as Coburn sees this light, then the truth has floated up close enough to the surface that it will be hard for others to ignore. Including Fox News. If the mini-trend of Frum and Coburn (and Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson and …) continues we may see some programming changes at Fox. The question is which direction? If Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes want to advance their conservative interests, and those of the Republican Party, they had better tack hard to the center. Their current course is headed straight into a perfect storm of tea bags, birthers, McCartheyites, militias, and secessionists. But if they want to sustain their ratings dominance, they have to keep feeding the fanatics that make up their base.
Fox has been the king of the ratings hill for several years, yet that has not helped them electorally. It was in those years when Fox’s audience was expanding that Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. It was in those years that Barack Obama was elected president and Democratic congressional majorities increased. And most recently, Fox was unable to hold back passage of the health care bill despite incessant promotion of the anti-reform troops (pundits, politicians, and protesters) and a barrage of false reporting on the substance of the legislation. This couldn’t be clearer evidence of the conflict between Fox’s success as a television network and its success as a partisan public relations agency.
This is going to be interesting. The folks at Fox are as devoted to their wealth as they are to their agenda. In fact, the two are nearly inseparable. They use their wealth to advance their agenda, and they push their agenda to increase their wealth. But they are going to have a hard time threading this needle. It’s a choice between market position or issue advocacy. Or, put another way, it’s a choice between Glenn Beck or electoral victories. They can’t have both. The decision may tear them apart. There have already been sharp division between factions at Fox, most notably when Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law announced that he was “ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard…” for journalistic standards.
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.
Update: Sen. Coburn sought Bill O’Reilly’s absolution on Monday. His appearance on the program was a mixed bag in that Coburn tried to maintain his critical stance on Fox, but also kiss up to O’Reilly. O’Reilly, on the other hand was his idiotic self. He declared with absolute certainty that no one on Fox ever said that someone could go to jail for not having health care under the Obama plan. Of course, that was easily disproved. In fact, Glenn Beck said it on O’Reilly’s show. It don’t come funnier than this, folks.
If there’s one topic of study for which Rush Limbaugh can be regarded as an expert it’s character assassination. He has spent his career contriving dishonest assaults on his enemies that take the most vile form.
With regard to Barack Obama, Limbaugh started early by hoping that he would fail. Limbaugh expanded on that to accuse the President of being a socialist, a Marxist, and worse. He repeatedly asserts that Obama has an explicit desire to destroy America, the Constitution, and the values of faith and family that the nation embodies. If that isn’t character assassination, then I don’t know what is. Yet it is Limbaugh who is now whining to Politico about being the victim of the President’s wrath. In a CBS interview, Obama told Harry Smith that the vitriol of opponents like Limbaugh was troublesome. That seems to be a rather restrained description, but Limbaugh took great offense to what he portrayed as “constant attempts at character assassination.”
The funny thing is that Limbaugh should regard being considered troublesome by the President as a compliment. Isn’t it his intent to cause trouble for this administration? But he somehow has turned it into an insult. Even funnier is this bit of self-denial:
“I think the president is trying to distract me, to get me talking about ME on my show instead of talking about him and the regime’s agenda. But it won’t work. I’m wise to their tactics.”
But it did work. Limbaugh IS talking about himself. And if Obama wants to get Limbaugh to talk about himself he only needs to remember this one thing: The secret to getting Limbaugh to talk about himself is to just let him talk (preferably with a microphone nearby). Limbaugh spends a majority of his airtime talking about himself. He even continued doing it in his comments to Politico, describing himself as being “on the top of the mountain” of opposition to the administration. He can’t stop talking about himself, and the last thing he needs is provocation from the President.
Limbaugh’s pathological unawareness of his self-obsession is manifested in much of his hypocritical rhetoric. He simply cannot correlate his commentary with his own actions. Amidst the widespread reports of escalating hostilities within the fringe conservative community, Limbaugh had a warning for Tea Partiers from whom he says the country is being stolen:
“So you tea party people, I’m sure you know this, but they are trying to get you provoked so that you act in ways similar to the way they’re accusing you. […] They have a morally superior view of their agenda and of themselves. They look at anything that opposes them as evil, and with evil you must do whatever it takes, ends justify the means to wipe it out.”
Isn’t this precisely the view that Limbaugh has toward the administration (which he has lately begun referring to as “the regime”)? Doesn’t he consider his positions to be morally superior and his opponents to be evil? He certainly has expressed an intention to do whatever it takes to defeat the left he hates so fiercely. During the Democratic National Convention in he 2008 he literally said “Screw the World: Riot in Denver!”
“I’m dreaming of riots in Denver. Remember 1968?”
“Riots in Denver at the Democrat convention would see to it we don’t elect Democrats – and that’s the best damn thing could happen for this country as far as anything I can think.”
“I mean, if people say what’s your exit strategery, the dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and that we have a replay of Chicago 1968, with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s the objective here.”
These are unambiguous directives to his listeners, who are not called “dittoheads” for nothing. These are every bit as bad as the Tea Bagger who recently advised his followers to go out and throw bricks through the windows of the offices or homes of Democratic lawmakers, and to engage in other sorts of vandalism and violence. These are the irresponsible edicts of a man who professes to obey the law, but asserts that his opponents do not:
“Something else about the Democrats, deep in their hearts they know that we are law-abiding people. They know that we don’t make messes. That’s why they’re trying to stoke lawbreaking behavior from the tea party people because they know that we obey the law. They don’t.”
Oh really? And inciting people to riot, to burn cars and throw bricks, is lawful behavior? Limbaugh is a despicable provocateur and he knows it. He is using a fabricated argument to project his perverse philosophy onto his perceived enemies. And, as usual, he is encouraging his feeble-minded followers to engage in activities that he himself is too cowardly to consider.
Limbaugh’s hypocrisy is classic, but his depraved licentiousness is completely off the scale of social decency and civility. And this attitude is by no means restricted to Limbaugh. Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the Fox News thugs, plus a variety of rabidly right-wing members of congress, are equally as culpable for the rancorous environment in the political atmosphere. No wonder there is so much vitriol wafting up in the steam from those tea cups.
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Columnist Cristina Corbin has wandered dangerously far away from the wingnut campground we know as Fox News. She