Fox News Hires CNN’s Washed Out Media Analyst Howard Kurtz

Posted by Mark NC on June 20, 2013 at 3:15 pm. 12 Comments :

Chalk up another acquisition by Fox News of an outcast from some other news network. As has been noted here at News Corpse, Fox “seems to regard the discards of other networks as their richest vein of new talent.” Today it was announced that Fox has scooped up CNN’s media analyst Howard Kurtz, who was recently censured by CNN, and jettisoned by The Daily Beast, for “sloppy” reporting that disparaged Jason Collins, the newly out NBA player. So of course Fox News would leap at the chance to add Kurtz to their roster. Other recent rejects by CNN that have joined Fox include Erick Erickson, Lou Dobbs, and Tucker Carlson.

Kurtz has a spotty reputation at CNN where he has, on occasion, had some profound commentaries that expose media hypocrisy and bias. But he has just as often proven to be a tool of the Washington villagers who dismisses serious failings and neglects the shortcomings of his colleagues. He is the ultimate insider who is married to a right-wing PR consultant, a fact that he does not disclose when reporting on related matters. In statements marking the new relationship, Fox and Kurtz were typically effusive of one another:

Fox VP Michael Clemente: Howie is the most accomplished media reporter in the country.
Kurtz: I’m excited to be bringing my independent brand of media criticism to Fox News. […] I hope to add a new dimension to Fox’s coverage and have some fun while diving into the passionate debates about the press and politics.

Not everyone at Fox has the same opinion of Kurtz as Clemente does. Sean Hannity sneered that Kurtz was a “nitwit,” and railed that “I don’t like him. He’s full of crap. He thinks he’s a sanctimonious, self-righteous, phony establishment journalist.” Bill O’Reilly, upset that Kurtz had criticized his epically erroneous analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision on ObamaCare, said “Kurtz does the bidding of Media Matters, and, I don’t know, maybe I should just ignore that and, as you say, move along down the highway, but it certainly disturbs me a little bit.” It should be noted that associating Kurtz with Media Matters is about the worst thing that O’Reilly could ever say about anyone. He regards Media Matters as “vicious, far-left, dishonest, smear merchants.” The question now is, will Kurtz provide fair and balanced coverage of those programs as a Fox News anchor?

On Fox, Kurtz will assume the anchor role on Fox News Watch, a weekend program that is distinguished by its panel of five devout conservatives against one alleged liberal. The five conservatives (Judith Miller, James Pinkerton, Cal Thomas, Richard Grenall, and host Jon Scott) are weekly regulars while the “liberal” seems to be whatever phony they can manage to scrape up that week. If they stick to this format it should be an easy transition for Kurtz who is used to covering for Fox’s biased reporting.

Full disclosure: I was once mentioned in a Kurtz column when he was with the Washington Post. Kurtz was aggregating reactions from a Laura Bush speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

The colorfully named News Corpse says the media should take a deep breath:

“The humor-challenged media is tripping all over itself to to praise the First Lady’s appearance before the White House Correspondents’ Association. Apparently their funny bone twitches uncontrollably at the sight of Laura being able to read from a sheet of prepared jokes. The talk in the television press has ranged from, ‘ Get this woman her own show .’ to, ‘ Maybe she should run against Hillary .’. . . .

“I suppose it’s too much to ask that the people who brought us Monica Lewinsky, Chandra Levy, Michael Jackson, Terri Schiavo, the Old Pope, the New Pope, and Jennifer ‘Runaway Bride’ Wilbanks, would suddenly chose to avoid blowing things up beyond all sense of proportion.”

Colorfully named? Maybe Kurtz will get the joke now that he is working in the News Corp empire. And just so nobody forgets, this is what Fox News thinks about their new colleague:

Bill O’Reilly Can’t Stop Embarrassing Himself: The Drone Edition

Posted by Mark NC on February 14, 2013 at 11:41 am. 2 Comments :

Last week Bill O’Reilly demonstrated how utterly inept he and his staff were when he asked “You heard anything on NBC about the drones?” Then he answered his own question saying “Neither have I. Neither has my staff.” As it turns out it was actually NBC who broke the story that had spurred the media dialogue on the subject.

However, O’Reilly stiffened his back and insisted that he was still right with a tortured explanation that talking about drones was not talking about drones. On last night’s program he wandered further into delusional territory during an interview with Howard Kurtz, who had previously criticized O’Reilly about his not noticing NBC’s role in the coverage of drones. O’Reilly charged Kurtz with hypocrisy and accused him of…

“…confusing hard news reporting about drones with the New York Times editorial page, which hasn’t condemned, as far as I know, in any great measure as they did with waterboarding, the use of it. What we were clearly talking about here was why the left doesn’t condemn killing terrorists with drones.”

As you might expect, O’Reilly stuck his massive foot into his even bigger mouth yet again. Nearly a year ago, well before this current dust up, the Times published an editorial titled “Too Much Power for a President.” The very first paragraph reads…

“It has been clear for years that the Obama administration believes the shadow war on terrorism gives it the power to choose targets for assassination, including Americans, without any oversight. On Tuesday, The New York Times revealed who was actually making the final decision on the biggest killings and drone strikes: President Obama himself. And that is very troubling.”

The Times goes on to say…

“No one in that position should be able to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners located far from a battlefield — depriving Americans of their due-process rights.”

So much for the Times not condemning drones. Even worse, O’Reilly actually contradicted his own premise that liberals have not been critical of Obama’s drone policy despite their criticism of Bush’s waterboarding and torture tactics. In the opening of this segment O’Reilly explicitly acknowledged that liberals were openly opposing Obama’s CIA director nominee over this very issue.

“Will counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan become the head of the CIA? He testifies on Capitol Hill tomorrow, but some liberals don’t like him because he is the director of the drone program that kills terrorists from the sky.”

O’Reilly needs to explain how liberals can be hypocrites for not speaking out against drones when they are, in fact, speaking out and O’Reilly himself has heard it and used it to introduce his story. He may also want to explain how he missed the New York Times editorial hammering the President on drones, but still went on the air to say the Times never criticized Obama. His loathing for depraved lefties was palpable as he piled on his rage:

“This is about one thing. Hypocrisy. You leftists screaming about waterboarding yet they’re muted about killing with drones because they’re in the tank for Barack Obama.”

Right! Leftists like the New York Times, Rachel Maddow, Glenn Greenwald, etc. are all in the tank for Obama even while they harshly slam him for deploying drones. It should also be noted that another news organization actually did mute the drone story – Fox News. Therefore they must also be in the tank for Obama.

How many times does O’Reilly have to get virtually everything wrong before people will take notice that he is just blabbering old fool who can’t form a coherent argument on any subject? If he had the capacity to feel shame he might hole himself up in a cabin in Idaho for the remainder of the decade. Unfortunately, his prodigious ego will ensure that he will continue to misinform his audience and whine pitifully when someone tries to point out his mistakes. And somehow this gets ratings for Fox. Well, I guess if people will watch Honey Boo Boo, they will watch anything.

Fox News Deliberately Low-Balled Sarah Palin According To Reliable Sources (CNN)

Posted by Mark NC on January 28, 2013 at 3:01 am. 8 Comments :

Much has been made of the news that Tea Party queen Sarah Palin and Fox News, the cable network that served as the PR agency for the Tea Party, have parted ways. The reporting generally implied that Palin had turned down Fox’s offer to renew her contract. That is, in all likelihood, exactly what happened.

However, contract negotiations are more complex than that. And now we have reporting from CNN’s Howard Kurtz that fleshes out some of the ambiguities of the original stories. On his program Reliable Sources, Kurtz expanded on the matter by saying…

“My reporting shows that Fox News did offer Sarah Palin a new contract, but it is what I would call a low-ball offer, significantly less, a fraction of the million dollars a year she had been paid.”

In other words, Fox deliberately made an offer that they knew Palin would reject because they had no interest in retaining her beyond her current contract. As speculated previously here at News Corpse, Fox probably “offered her a moose burger and parking validation to re-up – and even that would have been more than she’s worth.” After all, why would Fox continue to overpay someone about whom Fox CEO Roger Ailes reportedly said he thinks is an idiot?

Palin’s star has been fading fast. Fox News only posted a modified AP story about the separation on their web site. Fox Nation, known for its rabid partisanship and rank dishonesty, didn’t report on it all. As evidence of Palin’s rapidly declining value, her first post-Fox stop was at the Internet’s home of doctored videos and right-wing propaganda, Breitbart News. There she answered a couple of vacant questions from BreitBrat Stephen Bannon, the sycophantic producer of the fawning Palin crockumentary, “The Undefeated” (the most ironically named box office bomb ever, considering it chronicles one of modern history’s most frequently defeated political failures).

In response to Bannon’s query about what she planned to do next, Palin had no answer other than vagaries about her desire to quit “preaching to the choir.” She spoke of “sharing more broadly the message of the beauty of freedom” to a larger audience. She didn’t give any indication of where she would find an audience receptive to her wingnuttery that she thinks is larger than Fox News from which she was just ousted. The narrow appeal of her conservative extremism is unlikely to find much acceptance beyond the tiny choir that is currently singing from her warped hymnal.

Then Bannon asked her where she thinks the country stands today and she launched into a dirty laundry list of every worn out criticism the right has lobbed at Obama for four years. She spoke of deficits and unemployment – problems that resulted from George Bush’s mismanagement of the economy and have improved under Obama. Of course, she also included fabricated controversies about ObamaCare, Benghazi, and gun control, that are a staple of the right’s outrage machine.

Palin told BreitBrat Bannon that “Conservatism didn’t lose.” She blames the 2012 GOP debacle entirely on Mitt Romney, despite the fact that he ran as a “severely conservative” candidate embracing every position held dear to the Republican far-right fringe. And she declares that “we haven’t begun to fight! But we delight in those who underestimate us.” In that regard she must be filled to the brim with delight, because it would hard to have a lower estimation of the woman who thinks a “gotcha” question is “What magazines do you read.”

On the basis of that level of insightful commentary, it’s no wonder that Fox chose to insult Palin with a pittance of her prior pay, and free her to tarnish the reputation of some other news enterprise (i.e. Breitbart). Apparently somebody at Fox has concluded that their reputation has already been tarnished enough.

The Swiss Boating Of Mitt Romney: A CNN Fable

Posted by Mark NC on July 17, 2012 at 10:50 am. 9 Comments :

When you hear the right complain, as they always do, about the so-called liberal media, keep in mind the fact that Fox News is the most watched cable news network, that the Wall Street Journal is the largest national newspaper, that talk radio is dominated by conservatives, and that the Internet’s most referenced site belongs to Matt Drudge. What exactly do they think the media is?

Add to that the fact that many establishment news providers bend over backwards to avoid being targeted by conservative critics for having a liberal bias. Or worse, they strive to emulate the right-wing media in hopes of duplicating their perceived success.

CNN is the worst offender in this contest of running to the right. Their aggressive shift in ideology has been well documented. They have hired numerous far-right extremists with no effort to achieve any sort of balance. And that includes the news chief, Ken Jautz. Consequently, their ratings have collapsed along with their journalistic integrity.

Swiss Mitt This past weekend CNN broadcast another example of how their sinking ethics have impacted their news judgment. The segment by Tom Foreman was centered on the absurd premise that the Obama campaign has engaged in “Swiftboating” Mitt Romney by accurately questioning his business experience, his millions of dollars in off-shore tax havens, and his refusal to release more than a year or two of his tax returns. Foreman concludes his report saying…

Tom Foreman: In ad after ad, Democrats are suggesting that Romney is a fatcat job outsourcer, an opportunistic financial predator, and an elitist out of touch with the working class. Never mind that many of those claims appear to be backed with little or no evidence. […] Some Republican analysts fear that Mitt Romney could be the second politician from Massachusetts to be Swiftboated out of the presidency.

The problem with Foreman’s conclusion is that there is abundant evidence of the claims made in the Obama ads. And the questions they raise are those that would require answers from any political candidate. Who could deny that Romney is a fatcat? The job outsourcing by Bain entities is not even denied by Romney. He just argues that he wasn’t there at the time (despite official SEC filings that contradict him). And how could someone be more out of touch than by saying that he likes to fire people, he’s not concerned about the poor, and that corporations are people?

Foreman was not alone in raising the specter of Swiftboating on CNN. Reporter Jim Acosta misused the term when he interviewed Mitt Romney on Friday asking him whether he thought he was being Swiftboated. Talk about your softball questions. And media analyst Howard Kurtz also misused the term while promoting his Sunday program Reliable Sources. He was acutely concerned about Romney’s welfare under the intense pressure he must be suffering.

Howard Kurtz: I’ve been increasingly worried about whether the media that have been pushing a lot of these stories, “Boston Globe”, “Washington Post” on outsourcing, “Vanity Fair” on Cayman Island accounts, seem to some people to be echoing the message of the Obama campaign by raising so many questions about Romney’s business background.

Apparently Kurtz is of the opinion that if a story is getting a lot of attention the reporters should immediately stop covering it for fear of overtaxing the beleaguered subject of the story and to avoid charges of bias by “some people” on the receiving end of the bad news. How very considerate of him.

For the record, Swiftboating is a term that describes a campaign to disparage a candidate’s strengths that is based on falsehoods and lacks evidence. It is wholly improper to use the term simply to denounce ads that are critical of a candidate. Criticism that is rooted in the truth, with evidence to back it up, is not Swiftboating in any way shape or form. In fact, refraining from such relevant criticism would be campaign malpractice.

Asking Romney to account for his activities in business, which is the core of his campaign, is fair game. So is asking him to release tax returns as almost every candidate in modern times does – since his own father set the standard back in 1968. But suggesting that news coverage of such issues is Swiftboating, as CNN has done three times in as many days, is proof that the network has lost all interest in being a professional news enterprise.

Bill O’Reilly Is An Idiot Whether Apologizes Or Not

Posted by Mark NC on July 2, 2012 at 6:25 pm. 2 Comments :

Back in March, Bill O’Reilly had a contentious debate with Caroline Fredrickson, the president of the American Constitution Society, on the potential outcome of the Supreme Court’s hearing on ObamaCare. Ms. Fredrickson presciently predicted that the bill would be upheld as constitutional and even noted specifically that the justification would come from the Constitution’s taxing authority. However, O’Reilly disagreed and concluded the segment by saying this:

“Ms. Frederickson, you’re going to lose, and your argument is specious. We appreciate you coming on. But this is absolutely a mandate. It’s absolutely a force. It’s absolutely police powers from the federal government, and it’s going to be 5 to 4. And if I’m wrong I will come on, and I will play — I will play your clip. And I will apologize for being an idiot. But I think you’re desperately wrong.”

Last week, following the Court’s decision, O’Reilly was on vacation, but he did call into his program and spoke with guest host Laura Ingraham. He said nothing about himself having been so desperately wrong. Today he returned and brought up the the incident in March, however, he did not apologize. Just prior to a disingenuous pseudo-apology, he declared that he is “not really sorry,” which cancels out anything he said afterwards. You don’t get credit for an apology if you precede it by saying that you’re not really sorry.

Rather, O’Reilly spent several minutes blaming CNN’s Howard Kurtz and Media Matters for – well, I couldn’t really figure what he was blaming them for. Apparently they were somehow responsible for his being a complete moron, and therefore he had nothing for which to apologize. He alleged that Kurtz was empowering Media Matters in some respect, and that…

“Kurtz does the bidding of Media Matters, and, I don’t know, maybe I should just ignore that and, as you say, move along down the highway, but it certainly disturbs me a little bit.”

And that was it. No actual apology. No admission that he was an idiot. No integrity in keeping his word. Just an obvious and pathetic dodge. He pointed fingers at others who had nothing to do with any of this and pretended that he never made a spectacularly stupid promise in support of his ill-informed prediction. It was a display of dishonesty and cowardice that befits someone like – well, like Bill O’Reilly. So I thought I’d help Billo out by saying what he is to chickenshit to say:

I think that about covers it.

Liberal Media My Ass!

Posted by Mark NC on October 23, 2011 at 1:39 pm. 3 Comments :

Nothing will make me happier than when the utterly delusional notion that the media in this country is liberal has been refuted, defeated, exterminated, and cremated.

While most observers are already aware of the fact-hating editorial policy of Fox News, at least they did fire Glenn Beck earlier this year (although only because his increasingly hysterical ravings were making them look bad). What people may not have noticed is that CNN is taking up Fox’s slack.

This morning on CNN viewers could have awakened to see two of Beck’s surrogates bloviating on the events of the day. Amy Holmes, an anchor on Beck’s GBTV was a guest commentator on Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz. A couple of hours later, Will Cain, a repoter for Beck’s The Blaze appeared on CNN’s Your Money.

For CNN to feature two representatives of Glenn Beck’s insignificant and failing Internet venture is unbelievable. Is that the best they could come up with? Was CNN unable to find any reputable commentators from distinguished networks, newspapers, or universities? Or maybe their attempts to book members of the John Birch Society fell through.

Elsewhere, NPR made news by firing the host of an opera program because she had taken part in an OccupyDC protest. According to NPR, Lisa Simeone was sacked because her activity “has the potential to compromise our reputation as an organization that strives to be impartial and unbiased.”

Never mind that Simeone hosts a music program and does not cover politics or any other subject that could pose any kind of a conflict. Unlike NPR’s Mara Liasson who is a political reporter as well as a commentator on Fox News. Somehow NPR justifies Liasson’s fraternizing with Fox on matters that are explicitly political, but Simeone can’t introduce classical music after having exercised her Constitutional right to free speech on her own personal time.

Conservatives assail CNN as the Communist News Network due to their perception of it as unabashedly liberal. NPR is a perennial target of right-wingers in Congress who seek to defund what they considered to be a hopelessly biased mouthpiece for the left. At what point are these fallacies laid to rest? Do we really need any more proof than when CNN hosts two Glenn Beck flunkies on the same day, or NPR fires an opera program host because she is a liberal outside of work?

The Occupy Wall Street movement has done a great job of defining the 99% of Americans who are being rolled over by the !% of wealthy, corporate interests who are dominating our political culture. Something the Occupiers need to remember and focus on is that the media in this country is also wealthy and corporate, and they are Platinum members of the 1%. Wall Street firms and bankers spend billions on advertising and the media rewards them with positive coverage and the sort of ludicrous editorial decisions noted above. This needs to be addressed and corrected if we are to see any substantive improvement in the massive social and economic disparities that are threatening our nation’s welfare.

The Sorry Truth About Roger Ailes And Fox News

Posted by Mark NC on September 29, 2011 at 10:50 pm. 5 Comments :

A few days ago Howard Kurtz of Newsweek published an article profiling Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News. It was revealing of both Kurtz and Ailes.

The first sign that Kurtz was either unconscious or delusional was when he offered this description of Ailes’ allegedly changing moods:

“[A]s President Obama’s popularity has plummeted and the country has grown increasingly sick of partisan sniping, something unexpected happened. Roger Ailes pulled back a bit on the throttle.”

Kurtz never provides any evidence to support that contention. In reality Fox News is just as extreme an outlet for rightist propaganda as it has ever been. They incessantly hammer on fabricated scandals and openly disparage the President. The departure of Glenn Beck, which Kurtz mentions in passing, has done nothing to reduce the vitriol. Now Eric Bolling is calling President Obama a socialist in the program that replaced Beck.

Kurtz did manage to slip in this insight from unnamed Fox executives:

“Privately, Fox executives say the entire network took a hard right turn after Obama’s election, but, as the Tea Party’s popularity fades, is edging back toward the mainstream.”

The interesting thing about that is not the contention that Fox is “edging back toward the mainstream.” It’s not. What’s interesting is the admission that Fox “took a hard right turn.” That is something that Fox has been denying for years as they pretend to be “fair and balanced.” It also contradicts the constant Fox drumbeat of support for the Tea Party which they believe is a dominant factor in modern political culture (despite their puny 16% approval in recent polling). Another moment of clarity occurred when Kurtz painted Ailes with concern after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

“Ailes ordered his troops to tone things down. It was, in his view, a chance to boost profits by grabbing a more moderate audience.”

Notice that Ailes did not want to tone things down to ease tensions and prevent further outbursts of violence. According to Kurtz, Ailes wanted to tone things down to make more money. Of course, returning to reality, Ailes never toned anything down and he most likely doesn’t believe that doing so would be more profitable.

Perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious part of the profile is when Ailes complained that “America used to be able to get straight journalism.” This was such an egregious separation from sanity that even Kurtz noticed.

Roger Ailes is still running a dishonest enterprise dedicated to spreading falsehoods and advancing an ultra-conservative agenda. He still employs demagogues like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, and Sarah Palin (who is NOT running for president and Fox is lying about it). He still allows the ignorant stooges on Fox & Friends to spew gossip and inane conspiracies.

Kurtz was able to ply a few morsels of truth from Ailes about his inherent bias, but that does not excuse his naivete about whether Ailes has softened. He hasn’t. And in the coming months, as the election season heats up, expect to see even more radically untrue attacks on Democrats and progressives. If Kurtz really thinks that Fox News is moderating their biases, he is even dumber than Sarah Palin.

BUSTED: Fox News Memo Reveals Coordinated Bias

Posted by Mark NC on December 9, 2010 at 1:27 pm. 2 Comments :

In August of 2009, while the debate over health insurance reform was in full swing, GOP pollster Frank Luntz appeared on Sean Hannity’s program and advised Hannity and other Republican operatives to stop using the term “public option.” As a result of his own polling Luntz discovered that…

“…if you call it a ‘public option,’ the American people are split, [but] if you call it the ‘government option,’ the public is overwhelmingly against it.”

Luntz is a Republican pollster who specializes in language. His web site, The Word Doctors, sports the motto “It’s not what you say. It’s what people hear.” He is responsible for introducing rhetorical distortions such as the “death tax” into the public discourse. He truly does have a gift for doctoring words.

Two months after Luntz’s appearance with Hannity, Bill Sammon, Fox News’ Washington managing editor, issued a memo to Fox producers ordering them cease the use of the term “public option.” Media Matters published the memo today:

From: Sammon, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:23 AM
To: 054 -FNSunday; 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 069 -Politics; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 036 -FOX.WHU; 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers
Subject: friendly reminder: let’s not slip back into calling it the “public option”

1) Please use the term “government-run health insurance” or, when brevity is a concern, “government option,” whenever possible.
2) When it is necessary to use the term “public option” (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation’s lexicon), use the qualifier “so-called,” as in “the so-called public option.”
3) Here’s another way to phrase it: “The public option, which is the government-run plan.”
4) When newsmakers and sources use the term “public option” in our stories, there’s not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.

This is about as clear a demonstration of institutional bias at Fox News as you’ll ever see. The evidence of their bias has always been apparent on the air, but this shows that it isn’t merely the opinions of the presenters, but that it is a coordinated policy embraced and enforced from Fox News’ executive suites. It is also contrary to an earlier memo Sammon distributed disingenuously asserting that, “We do not cheerlead for one cause or another.” However it is perfectly aligned with Sammon’s ideology as expressed in his books:

The Evangelical President: George Bush’s Struggle to Spread a Moral Democracy Throughout the World
At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election
Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media.
Fighting Back: The War on Terrorism from Inside the White House
Misunderestimated: The President Battles Terrorism, Media Bias and the Bush Haters

In an interview on The Daily Beast. Howard Kurtz got Sammon to respond to the email flap:

“The term public option, he said, ‘is a vague, bland, undescriptive phrase,’ and that after all, ‘who would be against a public park?’ The phrase ‘government-run plan,’ he said, is ‘a more neutral term,’ and was used just last week by a New York Times columnist. I have no idea what the Republicans were pushing or not,’ Sammons says. ‘It’s simply an accurate, fair, objective term.’

If you believe that you’re probably already a loyal Glenn Beck viewer. Sammon’s complaint that “public option” is vague and bland is actually an endorsement of its neutrality and makes it more appropriate for unbiased reporting. Sammon knows full well that “government-run” is a loaded phrase. It certainly would have an impact on the anti-government Tea Party that is the foundation of both his network and the Republican Party.

His claim that he has no idea what Republicans were pushing is utterly implausible. If it were true it would mean that he is an incompetent manager and an uninformed journalist. How could he not know the GOP preference for “government-run” when it was broadcast on the second highest rated Fox News program? Does he expect people to believe that Frank Luntz could conduct polling on the phrases and report the results to Sean Hannity, without him having any knowledge of it? And was he entirely oblivious to the fact that only Republicans ever used the term “government-run”? His defense forces us conclude that he is either a liar or an idiot.

When Sammon objected to accusations that he was biased, Kurtz correctly pointed out a number of incidents that supported the accusations. He also mentioned a couple of Sammon’s books. However, I can’t let this little escape from reality go without comment:

Kurtz: “The significance of the marching orders is that they were issued to the news division, which aims to be fair and balanced and is run separately from the opinion side, populated by the likes of Hannity and Glenn Beck.”

I would like to see Kurtz provide any evidence that the news division at Fox is run separately from the opinion side. Or that they aim to be fair and balanced. The significance of the marching orders is that they were marching orders. An ethical network would not impose such constraints, even on their editorial commentators. The only sort of enterprise that would do so is one that is focused, not on news, but on propaganda; one that has an agenda and seeks to maintain ideological purity in their messaging. In other words: Fox News.

The Nazi Talk On Fox News Starts At The Top

Posted by Mark NC on November 18, 2010 at 11:28 am. 13 Comments :

If you have ever wondered where Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity et al, get their propensity for accusing every liberal or Democrat of being a Nazi, the mystery is solved.

Roger Ailes is the chairman and CEO of Fox News. As such he can be considered the role model for his staff and the authority on the network’s journalistic doctrine. In an interview this week with The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz (Part 1, Part 2), Ailes demonstrated precisely the sort of example he hopes to set for his team. In response to a question about Juan Williams’ departure from NPR, Ailes said:

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

That’s right. The folks at NPR are synonymous with a genocidal regime that murdered millions and sought to create a vast tyrannical empire for a “master race.” I always suspected that Lake Woebegone’s predominately white, Christian residents were secretly fascists.

This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. He said it three times. And if this is what he says in public to a reporter for The Daily Beast and CNN, just imagine what he says privately to direct the activities of his news producers, correspondents, and anchors. And what must Mara Liasson, an NPR correspondent and Fox News contributor, think of Ailes trashing her primary employer this way?

Ailes is guilty of a typical anti-Semitic tactic of trivializing the Holocaust in an attempt to dampen its historical impact and ultimately deny its existence. This is illustrated further when Ailes defended Glenn Beck’s atrocious smear of George Soros as a Nazi collaborator. Ailes dismissed the criticism directed at Beck by disparaging an imagined cabal of…

“…left-wing rabbis who basically don’t think that anybody can ever use word, Holocaust, on the air.”

Of course, there is no support for that statement. The Jewish organizations that condemned Beck’s programs are not averse to using the word, they merely object to it being used to slander actual Holocaust survivors, and to turning it into a colloquial insult. However, Ailes apparently believes the word should be used more frequently, no matter the context, and aimed at any progressive individual or institution that he doesn’t like. And his network is evidence of that belief. (See Lewis Black’s Nazi Tourettes)

The interview revealed several other examples of the inherent bias of a network that calls itself “fair and balanced.” On President Obama, Ailes advanced the notion that he is somehow “foreign” saying that…

“He just has a different belief system than most Americans.”

That must be why most Americans voted for him and still prefer him to every potential Republican opponent. They also prefer him to our previous president, George W. Bush, whom Ailes praised saying…

“This poor guy, sitting down on his ranch clearing brush, gained a lot of respect for keeping his mouth shut.”

I may have to give him that one. Keeping his mouth shut may be the only way Bush could ever gain respect. However, Ailes must not be paying attention because Bush hasn’t set foot in Crawford since he left the White House. His faulty attention span also missed some critical facts regarding Rupert Murdoch’s political contributions:

“Rupert Murdoch’s worked for 60 years. He’s the biggest media mogul in the world. I don’t think anyone can tell him what to do with his money. That’s sort of his right.”

Except that the millions of dollars that Murdoch donated to partisan GOP campaigns didn’t come out of his pocket. It was from News Corp, so it was the shareholders who were paying for his electoral largesse.

Finally, Ailes couldn’t help taking a swipe at a perennial foe whom he apparently thinks is another enemy of America: Jon Stewart.

“He openly admits he’s sort of an atheist and a socialist. […] He hates conservative views. He hates conservative thoughts. He hates conservative verbiage. He hates conservatives. He’s crazy.”

OK, let’s just set aside his hyperbolic derision of Stewart’s faith and patriotism. Ailes casts Stewart as crazy and hateful toward conservatives. But he sure gets along well with Bill O’Reilly, Newt Gingrich and many other conservatives who have been guests on his show. But here’s the fun part:

“If it wasn’t polarized, he couldn’t make a living. He makes a living by attacking conservatives and stirring up a liberal base against it. He loves polarization. He depends on it. If liberals and conservatives are all getting along, how good would that show be? It’d be a bomb.”

Couldn’t you make almost the exact same comment about Fox News? Just switch liberals and conservatives as the objects of attack and you have the Fox business model. And he’s right. Without the constant liberal bashing and polarization Fox would bomb. That’s because they don’t have any actual news to support their network.

Ailes exhibits a stunningly dense appreciation for reality. He is oblivious to what every objective analyst sees with crystal clarity. But the worst part remains his personal affinity for the sort of rhetoric that divides our nation. His embrace of Nazi and socialist slurs is a crucial part of the broadcast philosophy of Fox News, and now no one can wonder who set that repulsive and hostile tone that the rest of the network emulates.

Update: Roger Ailes has issued an apology of sorts. He sent a letter to Abe Foxman of the ADL saying that he regretted his use of the term “Nazi attitudes.” However the rest of the letter was a surreal justification for his language.

First he blamed it on his anger at NPR for having fired Juan Williams. Then he shifted gears and blamed it on a couple of rabbis with whom he had met to discuss Glenn Beck’s frequent comparisons of Nazis to Democrats, progressives and other Beck targets. He also defended Beck’s Smear-laden programs on George Soros by saying that his “Brainroom” had found the programs valid. For an apology he sure had a lot of other people to fault for his wrongdoing.

But the real flaw in the so-called apology is that Ailes sent it to the ADL. But it wasn’t the ADL whom he had called Nazis. It was the folks at NPR. I don’t think you can call it an apology if you don’t address it to the people you actually offended. It was more of a cowardly PR gesture.

NewsBusters: The Most Powerful Name In Stupid

Posted by Mark NC on September 26, 2010 at 8:29 pm. 6 Comments :

You know that you’ve reached new lows in stupidity when you make it necessary to defend CNN/Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz. But Noel Sheppard, NewsBusters’ Associate Editor, can hang his head in pride at having achieved just that feat.

In an article “analyzing” a segment of Kurtz’s Reliable Sources, Sheppard manages to demonstrate an astonishingly deficient ability to comprehend simple English. In this segment Kurtz correctly criticized Fox News in general, and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity in particular, for falsely asserting that Democratic Delaware senatorial candidate Chris Coons had “admitted” to being a Marxist. The basis for the assertion was this excerpt from an article Coons wrote 25 years ago in college:

“I spent the spring of my junior year in Africa on the St. Lawrence Kenya Study Program. Going to Kenya was one of the few real decisions I have made; my friends, family, and professors all advised against it, but I went anyway, My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe a strange diet, or the tropical sun, changed my personality; Africa to them seems a catalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear thinking Americans and sends back Bearded Marxists.”

It’s plain from reading this that it was Coons’ friends who raised the subject of his being a Marxist, and even that was clearly stated to be a joke. There is nothing there resembling an admission of Marxism, and there is no way a person with a functioning cerebrum could arrive at that interpretation. Which neatly explains how Beck and Hannity managed to do so. Kurtz, for whom I rarely find anything worthy of commendation, deserves credit for calling out the pair of Fox News hacks for their blatant and deliberate deceit.

Here’s where NewsBusters steps in to lather themselves in shame. Sheppard begins with an inquiry as to why Kurtz didn’t mention a previous article that appeared in Politico and referenced the Coons article. Sheppard asks…

“Why didn’t Kurtz scold Politico? After all, [Politico author Alex] Isenstadt appears to be the first national reporter to bring this article to light.”

The answer, of course, is that Isenstadt never alleged that Coons confessed to being a Marxist. There is nothing wrong with drawing attention to prior writings by political candidates. The problem comes when someone dishonestly portrays the contents of it, as Beck and Hannity did. Isenstadt didn’t do that so there was no reason for Kurtz to scold him.

Next Sheppard quotes a line from Isenstadt’s article that cites Coons’ campaign spokesman calling the “bearded Marxist” reference a joke. Sheppard then asks…

“Is this where Kurtz got the idea that the whole article was a joke? From Coons’s campaign spokesman? That doesn’t seem like good journalism, does it?”

Sheppard wouldn’t know good journalism if it reached out of his monitor and slapped him. The first idiotic hokum in this question is the premise that Kurtz held that “the whole article” was a joke. Kurtz never said that, nor did Coons or his spokesman. But where Sheppard goes off the rails is by suggesting that Kurtz got the idea that it was a joke from the campaign spokesman’s comment rather than from the actual text of Coons’ article that said explicitly, “My friends now joke that…” It was right there in black and white, in the original article, that Kurtz, and everyone else who can read, got the idea that it was a joke. It couldn’t be more clear if you pasted a picture of Henny Youngman above it. I guess it’s that clarity that accompanies reality that confused Sheppard.

And yet Sheppard persists in making a fool of himself. He concludes his analysis by complaining that Kurtz has a double standard because he criticized the coverage of Coons but not that of his GOP opponent, Christine O’Donnell. However, Kurtz was criticizing the Coons coverage because it was wrong. The coverage of O’Donnell was merely replaying video of her own performance on television. Nobody mischaracterized what she said, they just broadcast it as it was. If there was something wrong with it, even Sheppard didn’t bother to point it out. But he did take one more swing at the debunked smear that Coons was a self-avowed Marxist:

“As such, an autobiographical article by Coons in which he referred to himself as a bearded Marxist is all a joke while comments O’Donnell made concerning her religious faith are somehow relevant to this campaign.”

Once again, Coons did not refer to himself as a “bearded Marxist,” and his friends who did so were joking. And both candidates’ histories are relevant to the campaign, but they must be presented accurately. Unfortunately, Sheppard prefers the lying gasbag approach.

~~~

On a separate matter from the same program, Kurtz earned himself another commendation by calling out his own network, CNN. They declined to broadcast a story of war atrocities by Michael Ware due to graphic imagery. Kurtz observed that a story of this importance should still have been aired, and if the images were deemed too disturbing they could have simply left them out of the broadcast. He also took the network to task for refusing to make anyone available to discuss the matter. Kurtz deserves credit for that position. I hope we see more of this sort of media criticism going forward, but I’m just a cockeyed optimist.

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