Fox News

Fox News Court Jester Callously Insults People Injured During Trump’s Insurrection

Posted by on July 8, 2021 at 4:39 pm. 3 Comments :

A few weeks ago Fox “News” debuted “Gutfeld,” an alleged “comedy” program that they positioned as their answer to The Daily Show or the network late night offerings from Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon. It would have been considered a bizarre departure for a news network, but fortunately, no one really considers Fox to be one of those.

Fox News Bozo

Guess what? Fox is also not a comedy network. And Greg Gutfeld is only a comedian if you think that crude mockery of people who are disadvantaged or suffering is funny. As a committed elitist, he has still not learned one of the most basic principles of comedy: You do not punch down. And he regards jokes about child abuse, drug addiction, and Alzheimer’s as comedy gold.

On Wednesday Gutfeld led his program with a monologue that mined the same sort of cruelty that is the hallmark of his character, or lack thereof. The subject was Trump’s January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C. On that day more than a hundred police officers were injured, some with permanent disabilities. At least three are deceased. They were protecting America’s seat of democratic government, but their sacrifices have been dismissed by Republicans who refuse to investigate what happened and why.

In addition to the police and the members of Congress, journalists were among the victims. They were also, therefore, the targets of Gutfeld’s wrath. His monologue (video below) attacked reporters who are now struggling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by Trump’s Capitol Hill rioters. He callously belittles the emotionally bruising experience saying of reporters that…

“Apparently seeing a clown in a Viking hat knocking over a bottle of white-out on Dick Durban’s desk is tantamount to being mauled by ISIS in your kitchen.” [and that] “They’re more distraught than the Kardashians during a silicon [sic] shortage.”

Like many in the Trumpian/Fox News World, the rioters who violently assaulted the police, bashed in the doors and windows of the Congress, vandalized property with feces, and chanted about killing Nancy Pelosi and hanging Mike Pence, were invisible. Gutfeld refuses to acknowledge that reality, while characterizing the rioters who assaulted reporters and destroyed their equipment as merely “A group of largely unarmed housewives and dads.”

Gutfeld goes on to sarcastically dismiss the injuries of the journalists. He refers to them contemptuously as “these poor souls” and maligns them for thinking that January 6th was worse than 9/11. But that’s a notion that Gutfeld applied to everyone because a single reporter drew an association. Gutfeld quoted Matthew Dowd saying that…

“To me, though there was less loss of life on January 6, January 6 was worse than 9/11, because it’s continued to rip our country apart and give permission for people to pursue autocratic means.”

Which is an excellent point. Dowd wasn’t saying the loss of life was worse, but that the aftermath socially was. Gutfeld completely missed the point that after 9/11, the country came together to console and to heal and to seek to respond to the assault on America. But after January 6th, conservatives like Gutfeld sought only to divide the nation and defend the perpetrators who attacked it, as well as the citizens who condemned the attack. Trump confessed his “love” for the rioters. And others at Fox News, like Tucker Carlson, denied and/or excused the violence.

And remember, to Gutfeld and his Fox News confederates, all of this was hysterically funny. Dead and maimed cops, traumatized congressional representatives and their staffs, emotionally scarred journalists, were all the innocent targets of his vicious and infantile sense of humor. A regular laugh riot.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Hannity and Dershowitz Display Their Utter Ignorance and Disrespect for the Constitution

Posted by on July 8, 2021 at 11:53 am. 6 Comments :

On Wednesday Donald Trump announced that he intends to file a lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their executives for not allowing him to disseminate dangerously inflammatory lies. It’s a laughably pathetic legal stunt populated by a clown show of disreputable attorneys making preposterous arguments.

Fox News Sean Hannity

Trump’s lawsuit has been recognized by most legal experts as a frivolous abuse of the court system that is aimed more at fleecing his cult followers than prevailing in court. But undeterred by rational legal analysis, Fox News jumped eagerly into supporting Trump’s futile legal antics. On Wednesday evening Sean Hannity invited Alan Dershowitz to comment on the litigation. Dershowitz was a member of Trump’s impeachment defense team, so his prejudices and intellectual deficiencies are apparent. However, he was truly skirting the edges of coherence when he engaged in this exchange with Hannity:

Hannity: Seems like a strong case. But obviously nothing is a slam dunk.
Dershowitz: This is the most important First Amendment case of the 21st century, and it’s important because it pits freedom of speech on the one hand against the First Amendment on the other hand. That may sound paradoxical, but remember, it’s the high tech giants that are banning freedom of speech. They are censoring. But they are claiming the right to do so under the First Amendment. So they’re using the First Amendment as a sword against freedom of speech.

First of all, Hannity’s assertion that Trump has a “strong case” is contrary to reality. Not only does the case fail on legal grounds, it was filed in in the wrong jurisdiction – Florida rather than California – and may be dismissed on that alone. That’s just more proof that this is a charade for profit and that Trump and his lawyers don’t have any real intention of winning.

As for Dershowitz, he is making it hard to believe that he was ever regarded as a constitutional scholar. He began his remarks by portraying the case as “the most important First Amendment case of the 21st century,” when it isn’t actually a First Amendment case at all. For it to be a First Amendment case there would have to be government involvement in suppression of free speech. But Trump’s targets are all private companies. Trump’s lawyers are trying to claim that the social media companies are “government actors,” but that’s an imaginary label with no legal validity.

Where Dershowitz goes off the rails entirely is the nonsense that the “high tech giants” are claiming First Amendment protection to censor Trump. They are not. They have never asserted a First Amendment protection because they aren’t being suppressed by the government. What’s more, they have every right to monitor what appears on their websites. By Dershowitz’s standards, I should be able to force Fox News to give me airtime every night.

Furthermore, they are not “banning freedom of speech.” Trump, as he has said himself, has many opportunities to express himself, some of which he has claimed are superior to the companies he’s suing. “I’m really getting the big word out,” Trump bragged, “because we’re doing releases. And every time I do a release it’s all over the place. It’s more elegant than Twitter.”

Once again, Trump opens his big mouth and undermines his own arguments. In fact, his “releases” are actually undermining the entire premise of his lawsuit. Every time he makes incendiary statements about how the “Radical Left Democrats“ will “further DESTROY our Country,” and that the 2020 presidential election was “disgraceful and corrupt“ and “RIGGED and STOLEN,” he’s affirming the decisions by the social media platforms to remove his violence inciting account. So the more he keeps talking, the better. (Geez, I never thought I’d say that).

And meanwhile…

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Kayleigh McEnany of Fox News Lies that ‘All of Our Founding Fathers Were Against Slavery’

Posted by on July 6, 2021 at 1:14 pm. 4 Comments :

There is one unmistakably common characteristic of Donald Trump’s administration and particularly his press office. It was a festering morass of lies and liars. And no one did it better than his last press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. Which is why she was so quickly hired by Fox News after Trump was booted from the White House.

Kayleigh McEnany

McEnany’s aversion to the truth has been a hallmark of her public life. Examples of her deliberate dishonesty are abundant. They run the gamut from falsely asserting that the the Mueller report was a “complete and total exoneration” of Trump, to supporting Trump’s “Big Lie” that there was “ample evidence of fraud” in the 2020 presidential election.

Now McEnany is aiming for disinformer immortality. On Tuesday’s episode of Outnumbered on Fox news, McEnany made this shockingly ignorant claim:

“The haters never take a day off from hating. That is clear. They never take a day off from getting facts wrong. We know most of our forefathers, all of our main Founding Fathers, were against slavery, recognized the evils of it.”

The segment began with McEnany bravely defending the 4th of July from “Democrats, left-wing activists, and even the media” who she said “smeared the all-American holiday.” Which of course, they didn’t do. However, her comment demonstrated the hate that she was trying to project on Democrats. You can’t call others “haters” while you’re lying about them “smearing” a patriotic holiday.

Even worse, McEnany appears to be totally unfamiliar with American history. While accusing the left of “getting facts wrong,” she takes a million mile detour from the factual world. The truth about America’s Founding Fathers may be difficult for her and others to admit, but it isn’t in dispute. Most of them were “owners” of enslaved men, women and children. And those who weren’t tolerated the practice in order to hold the newly formed union together.

This is typical of how Fox News warps reality to stuff their square racist peg into their round white supremacist hole. They simply don’t care about facts that conflict with their pre-determined narrative. And they obviously know that their audience doesn’t care either, or is too stupid to tell the difference. But you can count on this appeal to bigotry and ignorance to be featured throughout the coming midterm elections and into the next presidential cycle. It is the only thing they have to run on.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

CNN’s Killer Video Mash Up: Tucker Carlson is the New Alex Jones

Posted by on July 4, 2021 at 4:48 pm. 3 Comments :

There was some optimistic speculation a few months ago that with the exile of Donald Trump from the White House, the right-wing mouthpieces in the media who supported him would settle down and seek to moderate their flagrant sycophancy and propaganda. As it turns out, that speculation was way too optimistic.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones

If anything, the rightward drift at outlets like Fox News became even more extremist in the post-Trumpian world. This was a predictable path for the fundamentalist conservatives at Fox News. The CEO even publicly declared that being the opposition is “what our job is now with the Biden administration.” And the result is that Fox News is now a network that is indistinguishable from the wildest crackpot outposts on the Internet.

CNN’s media analysts, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, noticed this and put together a video mash up that illustrated just how far down the rabid hole Fox’s top primetime host, Tucker Carlson, had descended. The video (posted below) neatly juxtaposed comments by Carlson with nearly identical comments by freakazoid Alex Jones. For instance…

Carlson: The NSA has been reading our emails.”
Jones: It’s not that I think the government spies on me. It’s admitted that they do.

Carlson: It’s a lie to say there are no risks. There are risks in everything. Including in getting a vaccine.
Jones: Everybody’s got family that got killed or got sick from a vaccine.

Carlson: So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, according to government documents.
Jones: It overwhelming the evidence that criminal elements of the federal government provocateured and staged January 6th.

What each of those clips have in common is the demented ravings of unhinged lunacy. Neither Carlson nor Jones can support what they’re disgorging with anything resembling a fact. Following the mash up, Stelter asked Darcy “Is it a stretch to say that Tucker Carlson is the new Alex Jones?” to which Darcy replied…

“Tucker Carlson is the new Alex Jones. If you watch Tucker Carlson’s program, and you watch Alex Jones’ program, they might differ a little bit in antics and the way they deliver their message, but that message to viewers is consistent. And it’s pretty identical.

Whether it’s talking about vaccine conspiracy theories, false flag conspiracy theories, deep state conspiracy theories. The messages that Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones are sending are the same. […] These far-right conspiracy theories, they used to be confined to the Infowars section on the Internet. You used to have to seek them out.”

The overriding theme is that both Carlson and Jones are among the media’s foremost promoters of utterly baseless, and demonstrably dangerous, conspiracy nutballery. And they share that compulsion to spread reckless lies with their messiah, Donald Trump, whose “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him just gets more deranged with every passing day.

Carlson has taken sides with Jones before. As recently as February he was defending Jones – along with Vladimir Putin and the Proud Boys – as truthtellers. At this rate Alex Jones should be getting his own show on Fox News by August, just in time to report on Trump’s imaginary return to the White House.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Fox News Hot Dogger Peter Doocy Challenges Jen Psaki with Critical Weenie Theory

Posted by on July 3, 2021 at 4:11 pm. 1 Comments :

Never let it be said that Fox News isn’t on top of the issues that are uppermost on the minds of the American people. And on this 4th of July weekend, Fox’s Chief White House pest, Peter Doocy, demonstrated how devoted the Republican Ministry of Disinformation (aka Fox news) is to the mission articulated by their CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, to be “the opposition” to the Biden administration.

Fox News, Peter Doocy

Doocy has distinguished himself by volunteering his behind for frequent whoopings by the White House press secretary Jen Psaki. There aren’t many “reporters” who are so selfless and/or masochistic. On this occasion Doocy bypassed any questions about the surging Delta variant of the COVID virus, or the tragic collapse of the condo in Florida, or the dramatic congressional battles over infrastructure and voting rights.

Nope. Doocy courageously went straight for the footlong controversy over the cost of cookouts. He even drew a link to the price of gas. It was a frank exchange that went something like this…

Doocy: The official White House account tweeted yesterday the cost of a 4th of July cookout is down 16 cents from last year. 16 cents?
Psaki: There has been a reduction in some of the costs of key components of a 4th of July barbeque. that was what the tweet was noting.
Doocy: So does the White House think that 16 cents off a barbeque has more of an effect on people’s lives than gas being a dollar more than this time last year”
Psaki: I would say if you don’t like hot dogs you may not care of the reduction of costs. You don’t have to like hot dogs. I will say that what we are most focused on is the fact that we’ve created now more than three million jobs since the President took office.

For the record, this is the light-hearted post that the White House tweeted about 4th of July barbeque costs:

As is apparent, many of the components of a holiday barbeque are indeed less expensive, just like Psaki said. But this complex matter deserves a deeper examination. So let’s begin with the fact that a reduction of any amount is significant. The prices for most consumer goods generally increase every year. But this year’s decline indicates that, even as the country is reopening from the pandemic, and the economy is booming, inflation does not appear to be a major worry.

Undeterred by reality, Doocy persisted with a deliberately hostile framing of his next question linking barbeque costs to gas prices. Psaki was prepared for this because she recently had to school Rep. Jim Jordan (OH-QAnon) on the subject. She replied to his ignorant tweet by noting “gas prices are the same now as they were in June 2018.” Indeed, any knowledgeable person knows that gas prices were artificially low last year due to that deadly pandemic thingy that kept people at home. Now that people are moving about again, both the demand and the cost of fuel have returned to their pre-pandemic levels.

Psaki skillfully spun Doocy’s argumentative inquiry into an snarky insinuation that he is anti-hot dog. Then she steered the discussion back to a much more relevant issue to the American people: jobs. On that subject the Republican Party has been pitifully weak as they try to belittle the historic success of the Biden administration’s first five months in office.

The bottom line is that Doocy just can’t resist trying to cast out questions that he thinks are bangers, but which actually make him look like a wiener, or wurst, a brat. Okay, I’m done now. And so is Doocy if he’s smart. But we already know the answer to that.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

In Desperation, Tucker Carlson of Fox News Resorts to Viciously Maligning Jill Biden

Posted by on July 2, 2021 at 12:51 pm. 6 Comments :

The mission of Fox News, as stated by its CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, is to oppose President Biden and the Democrats. “That’s what our job is now with the Biden administration,” he recently told a Morgan Stanley investor conference. But that apparently isn’t going very well.

Fox News. Tucker Carlson

Fox News is continuing to struggle to make a coherent case against Biden. Consequently, they’ve been resorting to lame, contrived “scandals” like whether or not he wears a face mask, or blaming him for a sauce shortage at Chick-fil-A, or mocking the romance in his marriage. And yet, despite devoting all of their antagonistic resources to it, they just can’t seem to shake his broad-based popularity.

The most stridently offensive perpetrator of unadulterated bullpucky on Fox News is without question Tucker Carlson. He has been wallowing in the muddiest of swamps with hysterical and dangerous conspiracy crackpottery (It’s too absurd to even call them “theories”). For instance…

Having had zero success tarnishing Joe Biden’s public image, Carlson has decided to go after his wife, Jill Biden. In a deranged diatribe on Thursday night, Carlson gathered up his most cretinous scowls and insolent demeanor to launch a flurry of unvarnished contempt at the First Lady (video below). Complaining about a recent profile in Vogue Magazine, he ranted that…

“Dr. Jill is a doctor, first and foremost. In one scene from the Vogue piece, Dr. Jill cradles the arms of nervous women who get the jab. ‘Look at me,’ she coos reassuringly. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’ That’s right. It’s only Kool-Aid. Drink the whole cup. As Dr. Jill puts it with her signature modesty, you try to lift up other people.”

This is typical of the vile misogyny that Carlson, and the rest of the Fox News hate mongers, regularly dish out at any strong, intelligent, and admirable woman. He is belittling her for having attained a doctorate in education. Then implies that her concern for others somehow associates her with a murderous Christian cult. Carlson continued, pouring on the sarcasm…

“Who is this amazing woman? This servant, saint, humanitarian genius medical missionary who somehow has managed to stay beguilingly sexy at 69? What did America do to deserve her? Well thankfully, Vogue answers that question. Dr. Jill, the magazine declares, is a, quote, ‘joy multiplier.’ She multiplies joy. That’s what she does! It’s who she is. And by the way, Dr. Jill also shot an 18 on the golf course last week. Played the whole round in 22 minutes between vaccinations and international treaty signings. It was a typical day for Dr. Jill.”

The irony of Carlson painting Dr. Biden as an object of idolatry is too rich for words. No one has elevated her to anything resembling the figure of adoration that Carlson is insinuating. And there has been nothing remotely similar to the divine status that has been conferred on Donald Trump by his worshipful devotees. Carlson himself is among the most adulatory disciples of the Cult of Trump. And Fox News is cult’s Ministry of Disinformation. But Carlson still wasn’t through…

“Back in North Korea, they must have read the latest issue of Vogue with their jaws open. A ‘joy multiplier’? A ‘joy brigade’ sure. But “joy multiplier’? That might be too far even for the Kim family. North Korea may be a hermit kingdom, but even they’re not that stupid.”

It’s clear that Carlson has fallen over the edge of sanity. He’s now comparing Vogue Magazine to the government controlled propaganda of North Korea. Does he stay up late to figure out these preposterous departures from reality?

Even worse, his reference to Dr. Biden being part of the “joy brigade” is nauseating in the extreme. His not-so-thinly-veiled reference is to the Nazi “Joy Division” that was comprised of young Jewish women in concentration camps who were forced to be sex slaves for German soldiers.

Carlson is demonstrating that he is a disgusting piece of allegedly human trash. He’s a coward who attacks the President’s wife because he’s too stupid to come up with a coherent criticism of the President. And his insults are among the most repulsive imaginable. Nevertheless, Fox News continues to support him, his program, and his noxious views. And their viewers eat it up like good cultists.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Why Does this Pitiful Fox News Flunky Keep Presenting His Butt for a Beating by Jen Psaki?

Posted by on June 30, 2021 at 5:20 pm. 2 Comments :

The rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the diseased tree. And Peter Doocy, son of long time Fox and Friends co-host Steve Doocy, is one of the best examples of that old saying. The younger Doocy has been making a name for himself by engaging in embarrassing dialogues with White House press secretary, Jen Psaki.

Jen Psaki

Doocy recently got creamed by Psaki when he tried to make an issue of Olympic hopeful Gwen Berry protesting social injustice. He did it again when he criticized Vice-President Kamala Harris for going to the border after months of complaining that she hadn’t. And then there was the time he sought to turn the origins of the COVID virus into a contrived melodrama.

On Wednesday Doocy took another shot at it. This time he was revisiting a subject on which he had previously failed to make a dent. He couldn’t get a rise out of Psaki on Tuesday, so he went home and retooled his queries (maybe daddy helped him), and came back for another swing on defunding the police. After rattling off the names of the Democratic “Squad” (all progressive women of color) as proponents of defunding, Doocy entered into this exchange with Psaki:

Doocy: Are there any examples of Republican members of Congress saying they want to defund the police?
Psaki: I think most people would argue that actions are more important than words, wouldn’t you say?
Doocy: To your point there, at the time of the vote on the American Rescue Plan you had the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, he said he just didn’t like it because he thought it was a classic example of big government, Democratic overreach in the name of COVID relief. And then Kevin McCarthy said he thought the Democrats were using coronavirus as an excuse for funding pet projects. Where is the “we are gonna vote against this because we ant to defund the police?”
Psaki: Again, I think actions speak louder than words Peter. So if you oppose funding for the COPS program, something that was dramatically cut by the prior administration, and many Republicans supported it, and then you vote against the bill that has funding for the COPS program, we can let other people evaluate what that means. It doesn’t require them to speak to it or shout it out. Their actions speak for themselves.

For a little background, Republicans voted en mass against a Democratic bill that had $350 billion dollars of funding for law enforcement. Some of them did say that they objected to the bill for other reasons. But none of them spoke out in support of the funding or offered an alternate amendment or bill to restore it. So while some Democrats have talked about defunding the police (by which they mean reallocating funds to other services – such as mental health, domestic disturbances, etc. – that police shouldn’t be doing anyway), Republicans have actually voted against the funding.

What Doocy is attempting here is to inoculate Republicans from any accountability for their unambiguous opposition to funding for law enforcement by actually voting against it. Doocy thinks that because they didn’t utter the phrase “defund the police,” that their vote to literally defund the police doesn’t count. Doocy went at this several times, but Psaki wasn’t letting him get away with it. And while Republicans are whining petulantly, it was brilliant how Psaki turned the “defund the police” meme back on the GOP.

You would think that Doocy would get tired of being wrecked in public over and over again. But either he has a steel spine, or his objective is simply to plant his false narratives and get out of the way so Fox News viewers can lap them up. Either way, he’s failing to make any progress with anything but his own humiliation. And on that score he’s been wildly successful.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

U.S. Finishes Dead Last for Media Trust Among 46 Countries, and Fox News Lies About It

Posted by on June 30, 2021 at 12:36 pm. 1 Comments :

The state of the media suffered “bigly” during the years that Donald Trump occupied the White House. He hated the concept of free press, repeatedly calling it “the enemy of the people,” and berating and insulting reporters. It was his mission to sow discord. And it was one of the few things that he was good at. At least with regard to his worshipful cult followers.

Fox News, Bullshit Factory

Trump actually admitted to Leslie Stahl that he purposefully foments distrust of the media. She asked him why he attacks the press. “You know why I do it?” he replied. “I do it to discredit you all, and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

Mission accomplished! A new report by the Reuters Institute ranked media trust among 46 countries. The United States came in dead last:

“The United States ranks last in media trust — at 29% — among 92,000 news consumers surveyed in 46 countries. […] One explanation, though not necessarily the only one, is the extreme political polarization in the U.S. This study, like many others, found extremely high levels of distrust — 75% of those who identify as being on the right thought coverage of their views is unfair.”

So it was the deliberate slander of the press by Trump and his conservative mouthpieces at Fox News and elsewhere that produced this humiliating result for the U.S. And no one should be surprised to learn that it’s still going on. Fox News contributor Joe Concha wrote an op-ed for The Hill that brazenly misrepresented the Reuters study:

“The U.S. media is the least trustworthy in the world, according to a comprehensive new Reuters Institute survey encompassing 46 countries. Yes, you read that right. The country with among the most resources in this arena – human, technical and otherwise – finished dead last. Finland ranked the highest, with a 65 percent trust rating. In Kenya, the trust rating clocked in at 61 percent. But here in the U.S.A., the home of global media giants including the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, we’re trusted by a whopping 29 percent of those reading and watching.’

Notice what Concha left out? The primary cause of distrust in the media, his employer Fox News. Concha’s article went on to cite stories about Trump’s collusion with Russia an example of why the media isn’t trusted. He falsely claimed that “the Mueller Report didn’t find proof” when it actually did. Concha also maligned CNN and MSNBC reporters, saying that “they’re patently partisan opinion hosts” who “share their feelings, their opinions” and that they “pass it off as objective news reporting.” Which, of course, is what Fox News does 24/7, and what Concha is doing in this op-ed.

Digging deeper into the Reuters study confirms that Fox News is the main offender. When the survey results were broken down by media brand, Fox News had the distinction of being the most distrusted at 46% and only 35% trusted. That coincides with Trump’s most zealous base of support. Meanwhile, the most frequent media targets of Trump’s animus (NBC/MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post) all placed higher than Fox by 8 to 11 points.

Fox News, Reuters, Media Brands

The fact that Fox News would so flagrantly misrepresent this information is typical of their dishonesty and bias. This week Fox also misrepresented the ratings for cable news networks. They reported on the ratings decline of CNN and MSNBC, attributing it, without evidence, to a “credibility problem.” But for some reason Fox’s article never mentioned Fox News ratings at all, or the fact that they had declines that were just as bad and, more often than not, worse.

So in less than a week Fox News blatantly lied twice (at least) about how they are received in the media marketplace. And they are doing it deliberately with the intention to deceive. Which is no less than what should be expected of a “news” network that lies about everything else all day, every day. That’s just how Fox News rolls.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Obsessed Ego Maniac Trump Calls TV Ratings Declines ‘A Wonderful Thing to See’

Posted by on June 29, 2021 at 5:24 pm. 3 Comments :

Donald Trump, the former reality TV game show host, is once again obsessing over television ratings. It’s almost as if he still thinks he’s a TV personality, rather than the pathetic political loser who is now a senior resident of Palm Beach’s gaudy Mar-All-Ego retirement village in Florida.

Donald Trump TV Set

Trump’s fixation on TV ratings goes back a long ways. He has long regarded them as being a better indicator of popularity than public opinion polls. That may be because most polls consistently exposed his weakness and general disapproval with the public at large.

Trump literally said that TV ratings “are the real polls” despite the fact that Nielsen doesn’t measure popularity, just viewership. Which means they don’t record the political ideology of viewers.

Furthermore, TV ratings don’t account for the fact that Fox News only tops the ratings because it has a de facto monopoly on the cult-like right-wing audience, while the rest of the viewer universe is divided among all the other news and entertainment networks.

On Tuesday Trump issued one of his increasingly impotent statements (since he can no longer post on social media) that are mostly ignored by everyone but his dimwitted disciples. He said that…

“CNN ratings are down 70%. MSDNC is also way down. Actually, they are ALL way down. They say the news is ‘boring’ since I left D.C. Morning Joe, Joy Reid (whoever that is?), Nicole Wallace, Jake Tapper, and even Chris Wallace, at Fox, in free fall. A wonderful thing to see!”

Trump is surprisingly correct for once. Ratings for all of the cable news networks have declined year over year. According to Deadline…

“In primetime, Fox News topped with an average of 2.13 million viewers, compared to 1.31 million for MSNBC and 798,000 for CNN. Compared to the same month a year earlier, Fox News was off 42%, MSNBC was down 36% and CNN dropped 57%. In the 25-54 demo, Fox News drew an average of 329,000, down 50%; compared to 179,000 for CNN, falling 68%; and 166,000 for MSNBC, off by 48%.

“In total day, Fox News averaged 1.17 million in total viewers, down 35%; MSNBC posted 763,000, down 37% and CNN was at 580,000, down 49%. In the 25-54 demo, the numbers were 195,000 for Fox News, down 42%, 133,000 for CNN, falling 59% and 99,000 for MSNBC, dropping by 48%.”

However Trump doesn’t bother to explain why ratings have suffered. He simply implies that it’s because his unceasing lunacy is no longer a part of the daily circus that consumes the press. He’s at least partially correct. There are fewer viewers for the same reason that viewership declines after any other catastrophic event. Ratings spike when a hurricane ravages the eastern shore. Then they subside when the weather returns to normal. And Hurricane Trump has petered out.

In the big picture, the ratings for all of the cable news networks were expected to fall back from this time last year. In June of 2020 the nation was in the midst of a presidential election. The party conventions were approaching. And it isn’t insignificant to note that people were confined to their homes due to a deadly pandemic. Which was another Trump catastrophe that boosted news viewing.

Trump’s statement went out of its way to identify program hosts mostly from MSNBC. And the only one that he derisively insulted was Joy Reid, a Black woman. That’s a pretty good indicator of who and what he is most afraid of. But his last comment stating that these ratings declines are “A wonderful thing to see” reveals his hostility to the media that he has repeatedly referred to in Stalinist terms as “the enemy of the people.”

Like the totalitarian dictators he admires, Trump wants the media to fail. He regards a free press, and the Constitution that protects it, as an adversary. And any bad news for the media is good news for an aspiring tyrant like Trump. He actually confided his envy to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, telling him that he also would like to “get rid of” the press. And given the opportunity, don’t doubt that he wouldn’t try.

UPDATE: Fox News reported on the ratings decline of CNN and MSNBC, attributing it, without evidence, to a “credibility problem.” And speaking of credibility problems, for some reason Fox’s article never mentioned Fox News ratings at all, or that they had declines that were just as bad and, more often than not, worse.

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

SRSLY? Tucker Carlson of Fox News Peddles Paranoid Plot that the NSA is Spying on Him

Posted by on June 29, 2021 at 9:55 am. 6 Comments :

Just when you thought that the conspiracy theory crackpots of the world had hit rock bottom, Tucker Carlson comes along and blasts through to previously unimaginable new lows. And with his latest lapse into lunacy he has secured for himself the title of uncontested heavyweight Freakazoid of Fox News.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Bullshit Factory

On Monday’s episode of Carlson’s White Power Hour, he disclosed the alleged existence of a clandestine plot to banish him from television. The architects of this evil, according to Carlson, are undercover operatives of the National Security Agency (NSA). Carlson unleashed this unhinged horror story with his trademarked scowl and furrowed brow (video below):

“It’s not just political protestors the government is spying on. Yesterday, we heard from a whistleblower within the U.S. government who reached out to warn us that the NSA – the National Security Agency – is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.

Now that’s a shocking claim and ordinarily we’d be skeptical of it. It’s illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens. It’s a crime. It’s not a third world country. Things like that should not happen in America. But unfortunately they do happen, and in this case they did happen.”

That is indeed “a shocking claim.” But only because of how preposterous it is. Despite Carlson’s evidence-free insistence that it all happened, it makes no sense whatsoever. Carlson’s ego is in hyperdrive if he thinks that the NSA would waste any time trying to get his lame show canceled. And before you believe any of Carlson’s hysterics, bear in mind that he is a notorious liar. He was defended in a defamation case by his own Fox News lawyers, who successfully argued that “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.” In other words, Carlson’s reputation sucks and no reasonable person would believe anything he says. With that in mind, Carlson continued…

“The whistleblower, who is in a position to know, repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could only have come directly from my texts and emails. There is no other possible source for that information, period. The NSA captured that information without our knowledge and did it for political reasons. The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that.”

First of all, if the NSA were spying on Carlson they would have to have had warrants to do so. That would indicate that either Carlson, or the person(s) he was communicating with, was a foreign agent or other national security threat. Which isn’t much of a stretch considering how he has aided and abetted Russian propaganda. Furthermore, if an NSA agent disclosed an active investigation to a target of the investigation, that isn’t whistleblowing. It’s a felony.

More to the point, Carlson’s ludicrous “factual” declaration that he has “confirmed” that the Biden Administration is spying on him is laughable. The notion that the information Tucker says could only have come from NSA “captured” texts and emails is just plain stupid. It could also have come from any of those he was texting and emailing. Or it could have come from a hacker, such as the Russians who are so enamored of Tucker and his anti-American propaganda. That would fit in perfectly with their efforts to foment fear and distrust of the U.S. government. But Carlson still wasn’t through…

“This morning we filed a FOIA request – a Freedom of Information Act request – asking for all information the NSA and other agencies have gathered about this show. We did it mostly as a formality. We also contacted the press office at both those the NSA and the FBI. We don’t expect to hear much back. That’s the way that usually goes.

Only Congress can force transparency on intelligence agencies. And they should do that immediately. Spying on opposition journalists is incompatible with democracy. If they are doing it to us – and again, they are definitely doing it to us – They are almost certainly doing it to others. This is scary and we need to stop it right away.

It’s cute that Carlson refers to himself as a “journalist.” However, in all probability this is just a totally manufactured and pitiful attempt on Carlson’s part to deflect from the avalanche of criticism he’s received from a recent spate of ridiculous and even brazenly unpatriotic rants. For instance, He has taken incoming from…

After that sort of maniacal misbehavior, Carlson surely needs some distractions to take the heat off. But inventing paranoid plots against him by the NSA seems like a strange strategy to get people to pay less attention to his mental breakdowns. And one has to wonder what his bosses at Fox News think of his rapidly deteriorating cerebral malfunction. No one at Fox has corroborated this “bombshell” allegation, or done any additional reporting on it. They’ve refused to reply to inquiries or even defend Carlson. But knowing Fox, they may just be considering giving him a raise.

UPDATE: The NSA has released a statement deny that they have ever monitored Carlson, which they really didn’t need to do. And, naturally, Carlson called it a “paragraph of lies” but still hasn’t provided any proof.

And this just in: Donald Trump weighed in to say that he finds Carlson’s babbling “totally believable.” Meanwhile, Press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Carlson’s NSA delusions. She plainly noted that the NSA “focuses on foreign threats and individuals.” In other words, not Carlson.

Reporter: Tucker Carlson said that the NSA is spying on him. Is the administration aware of any espionage or listening efforts on US citizens by the NSA, and is Tucker Carlson one of them?
Jen Psaki: Well, the NSA has, I think you are well aware, everyone’s aware, everyone on this plane is aware, I should say, is an entity that focuses on foreign threats and individuals who are attempting to do us harm on foreign soil. So that is their purview, but beyond that I would point you to the intelligence community.”

NOTE: Twitter recently suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.