Tag: Fox News

Ever since October of 1996, Fox News has been regarded by serious media analysts as a somewhat less than objective mouthpiece for conservative propaganda. From the start they adopted a posture that appeared to be bent on shilling for Republicans by drenching their reports with partisan disinformation.

       (Stickers of the above image can be purchased at Crass Commerce)

The intent couldn’t have been more transparent. This was a network birthed by the planet’s most notorious practitioner of tabloid piffle, Rupert Murdoch, who adorned it with a spritz of soft-core porn, and masqueraded it across America’s TV screens as if it were actually news.

But the real intent was something else altogether…

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Now that Tax Day has come and gone, we can take an objective look at what all the excitement over the so-called “grassroots” Tea Party movement has wrought.

For an alleged phenomenon that was sweeping a nation of angry revolutionaries, it has left us with no more than a resounding thud.

Nate Silver has produced what appears to be the only comprehensive estimate of national attendance, based on authoritative sources like law enforcement and local reporting. His figures conclude that about 262,000 people gathered in over 300 cities across the country to wave tea bags and denounce taxes. That is pretty close to the estimate by the conservative Pajamas Media (sources not disclosed), who place the figure slightly higher at 278,000. Considering the fact that twice as many people will attend a Major League Baseball game on a typical Saturday, every weekend, that doesn’t seem like much to brag about.

    America’s Barack

It may be a little early, but I’m already getting ready to celebrate. But first, a short story about media cronyism.

Tomorrow is election day, children. It is one of the most cherished privileges of being an American citizen, and one of the most solemn responsibilities as well.

Many people take great pleasure from having the ability to help to choose who will lead our great nation, and they believe that by voting they are playing an important role in that choice. However, most are unaware that sometimes this process is not as straight forward as one might think.

After millions of well intentioned consumers citizens have gone to the polls to cast their votes, our friends in the media spend many minutes, and millions of dollars, figuring out who really won the election. They add up numbers given to them from computers and pollsters and other pundits, and when they are certain that they can make a reasonably close guess – BAM! – they announce it on television and America has a new president.

So where does this abundant and unregulated power reside?

The bottomless fount of hilarity that is Bill O’Reilly has erupted once again. After MSNBC displayed humorous text on screen during a story about John McCain’s inability to remember how many houses he owns, Bill O’Reilly went nuts declaring that it was…

“…one of the most outrageous things that I’ve ever seen in my 35 years of journalism.”

Never mind that O’Reilly hasn’t spent 35 seconds in journalism, he still selectively ignores the much more offensive (and not humorously intended) examples of Fox News’ broadcasts:

A NewsCorpse.com Video:

A press conference will be held today at 2:30 outside of the offices of Fox News in New York. The purpose of the gathering is to deliver a petition with over 600,000 names to network executives calling for an end to the racist attacks against black Americans including Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. The petition is the work of Color of Change and MoveOn and asks Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to respond to the allegation that…

“Fox has developed a pattern of airing racially offensive attacks, then apologizing only after controversy erupts. Forced, half-hearted apologies do not demonstrate good faith when the larger pattern of offensive rhetoric continues.”

Cross posted from my blog, The Wild Wild Left

Ed Gillespie, Counselor to the President wrote this letter to Steve Capus, President, NBC News.

Amazingly enough they have no problem with O’raly’s Fox-step right bias but lay these complaints at the feet of NBC:

I’m sure you don’t want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the “news” as reported on NBC and the “opinion” as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines. I welcome your response to this letter, and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network’s viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don’t hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division.

Capus, bless his heart, replied (in part):

“Just as the White House does not participate in the editorial process at the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, NBC News, as part of a free press in a free society, makes its own editorial decisions,” NBC said in a statement.

Continuing a long pattern of decline, Fox News once again underperforms its competitors. The first quarter of a presidential election year can generally be expected to boost viewership for news networks. For CNN and MSNBC this has been markedly apparent. For Fox News…not so much.