GOP propaganda organ gets front row seat at White House briefing room

In what possible reverse PC universe does FOX beat out NPR as a news organization? It's amazing how the mainstream media just bends over backwards to "prove" to conservatives that it's not liberal. The Republicans, and the Republican propaganda organ, play the White House correspondents like a fiddle. Read More......

Howard Dean calls FOX News 'absolutely racist' for handling of Shirley Sherrod affair

HuffPo:

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean took direct aim at Fox News for its involvement in the Shirley Sherrod racism flap, calling their coverage "absolutely racist."

Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, offered his candid assessment in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday" in which he criticized the cable network for being complicit in the controversy.

"Fox News did something that was absolutely racist," Dean said. "They had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and this Sotomayor and all this other stuff."

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Alan Grayson receiving death threats following Fox News smear

This behavior by Fox News has to end immediately. Murdoch's media empire is always about promoting division and hatred. What makes this even worse is that they hammer away stories to the gun-toting Teabaggers who somehow think the US is poised for a revolution. Congressman Grayson, on DailyKos:

One day, a Republican operative offers $100 to anyone who'll punch me in the nose.

The next day, I get a death threat.

After Fox News spewed its usual clownish hatred about me yesterday, my office received a call. The caller told our receptionist - a young intern - that "10 people are going to kill the Congressman within 24 hours." We gave the information to the Capitol Police; they are investigating.

Fox. You'd think that they would have learned their lesson after Dr. George Tiller was killed. And they did learn a lesson: a lesson in killing.

And why? Because I told the truth: the truth that by stalling on unemployment insurance, right-wingers revealed themselves to be heartless, selfish wretches, who have been taking food out of the mouths of children.

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Right-wing nut, angry at liberals in Washington, opens fire on cops in CA. Gun nut mom talked about coming 'revolution.'

Wonder where he got his fair and balanced look at American politics?

A 45-year-old parolee, described by his mother as angry at left-wing politicians, opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers on an Oakland freeway early Sunday and was hit by return fire while wearing body armor, authorities said.

She said her son, who had been a carpenter and a cabinetmaker before his imprisonment, was angry about his unemployment and about "what's happening to our country."

Williams watched the news on television and was upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," his mother said.

Janice Williams said she kept the guns because "eventually, I think we're going to be caught up in a revolution." But she said she had told her son many times that "he didn't have to be on the front lines."

And tell me again why people like this are permitted to own guns? Read More......

FOX News' tipping point

From Eric Boehlert:

So the stimulus bill was evil and un-American. Bailing out GM and Chrysler was evil and un-American. Passing health care reform, of course, was evil and un-America.

But securing $20 billion from BP to pay for the cleanup and to compensate working Americans for the damage done to their livelihoods. That was evil and un-American?

According to Fox News it was.

And with that audacious claim, I'm wondering if Fox News isn't pressing up very closely to its tipping point; to the moment where Fox News reveals how certifiably insane it is by rushing to BP's defense, and just how distant its programming is from the American mainstream.

I don't mean it's the tipping point in terms of there being some sort of collective realization within Fox News that its signature form of partisan Obama hatred has jumped about 19 different sets of tracks and its incessant campaign of smears and lies makes a mockery out of the news business, as well as does real damage to democracy. (I'm pretty sure everyone at Fox News already knows that.)

I'm referring instead to a collective realization among people outside Fox News and the GOP Noise Machine that there's something fundamentally wrong with a so-called news organization siding with BP after what the oil giant has done to the Gulf of Mexico and the reckless, cavalier way it has ruined the livelihoods of countless of residents.

That there's something just plain wrong and illogical in being so robotically ant-Obama that the Fox News team would consciously side with today's version of Public Enemy No. 1 and insist, with complete conviction, that it's the president of the United States who's to blame for the big oil disaster, and it's the president of the United States who should be attacked, smeared, and ridiculed for getting BP to set aside $20 billion in damages.

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Fox flogs 'BP gave $750 million to Obama campaign' lie

Another day, another Fox News lie. The campaign contributions related to BP were primarily from BP employees and the number was closer to $70,000 so only a slight accounting error from Fox. As questionable as Rahm Emmanuel's free apartment may be, being tied to a marketing guy who did an advertising campaign is a bit different from being tied to the executive team, as it exists with the Republicans. But why let facts get in the way? More from Media Matters:

Fox News pushed the tenuous suggestion that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has unethical "ties" to BP because he once lived in the home of Stan Greenberg, a D.C. research strategist who has done work for the oil company. In fact, there is no evidence that Emanuel's relationship with Greenberg -- which dates back several decades -- has anything to do with BP or benefited BP in any way. Moreover, Brian Kilmeade falsely claimed BP donated $750 million to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, which would have amounted to the entirety of Obama's campaign haul.

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FOX wants to give Bush credit for the economic recovery

It seems that now that the economy appears to be recovering, and banks have stabilized, FOX is suddenly interested in giving Bush credit for the bank bailout. Now, mind you, Bush was responsible for putting together the TARP program. The thing is, the Republicans have been calling TARP a "bailout," and have been railing against it, and even railing against Wall Street reform as "a bailout" - all because they think this will tar Democrats, and help Republicans win back the Congress in the fall. So it's interesting that now FOX is trying to spin the bailout as a good thing, and even claim GOP credit for it

Defies logic. But then again, that's what being a partisan propaganda organ is all about.

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FOX News won't run VoteVets ad on climate change. It's 'too confusing'

Ben Smith has the rationale from FOX News for refusing to run an ad from VoteVets. According to FOX News executives, this ad is "too confusing." Huh? Watch for yourself. It seems pretty clear cut that climate change affects national security:

I guess if people don't believe in climate change, then tying climate change to national security would be confusing. Read More......

FOX News reports Mr. Rogers is evil

Apparently, a new study says that Mr. Rogers is the cause of all "entitlement" because he told kids they're "special" when they're really not. Of course, FOX takes it one step farther, as always. Watch the second half of the video for the full flavor of how FOX handles "news."

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Fox too liberal for you? Kelsey Grammer backs upstart right-wing TV network, RightNetwork

Nothing is ever enough for these folks. It's why you can't appease them, ever.

Actor Kelsey Grammer is one of the names behind The RightNetwork, a new operation that is being targeted at "Americans who are looking for content that reflects and reinforces their perspective and world-view."

The network is expected to launch this summer and is hoping to be available to on-demand cable offerings, online and mobile phones.

"There's wrong, and there's right, right network, all that's right with the world," Grammer says in a video clip on the network's Web site.

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Glenn Beck's ratings show slight drop

Jed Lewison notes that Beck's ratings are dropping slight, and certainly not going up. This is interesting in the context of the post I published yesterday about whether FOX News was bad for Republicans.

You know how Glenn Beck's TV show is a ratings juggernaut fueled by the tea party movement?

Well, maybe it's time to rethink that assumption -- because now that tea party 2010 is here, Beck's ratings are down from tea party 2009.

From April 1 to April 14, 2009 (the two weeks immediately preceding tea party 2009) the Glenn Beck show averaged 2.23 million viewers.

Meanwhile, from April 1 to April 14, 2010 his show averaged 2.15 million viewers.

That's right -- in 2010, Beck's ratings have actually dropped slightly from 2009 levels in the runup to Fox's second annual tea party day, falling about 4%.

That's not a dramatic decline, and Beck clearly still has a loyal audience. But his audience is not growing.

Beck's April-April ratings performance undercuts the notion that he's building a sustainable ratings juggernaut.

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Some conservatives are beginning to question whether Fox News is good for their movement

We're kind of on a Newsweek roll today, but these articles are interesting.

Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, notes that when Fox News first began airing, it presented itself as a counterweight to the left-leaning mainstream media, but as the mainstream media moved more to the center in recent years (CNN, for example,just hired prominent right-wing blogger Erick Erickson), Fox, to maintain its distance, moved further to the right. "I have no problem with a network that wears its politics on its sleeve," says Bartlett. "What bothers me is [Fox] pretends not to be that." With so many conservatives watching only Fox, says Bartlett, "people are wearing blinders; they hear no fact that conflicts with their world view. All day long their views are reinforced that Obama is a socialist crackpot."

Bartlett wonders if ultimately "an inherent conflict of interest is growing, in which the very success of Fox makes it harder for Republicans to get out of the echo chamber, to have arguments that go beyond their base, and to reach out to independents and Democrats who might vote for them."

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Murdoch: MSNBC, CNN 'Tend To Be Democrats,' NYT Carries Obama's Water

Remember what we've told you before: Republicans accuse us of being and doing what they already are. In poker it's call a "tell." If FOX's Rupert Murdoch accuses the NYT and CNN of being stooges for Democrats, he's actually admitting that he's a stooge for the Republicans. Not to mention, that's some real chutzpah for former Murdoch - who hired a former GOP consultant, and a man who wrote a strategy memo for President GW Bush, to run FOX News (Roger Ailes) - to accuse CNN and the NYT of being biased.

Murdoch doesn't get it. He thinks CNN and the NYT are his competitors. They're not. They're media. He's a propagandist. Read More......

Howell Raines: Why don't honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?

From Howell Raines in the Washington Post:

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

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More Jon Stewart on FOX 'News' & health care reform

(H/t E&P; in Exile) Read More......

If it's Friday, Glenn Beck is back to defending the 'death panel' lie

I realize that Beck is entertaining, and he is. But he's also a huge liar. An entertaining liar. But still a liar. Too many FOX viewers confused entertainment and tenacity with truth. Read More......

Pat Robertson's lawyer shows what's wrong with the GOP

I got an action alert today from Jay Sekulow, of the ACLJ - it's an organization that Pat Robertson set up to counter the ACLU. Like every other religious right activist group, the ACLJ tends to parrot whatever the Republican talking point is of the day. To wit: Today it's health care.

Of course, check out what the ACLJ is saying about health care reform. Not surprising from a people who believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old, and that modern man walked alongside Dinosaurs, a la the Flintstones, the ACLJ's take is typical GOP lie:

Brace yourself - the health care game on Capitol Hill just took a dangerous turn.

It appears the President and Democrat leadership in the House and Senate have decided to change the rules ... disregard the U.S. Constitution ... and ram their flawed health care through at any cost.

Congress has now vowed to utilize a one-sided, Democrat-controlled legislative maneuver called "reconciliation" to get the votes they desperately need on health care.

And that's not all. President Obama has released his own pro-abortion version of the bill ... also side-stepping the legislative process - a move that raises serious constitutional concerns. Our nation's legislative branch writes our laws, NOT the President.

Here's the problem. How do you negotiate with people who are either liars, crazy, or both? The reason some people are so upset in this country that they're yelling and screaming at health care meetings, and even storming planes into IRS offices, is because they've been spoon fed a heaping helping of crazy by the right-wing noise machine for several decades. When you tell your followers that by proposing his own health care plan, the President is making an end-run around the Constitution, is it any wonder they start storming the gates?

The Teabaggers, and the remaining rag-tag followers that make up today's Republican party, have been lied to so much by FOX, the religious right, and the leadership of the GOP, it's no wonder they think health care reform is all about death panels. The question is: How do you negotiate in good faith with someone who's either dishonest, stupid, crazy, or a little bit of all three? Read More......

FOX News is convinced the guy who crashed the plane into an IRS office is not a terrorist

After all, he isn't brown.

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Beck cites CBO to show stimulus was more expensive than first thought, leaves out fact that CBO said stimulus created/saved 2m jobs

I'm watching a new video of FOX News' Glenn Beck that's going around, and as usual he acts like a bit of a nut. But what's so disturbing is that this video is a perfect example of how Beck, and FOX generally, lie to their audience. Let me walk you through it.

1. Beck cites CBO (the Congressional Budget Office, an independent non-partisan congressional agency that is not tainted by politics) numbers to show that the stimulus cost more than the President Obama thought it would. On the order of 800 and some billion instead of 780 billion or so. Okay, fair enough.

2. Beck goes on to mock the President for mentioning examples of jobs saved by the stimulus. Beck clearly implies that the stimulus has helped, at most, a handful of people, but otherwise it's been pretty useless.

Beck's proof? A recent CBS poll showing that only 6% of Americans believe that the stimulus created any jobs. Beck goes on to compare this to the number of people who think Elvis is alive, or that we never really landed on the moon.

Now, note what Beck did. He took a survey showing that people didn't BELIEVE the stimulus created jobs, and used that as proof that the stimulus actually did NOT create any jobs. In fact, 6% of the American people may not believe the stimulus created any jobs because they're not away of the truth. It's possible. And in fact, if you look at the independent studies of the stimulus, done by folks like CBO - the folks Glenn Beck quotes a responsible source - you'll find that the stimulus has done wonders for employment over the past year. In fact:

Among people who know what they're talking about, the fact that the stimulus has been successful isn't even controversial anymore. The leading economic research firms -- IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers, and Moody's Economy.com -- estimate that the effort has already created as many as 1.8 million jobs, and will create about 2.5 million jobs when all is said and done. As far as the independent Congressional Budget Office is concerned, those are conservative estimates -- the CBO believes the stimulus is already responsible for as many as 2.4 million jobs.

Or just check out the Wall Street Journal, they reported on the CBO study too.

Watch the video. Beck is certainly a great entertainer. But he's also one hell of a liar. He clearly suggests that the fact that the American people don't realize the stimulus has worked means that is has NOT worked. And now we know, from the very people Glenn Beck cites as his money experts, that this is a flat out lie. The man just lies, so long as it permits him to take a cheap shot at Democrats. Do your own research on the topic. He lied.

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Glenn Beck to "scar[ed]" caller on disability asking if Obama's heading toward eugenics: "He'd claim no, but ... yes"

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