Fox News’ Visually Distorted Charts
FlowingData points out a recent graphic from a story on Fox News showing the unemployment rate changes under Obama. The numbers are presumably correct, but do not seem to correspond to the rise and fall of the visual, in which, for instance, 8.6 is a higher number than 8.8 or 8.9. Ah, the “Fox Chart” — what does it mean? Is it a work of postmodern art?
Fox News Becoming More Liberal?!?
According to Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine there are moves afoot to move Fox News Channel to the political center … I guess we’ll see.
When six GOP primary contenders descended on Fox News’ midtown headquarters for a “candidates forum” with a trio of red state attorneys general on Saturday night, the candidates probably expected tough questions about their positions. But they certainly didn’t expect to find a New York Times reporter roaming backstage.
Fox’s decision to allow Times scribe Jim Rutenberg into the building to confront the candidates in person threw campaign aides off guard, especially in the Romney camp, which went into “defensive mode immediately, insisting that the reporter stay far away,” as Rutenberg later wrote.
But the decision was just the latest example of what Fox head Roger Ailes recently called a “course correction” in an interview with Howard Kurtz of Newsweek. The Romney team’s debate-night tussle was the second embarrassing episode…
Fox News On Police Pepper Spraying: ‘It’s A Food Product, Essentially’ (Video)
Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly break down the tumult between police and students at UC Davis: the police sprayed the sit-in protesters with a “food product.” O’Reilly adds, “I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police, particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.” Hear that? Violent police crackdowns are basically a big, fun, good-natured food fight!
Keith Olbermann: Fox News is a ‘Political Whorehouse’ About Occupy Wall Street (Video)
Guy sure is not pulling any punches since leaving MSNBC:
The Fox News #OccupyWallStreet Footage You Won’t See On TV
Respect for Drew Grant and the New York Observer for outing Fox News Channel’s selective editing of their OccupyWallStreet coverage:
Even if Geraldo Rivera was at the Zuccotti Park yesterday, Fox News has generally been a tad dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Foxnews.com (as of this writing) has no coverage of this national event on their front page stories. (Hard to imagine for a network that was so gung-ho about the Tea Party!) Red Eye‘s Bill Schulz went out to try to “prank” the protesters. Bill O’Reilly sent a producer minion out with the same mission: to belittle OWS’s cause by cutting up interviews to make people sound stupid.
Well, here is an interview that Fox News filmed, but doesn’t want you to see. The segment was shot on Wednesday for Greta van Susteren‘s show, (though it looks like the same producer from this O’Reilly segment questioning Michael Moore‘s anti-capitalist agenda) though the decision was made to leave it on the cutting room floor. The reason should be obvious pretty quickly.
NewsCorp Blockers For Your Browser
Afraid that you or your family could unwittingly stumble into the tentacles of the NewsCorp empire? Murdoch Block for Chrome and MurdochAlert for Firefox claim to keep you safe:
MurdochAlert warns you whenever you visit one of the 100+ Murdoch Family-controlled websites. If you’re not ready to block them all, MurdochAlert can warn you instead. Also it’s handy for identifying news sources controlled by the Murdoch Family.
NewsCorp agents in multiple countries have been arrested for hacking into the phones and computers of at least thousands of innocent people. Since the Murdoch family controls 100+ high-traffic domains, it is difficult for average users to know which sites could potentially place them at risk.
MurdochAlert identifies the domains that may place users at risk for Murdoch-related hacking. MurdochAlert shows a bottom warning box whenever you visit a Murdoch-controlled sited.
Rupert Murdoch’s Tabloid Hacked To Report His Death
The woes keep piling on for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, as the homepage of its popular Sun paper was altered to feature an amusing fake report on the mogul’s committing suicide “in his topiary garden”. The Guardian notes:
News International websites for the Times and the Sun were taken down last night after hackers targeted the Sun’s web pages and redirected traffic to another page falsely reporting that Rupert Murdoch had been found dead. The breach was apparently the first hack of a major UK newspaper’s website.
The LulzSec hacking collective hacked the tabloid’s site, and also claimed to be “sitting on their [the Sun's] emails” and that they would release the emails on Tuesday.
Crikey! FBI Opens Inquiry Into Murdoch’s News Corp.
Richard A. Serrano, Jim Puzzanghera and Kim Geiger write in the LA Times:
The phone hacking scandal that has ignited a political firestorm in Britain jumped the Atlantic on Thursday as the FBI opened an investigation into whether British reporters tried to access cellphone messages and records of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in violation of U.S. law.
The preliminary probe further rattled the New York-based global media empire of Rupert Murdoch, who was forced this week to withdraw his $12-billion bid to take over Britain’s largest satellite broadcaster, and raises new questions about the future of News Corp.
U.S. officials said the FBI is trying to determine if a full investigation is warranted, and no evidence has yet emerged to confirm that News Corp. employees sought to hack phones in the United States. But the unfolding scandal sent the company’s battered stock down another 3% in trading.
Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint For Fox News
If you suspected that Fox News was nothing more than a decades-in-the-making Republican plot to pipe propaganda to unsuspecting rubes…you were right down to a tee. Gawker dug up this amazing find:
According to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the forerunner for Fox News was a 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers.
The memo is called, simply enough, “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”.
Fox News Twitter Account Gets Hacked Announcing President Obama’s Assassination
With instant access to knowledge via technology, it’s easy to get the wrong news. While some hackers may expose a private tweet or e-mail, others create fake news, like the assassination of the American president. Los Angeles Times reports:
Former Rep. Anthony Weiner falsely said his Twitter account was hacked just before Memorial Day weekend. But over the holiday weekend, it looks like real hackers attacked the @foxnewspolitics verified account, one of several Twitter accounts run by FoxNews.com.
A group calling itself “ScriptKiddies” claimed responsibility for the hack and also declared it has ties to the international hacker collective Anonymous.
The Tweets began appearing just after 2 a.m. ET on Monday, July 4, an hour and date likely calculated to maximize the time the Tweets were up before the account owner noticed or could do anything about it. The fake messages announced the assassination of President Obama during a visit to Iowa, but there were no…
Glenn Beck Farewell Supercut
In commemoration of Glenn Beck’s departure from the Fox News airwaves this week, Media Matters has compiled his top moments and catchphrases (which include, “Hello America!”; “I hope I’m wrong”; “the country’s on fire”; and, most disturbingly, “lemme get the frogs”) into fifteen straight minutes of hucksterism and insanity. In all honesty, if I’d known his show was this entertaining, I would have watched.
MoveOn Admits To Hacking Fox News
Fox News’ ticker outside the New York building was hacked into, replacing the scrolling news with an activist message describing the lies being told by conservative groups. MoveOn, a progressive advocacy group, claimed responsibility for the prank which they are now using to promote a broad anti-austerity campaign that launches June 23.
Roger Ailes Bombproofed The Fox News Headquarters, Fearing Gay Terror Attacks
Rolling Stone’s long piece on the evil mastermind is filled with all sorts of joyous nuggets, including the above. Additionally, an underground bunker called the “brain room” — with special security clearance needed for entrance — acts as a research center in which the cable network’s most fiendishly clever plans are developed:
Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows – even going so…
Fox News & Bill O’Reilly Are America’s Most Trusted News Sources
Paul Bedard reports in U.S. News & World Report:
In a stunning rejection of network news and nightly news anchors, cable news, driven by the Fox News Channel and mouthy Bill O’Reilly, is now the top most trusted source—by a mile.
In a new poll from Boston’s Suffolk University (PDF), more than a quarter of the nation says Fox is tops when it comes to who they trust the most and O’Reilly is the most believable.
“This poll shows two things: first, the network news have completely lost their brand. Second, the only network with any intensity is Fox News,” says Brent Bozell, president of the conservative Media Research Center. “Bottom line: the more they attack Fox, the stronger it is getting,” he adds.
But at the liberal Media Matters, Executive Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt says the public’s trust in Fox is disturbing. A regular Fox critic, he says the poll reveals that “Fox…
Political Game Playing Promotes Partisanship Through Polarization
Fox News studio. Photo: Inside Cable News (CC)
Grrrrrrrr.
You can almost hear the growling in the background as the masters of attack politics go into action, virtually every hour on the hour, on the Fox News Channel. The issues they focus on are carefully selected by top executives and then broken down into highly politicized message points.
Their dominant emotion is annoyance, as expressed in sarcasm and scowling. Contempt is the underlying attitude.
The other side is usually not just wrong but plain stupid, almost unbelievable in its soft-headed naivete and distance from reality
A “what do you expect” question invariably tops off the argument which always ends with the Fox host a winner and the Democrat or social critic a loser on every level.
Standing on a podium, driven by self-righteous certainty, the finger pointers view the people they talk about, and talk down to, as below the intelligence threshold of people even worth…
OutFoxed: Obama Bin Laden
This picture tells you all you need to know about the bias of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV network (thanks Jeff Scott for sending it in). For those of you who need a refresher on just how “fair and balanced” Fox News is, take another look at Robert Greenwald’s classic Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism.
Glenn Beck Leaving His Fox News Show
Is he even too crazy for Fox News? Linda Feldmann writes in the Christian Science Monitor:
It’s the end of an era: Glenn Beck is leaving his daily talk show on Fox News later this year, he and Fox announced Wednesday. The show, called “Glenn Beck,” had seen a precipitous decline in ratings over the last year, and Mr. Beck’s departure was not unexpected.
Not long ago, the populist rabble-rouser of the right and self-described “rodeo clown” was flying high. Beck began at Fox a little more than two years ago, in January 2009, having jumped from CNN Headline News. Coincidentally, that was right before the birth of the tea party, and he quickly became one of the movement’s leading advocates. In March 2009, he launched the successful 9-12 Project, which sought to promote patriotic values. And last August, he drew tens of thousands of people from around the country to a…
