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…
Glenn Beck Considers Starting His Own Network
Glenn Beck at the Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C.
Oprah Winfrey got her own network, now Glenn Beck is considering it. Will a network last if it only has it’s delusional audience to rely on? The New York Times reports:
The possibility that Glenn Beck will exit the Fox News Channel at the end of the year has prompted a big question in media circles: if he leaves, how will he bring his considerable audience with him?
Two of the options Mr. Beck has contemplated, according to people who have spoken about it with him, are a partial or wholesale takeover of a cable channel, or an expansion of his subscription video service on the Web.
Reports this week that Joel Cheatwood, a senior Fox News executive, would soon join Mr. Beck’s growing media company, Mercury Radio Arts, were the latest indication that Mr. Beck intended to leave Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, when…
Fox News To Fire Glenn Beck?
Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC)
The Week dissects a David Carr piece in the New York Times and comes to the conclusion that “the cable news giant may part ways with the conservative firebrand at the end of the year”:
Glenn Beck is obsessed with the coming apocalypse, but the real end times on the horizon may be for his nightly show on Fox News, reports David Carr at The New York Times. Senior Fox News executives tell Carr that the network is “looking at the end of [Beck's] contract in December and contemplating life without [him].”
Why? The conspiracy theorist has lost a third of his audience since last year, particularly in the younger demographic; he has drawn the ire of conservatives like William Kristol, and, says Carr, his show has “turned into a serial doomsday machine that’s a bummer to watch.” Could Fox News really be preparing to part ways with Beck?
It would be no…
Streets Lined With Palm Trees In Fox News’ Coverage Of Wisconsin Protests
Bill O’Reilly reports that the massive pro-union protests in the Cheese State are largely comprised of “professional left-winger” thugs bussed in to stir up violence. The Fox News camera crews caught footage of the attacks and ugliness unfolding on the streets of tropical Wisconsin.
Colbert’s Reasoning For The Riots In Egypt
Comedy Central’s February 14, 2011 broadcast of The Colbert Report, ridicules Glenn Beck’s reasoning behind the riots in Egypt. Instead, Colbert links the uprising to King Tut’s missing penis.
Fox News: Elie Wiesel is ‘Holocaust Winner’
This is one hell of a typo (it occurs around the 0:50 mark). Jon Bershad writes on Mediaite:
Wow. We all make mistakes and typos. There will probably be at least one in this post alone. However, some typos are worse than others. This is one of those typos. Last week, Fox & Friends had on Elie Wiesel to talk about human rights injustices. However, eagle-eyed viewer Young Manhattanite was rewatching the clip online and noticed that they accidentally combined “Holocaust Survivor” and “Nobel Prize Winner” in the chyron so as to identify Weisel as a “Holocaust Winner.” Again, wow.
Merry Christmas From Fox News… But No Other Holidays
Thanks to Tim Molloy at The Wrap for noticing yet another dig at Fox News Channel by the producers of The Simpsons:
Two weeks after “Simpsons” executive producer said the show would lay off Fox News for a while, the Fox News helicopter made another appearance on the show — this time with the words, “Merry Christmas from Fox News… but no other holidays.”
The copter flew over Springfield for the Nov. 21 episode with the slogan, “”Not Racist, But #1 With Racists,” and returned the next week with the slogan changed to “Unsuitable for Viewers Under 75.”
In an interview with TheWrap, Jean said the day after the copter’s second appearance that the show would leave Fox News alone for awhile. His comments came after a Fox News insider laughed off the jokes, saying at least “The Simpsons” was funny…
[continues at The Wrap]
Foxs’ Report On ‘War On Christmas’ Never Actually Happened
Via Media Matters:
Fox & Friends reported that a school in central Florida had banned the “traditional Christmas colors” red and green from classrooms. In a statement to Media Matters, the school’s district spokesperson, Regina Klares, has denied this, stating, “There is not a ban on the colors red and green at Heathrow Elementary.”
[Continues at Media Matters]
Simpsons: Fox News ‘Not Racist, But #1 With Racists’
The boundary-pushing Simpsons team risk the wrath of Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp minions by bashing Fox News Channel (remember that the Fox network carries The Simpsons). As well as having a dig at FNC, the gang also suggest there’s a mainstream media conspiracy to create one crisis or another to take our minds off what’s “really” happening (as if!, right?). Check it out:
Fox News: Heaven Is For Real
Fox News (no, not a local affiliate) interviews a four-year-old boy who visited heaven after slipping out of consciousness during an emergency appendectomy. While there he met his dead grandpa and Jesus, among others. Watch journalist Gretchen Carlson have her mind blown by this “amazing story.”
Fox’s Roger Ailes Calls NPR Nazis
Roger Ailes giving Congressional testimony
Way to go Roger, the rest of the media is going to love you more than ever. Sample quote from Howard Kurtz’s interview with Ailes for the Daily Beast, where he discusses the executives at NPR:
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.”
Elsewhere in the interview Ailes says Obama thinks differently from most Americans; defends Murdoch’s GOP donations; admits Glenn Beck sometimes goes too far; slams Jon Stewart as a conservative-basher; explains why he rode to Juan Williams’ rescue; and sees NPR as taxpayer-funded propaganda. The kind of man you’d like as your neighbor, right?
Part 1 of the interview here. Part 2…
Cee-Lo Green Changes ‘F-You’ Lyrics To ‘Fox News’ on “Colbert Report” Performance (Video)
On air, Cee-Lo Green changed the F-You to Fox News in this song from his third album The Lady Killer so here’s the unchanged version as the artist intended (via Colbert’s website):
Jon Stewart Explains His Critique of The Media to Rachel Maddow (Video)
I caught the televised version of this yesterday, here’s the entire uncut interview below. I know the folks at MSNBC weren’t too happy to be compared to Fox News at Stewart’s “Restore Sanity” rally, so he takes some time on that network to clarify his intended message.
Two Out of Three ‘Fox & Friends’ Think ‘All Terrorists are Muslim’
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
No one should believe that Fox & Friends is a bastion of journalistic integrity or even slightly interested in fact checking. However, the morning show took the cake in redefining those two terms this week when co-host Brian Kilmeade, declared “Not all Muslims are terrorists, all terrorists are Muslim.”
So, I suppose this would mean that the following terrorist organizations are somehow secret Muslims:
- Provisional Irish Republican Army (Catholic)
- Ulster Defense Association (Protestant)
- Real IRA (Catholic)
- Sons of Freedom (Christian)
- National Liberation Front of Tripura (Christian)
- Babbar Khalsa (Sikh)
The list could go on. If you spend more than ten seconds even on Wikipedia, you might learn that there are even Hindu terrorists targeting Muslims…
Prison Interview with Glenn Beck-Inspired Gunman
In 2008 a Unitarian congregation in Tennessee was fired upon by a reported devotee of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. In the shadow of last summer’s “ground-zero mosque” controversy, a NYC cab driver’s throat was slashed after he identified himself as a Muslim.
Were these the acts of disturbed individuals, already predisposed toward violence, or the natural outcome of so much inflammatory rhetoric being injected into the national discourse? Are hateful demagogues in any way responsible for the criminality of those who take them seriously?
John Hamilton of Media Matters raises these questions in a new piece, in which he interviews Byron Williams, a jailed gunman who credits Glenn Beck and Fox for inspiring his ill-fated insurrection against the Tides Foundation and ACLU.
The Fox News Party’s Lineup For The Primaries
How much longer will Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes pretend that their Fox News Channel is anything other than the Republican Party’s TV megaphone? This Politico story demonstrates that the conjugal relationship between GOP and FNC is clear for all to see, and yet they continue to deny sharing the same bed:
With Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee all making moves indicating they may run for president, their common employer is facing a question that hasn’t been asked before: How does a news organization cover White House hopefuls when so many are on the payroll?
The answer is a complicated one for Fox News.
As Fox’s popularity grows among conservatives, the presence of four potentially serious Republican candidates as paid contributors is beginning to frustrate competitors of the network, figures within its own news division and rivals of what some GOP insiders have begun calling “the Fox candidates.”
With the exception…
Body Parts of 9/11 Victims Map Used To Oppose ‘Ground Zero Mosque’
Photo from NY Post
Fox News often takes things a step too far, but to use a map of the distance where human remains were found as an argument against a mosque, is just uncalled for. Via RawStory:
Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has set what may be a new standard of shamelessness by marking the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks with the publication of a map of human remains originally developed by the New York Fire Department in 2002.
“Here’s the chilling proof that Ground Zero stretches well beyond the boundaries of the World Trade Center site,” Murdoch’s New York Post boasted. “The map was obtained by The Post from sources after the Fire Department did not respond to requests to review it. It shows that remains were found just 348 feet to the south of the mosque site at 45 Park Place.”
An even more ominous version of the same map, with…
UN Sets Global Agenda
Details of a high level United Nations strategy meeting have been leaked to Fox News, with the inevitable subsequent fear-mongering regarding a conspiracy to create a one world government:
After a year of humiliating setbacks, United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon and about 60 of his top lieutenants — the top brass of the entire U.N. system — spent their Labor Day weekend at a remote Austrian Alpine retreat, discussing ways to put their sprawling organization in charge of the world’s agenda.
Details concerning the two-day, closed-door sessions in the comfortable village of Alpbach were closely guarded. Nonetheless, position papers for the meeting obtained by Fox News indicate that the topics included:
- how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the fiasco of last year’s Copenhagen summit;
- how to continue to try to make global redistribution of wealth the real basis of that climate agenda, and widen the discussion further to…
Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and the ‘Terror Mosque’
Thanks to Andrew Lander for sending this little bit of Fox News hypocrisy our way, from Yahoo News:
The opponents of the proposed Cordoba Initiative Islamic center planned for Lower Manhattan are fond of suggesting, by way of lengthy and often confusing chains of causation and association, that its principal planner, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is connected to terrorism. “The imam has been tied to some shady characters,” Fox Business Channel’s Eric Bolling recently said, “so should we worry that terror dollars could be funding the project?” Blogger Pamela Geller, who has become a regular talking head on cable-news channels to denounce the mosque, has noted Rauf’s involvement with a Malaysian peace group that funded the group that organized the Gaza flotilla under the headline, “Ground Zero Imam Rauf’s ‘Charity’ Funded Genocide Mission.”
On last night’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart skewered these antics as a “dangerous game of guilt by association you can play with almost anybody,” and proceeded to tie Fox News to al-Qaida…
