Fox News: At it again

[gah]

I <3 Fox news.

[Undermind]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/carjack-suspect-shoots-high-speed-chase-fox-broadcasts-live-article-1.1170617

[twatts]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/carjack-suspect-shoots-high-speed-chase-fox-broadcasts-live-article-1.1170617

LOL!  Love the Foxy People...  Even this is an opening to attack OB.  First comment I see:

News alert! U.S. Ambasador killed because of incompentent leadership.  Administration officials hide facts and lie to American sheeple!

$1 says the noodies of the Royals in UK come from Fox...  Fighting back on the wire-tapping thing...

Terry

[VDB]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/carjack-suspect-shoots-high-speed-chase-fox-broadcasts-live-article-1.1170617

Shep Smith strikes me as one of the few people at FN with any shred of integrity.

Probably explains why he's been banished to the afternoon car-chase hour.

[VDB]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/carjack-suspect-shoots-high-speed-chase-fox-broadcasts-live-article-1.1170617

LOL!  Love the Foxy People...  Even this is an opening to attack OB.  First comment I see:

News alert! U.S. Ambasador killed because of incompentent leadership.  Administration officials hide facts and lie to American sheeple!

$1 says the noodies of the Royals in UK come from Fox...  Fighting back on the wire-tapping thing...

Terry

The right desperately wants to play this up as Obama's "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within U.S." moment. They also want to erase the perceived edge he enjoys over Romney on foreign policy matters. You'd almost admire Fox News for their insistence on holding the government's feet to the fire (see: Fast & Furious coverage) if it wasn't so obvious that they're doing it for political, not principled, reasons.

[twatts]

You'd almost admire Fox News for their insistence on holding the government's feet to the fire...

The Main Function of The Media in a Democracy/Republic is to inform the Public of the Actions of the Government.  They must do so vigorously and from all viewpoints and political leanings.  It is The People's only defense against Corruption:  if we know how bad it is from reading it in the paper - we can elect someone else... 

That being said, I don't mind Fox really.  I know their MO and take their stuff with a grain of salt...  The same can be said for all media outlets...

Honestly, Fox has a good thing going - there should be a right-leaning media outlet doing its job to inform the public to issues from its viewpoint.  I just wish they were less Tabloid-ish and actually tried to be "legitimate".  The idea that they are somehow outside of the Mainstream just lends to the notion that they lack credibility and are again, tabloid-ish. 

That being said, I tend to read a lot of different news outlets on things I'm interested in.  BBC and Aljazeera are two goods ones for an outlook from outside the US, though each has its slant (AJ is quite foreign to me as Westerner, but it is intriguing).  We tend to be narcasistic (sic) in our news regardless of outlet.  Its nice to see an outsider's view, even if I don't necessarily agree with it...

Terry

[PIE-GUY]

BIAS ALERT! BIAS ALERT!

Liberal media response???

From www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/business/media/challenging-the-claims-of-media-bias-the-media-equation.html

Tired Cries of Bias Don't Help Romney

    by DAVID CARR
    Sept. 30, 2012

In the last few days, conservatives have become agitated about Mitt Romney's drop-off in the polls. So did they think the stumble was because of the ill-fated "47 percent" slip of the lip, or the hasty effort to gain a political edge after the death of an American ambassador in Libya, or more problematically, a campaign that can't seem to stop pratfalling no matter what the news?

No, in their view, the mysterious drop can only be explained by the fact that the mainstream media have their collective liberal thumb on the scale, in terms of coverage and, more oddly, polling.

On Sunday, Mr. Romney's running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, got right to the point.

"It goes without saying that there is definitely media bias," Mr. Ryan told "Fox News Sunday." "I think most people in the mainstream media are left of center and, therefore, they want a very left-of-center president versus a conservative president like Mitt Romney."

And ostensibly tendentious coverage was cited last Wednesday in a letter addressed to the "Biased News Media" and sponsored by the Media Research Center, which defines its mission as "holding the liberal media accountable for shamelessly advancing a left-wing agenda." The letter said in part: "This election year, so much of the broadcast networks, their cable counterparts and the major establishment print media are out of control with a deliberate and unmistakable leftist agenda."

It was signed by conservative royalty, including Brent Bozell, Gary Bauer, Ed Meese, Tony Perkins, Rush Limbaugh and Richard Viguerie. It included a list of chronic offenses and concluded, "It is time the American people turn you who are offending off, once and for all. You have betrayed their trust."

The mainstream media are frequently indicted suspects when the rink tilts against conservative causes. But it seems worth pulling apart that notion, especially in a landscape where ownership of the megaphone is increasingly up for grabs.

Back when Spiro Agnew went after the "nattering nabobs of negativism," most people got their news from three networks and a handful of national newspapers. Network news still pulls in more than 20 million viewers nightly, and newspapers still matter in spite of their business struggles, but their influence is waning as thousands of new sources of information bloom.

As the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press pointed out last week, digital news has surpassed radio and newspapers and is quickly catching up to television. Social networks are soaring as a source of news, and since 2010, the report said, "there has been a sharp decline in the proportion of Americans who got news yesterday only from a traditional news platform — from 40 percent then to 33 percent currently."

Even if legacy media still maintained some kind of death grip on American consciousness, it would be hard to claim that the biggest players in those industries are peddling liberal theology.

Think about it. What is the No. 1 newspaper in America by circulation? Why, that would be The Wall Street Journal, a bastion of conservative values on its editorial pages and hardly a suspect when it comes to lefty news coverage. (Though it's worth pointing out that the paper has published some very tough coverage of Mr. Romney.)

What about radio? Three of the top five radio broadcasters — Mr. Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the recently departed Michael Savage — have outdrawn NPR's morning and evening programs by a wide margin. In cable television, Fox News continues to pummel the competition.

Many Republicans see bias lurking in every live shot, but the growing hegemony of conservative voices makes manufacturing a partisan conspiracy a practical impossibility.

Let's be fair. It's not as if everyone who believes there is a liberal bias needs to be fitted for a tinfoil helmet. But the trope is losing traction, partly because there are many robust champions of the right, which gives conservatives the means to project their message far beyond the choir.

It's hard to picture conservatives as disenfranchised in the fight for attention from the news media, not after a campaign season in which the audition for the Republican nomination seemed to include some combination of hosting and making guest appearances on Fox News. Another thing about the media blame game? It doesn't work. Newt Gingrich ran hard against the news media and that didn't turn out so great.

Mr. Romney seems to have realized that. After weeks of complaints from his surrogates that his campaign missteps were being invented and/or amplified by the news media, he is no longer regularly shooting the messenger.

"I think we have a system of free press," he told CBS before an appearance in Toledo, Ohio. "People are able to provide their own perspective based upon their own beliefs. I think there are some people who are more in my camp, there's a lot of people who are more in his camp, and I don't worry about that."

A senior adviser, meanwhile, said the Romney campaign now has a "no-whining rule" about news coverage. (Mr. Ryan apparently missed the memo.) And William Kristol of The Weekly Standard told Politico that, "it shouldn't be the consensus of conservatives in general to blame the media."

But the pushback goes beyond coverage. Now even the polls themselves are being impugned, with suggestions that they are skewed by left-leaning math. Various conservative bloggers and pundits have complained that a slew of polls showing gains by President Obama were guilty of "oversampling Democrats" and "confirmation bias."

If that rings a little familiar, recall that when the election seemed to be slipping away from John Kerry in 2004, MoveOn.org took out a full-page ad in The New York Times accusing the Gallup organization of overrepresenting Republicans and asking, "Why does America's top pollster keep getting it wrong?"

Of course, given that I am pointing out these disconnects in The New York Times, it will be seen as confirming what conservatives already know: that I went to the dark chambers where we cook up the conspiracy, met with my betters to receive my marching orders and then set about playing my small role as a cog in the manufacture of liberal consent. (Memo to headquarters: the Plan is in very high effect).

Maybe though — and I'm just putting this out there — the polls and the coverage suggest that Mr. Romney has had a bad couple of weeks and he needs to turn it around if he wants to win the election. On Sunday, a well-informed observer pointed out as much on ABC's "This Week."

"I'm not going to sit here and complain about coverage of the campaign. As a candidate, if you do that, you're losing." That bit of trenchant analysis comes from deep inside the Republican tent: Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

[VDB]

On NPR this morning, there was a story about a bunch of suspicious and potentially fraudulent voter-registration forms being turned in in Florida by a firm hired by the GOP.

Immediately, this is quite reminiscent of the whole ACORN episode when people were caught turning in registration forms for "Mickey Mouse" and other imaginary characters. Remember that scandal? Fox News and conservatives were all over it. Mention ACORN to a conservative today, and it will conjure up terrifying thoughts of liberal fraudsters and election thieves run amok. The episode helped fuel the atmosphere of suspicion and alarm that spawned GOP-lead initiatives to "secure" our democracy, e.g. through the wave of voter ID laws we've seen recently.

Any mention of this story on Fox News this morning? Not a one. Couldn't even find it on their "Politics" main page. What's up, FN, not so horrified by voter registration fraud any more? But don't worry, one of the top items on FN.com's front page right now is an opinion piece on "mainstream media is now a threat to our democracy." Got it.


edit: spelling...

[sls.stormyrider]

I'm gonna puke up my lunch.

Remember when Dan Rather ran the story about GWB and questions of his military career on CBS news? If you don't, their fact checking was found to be, well, a little lacking. Several reporters got fired and Rather was banned from the top spot for life.
I suppose that wasn't a strong enough of response from that pinko outfit, CBS.

[Hicks]

Heh, maybe if they weren't running such as weak ass candidate the news wouldn't consistently be dominated by Romney's fuck up du jour?

I'm seriously loving this.

[VDB]

Fox's laughable case for Romney

[sls.stormyrider]

This vast conspiracy is downgrading Romney three to nine points by using screens that overstate the votes of blacks, Latinos, Asians, women and the young.

right - because GOP governors are doing whatever they can to prevent people with these demographics from voting

[VDB]

News anchor suggests it's ridiculous to say a sitting president could actually be considered "lazy," Fox News cries "bias alert!"

[runawayjimbo]

News anchor suggests it's ridiculous to say a sitting president could actually be considered "lazy," Fox News cries "bias alert!"

Pfft, tell that to Calvin Coolidge. Dude took like 3 naps a day (but he was a helluva free marketer).

[VDB]

News anchor suggests it's ridiculous to say a sitting president could actually be considered "lazy," Fox News cries "bias alert!"

Pfft, tell that to Calvin Coolidge. Dude took like 3 naps a day (but he was a helluva free marketer).

I am now totally jealous of Calvin Coolidge.

But you raise a good point -- wouldn't the hands-off, laissez-faire, conservative theory of government be more conducive to "laziness" than that meddlesome, overbearing, liberal style? Jeez, Sununu, stay on message.