OTHER ORGANIZATIONS THAT ALSO THINK; "FOX ISN'T OFFERING REAL NEWS"

Just more examples showing why Fox Non-News is just a tool for the right-wing, "wing-nuts".

...A logo that should not include "News"

I continue to readily admit my distain for the billionaire Rupert Murdock and his management of both his publications and his TV media companies, specifically the Fox Cable Network. But I recently read a very concise article on Fox written by an astute journalist named Stan Adele who writes for the award winning, on-line news magazine; AlterNet.org.

Mr. Adele has done yeoman´s duty in taking a favorite subject of mine, and apparently that of the Obama White House as well, in denouncing and proving that the Fox Opinion Channel as not operating as a legitimate "News Channel".

Now, I will confess that I really can´t "broad-brush" all of the Fox news coverage as being illegitimate. What the Fox News Network produces during much of the regular week-day morning´s is usually right up there with many other real "news" providers. It´s when they get into their evening shows or on some of their weekend offerings that they get totally out-of-hand and they seem to "morph" into: "FOX: The National Cable Channel of the Far-Right", or the "channel that can spread misinformation faster and better than any other network".

Mr. Adele has taken this subject seriously, as many of us have, and he has taken the time and made the effort to document some substantive examples of how Fox is many times, NOT a legitimate news reporting organization. In his recent article called: 8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization, Mr. Adele lists in detail the investigation and comparisons to "real" news organization for showing exactly why Fox is not offering real news and is basically just a right-wing tool for the conservatives.

In the following article, I will summarize what Mr. Adele has documented so well. However, if you would like to read his article in its entirety, you can do so at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143456/ . But here are just the basics from Mr. Adele that totally confirm why Fox should drop both the word "News" and the tag-line "Fair & Balanced" from their network logo, especially for their evening programs.

1. Glenn Beck:

As Mr. Adele makes it clear, no other honest news operation has ever hired its own "community organizer". Especially one tasked with the mission of organizing paranoid people to march through the streets of the nation's capital with signs depicting the president of the United States as a mass murderer. But through Beck´s 9-12 Project, that's exactly what Beck did on Fox. Beck personally organized along with other right-wing organizations, the 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington. This march included all the protestors with the signs comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

Beck was also helped in turning out the angry mobs to disrupt this summer's town hall meetings where members of Congress attempted to discuss health care reform with their constituents. After a scuffle at a Tampa, Fla., Town Hall Meeting, where they named their local 9-12 Project site as their inspiration, the national 9-12 Project site finally stopped accepting further written comments.

And despite the loss of some 80 advertisers from Fox´s; The Glenn Beck Show, after Beck had claimed the president had "a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture," one wonders why Beck still remains on the air at Fox? Other TV and radio show hosts have been asked what would happen to them if they had personally lost 80 sponsors, and everyone of them said they would have been shown the door.

Could it be that Beck is still there because he's more valuable to his boss as the "community organizer" than as a conduit for advertising dollars? After all, as everyone is aware of Mr. Murdock´s right-wing politics, defeating government regulation of any kind could assure billions for "Murdoch-the Investor". The profits from a show with only 3 million viewers would at most only bring in millions. But for Murdock, we all know that it's all about the zeros and how many there are.

2. Americans for Prosperity (AFP):

Fox's alliance with the corporate-funded "Astroturf" group (a non-grass-roots group): Americans for Prosperity, it is a very strange relationship. There has never been a relationship between a news channel and a corporate-funded group that organizes fearful people to disrupt public meetings. Americans For Prosperity, a group that received funding from Koch Industries, an oil-and-energy company and major polluter, also organized this summer's town hall disruptions.

At a recent AFP conference in Pittsburgh, the roster of speakers was heavily populated by Murdock´s News Corp. personalities, including Fox contributors Michele Malkin and Jim Pinkerton, and Murdock´s Wall Street Journal columnists John Fund and Stephen Moore. AFP Policy Director Phil Kerpen, also has a column at FoxNews.com, and he used it to take credit for the resignation of White House adviser Van Jones, against whom he helped orchestrate a smear campaign in collusion with other Fox personalities, including Glenn Beck.

At the RightOnline conference, when the AFP President Tim Phillips was asked if his organization had a partnership with Murdoch, Mr. Phillips looked stunned. Mr. Phillips said; "There's no partnership, financially, understood or anything else."

However, Murdoch's direct employees accounted for more than one-third of the roster of speakers at the AFP conference plenary session.

And according to the Fox News Washington Bureau, indeed Michelle Malkin and Jim Pinkerton are paid by Fox, and are branded by the News Channel, listed on the "talent" page of its Web site. Fund and Moore are full-time employees of Murdock´s Wall Street Journal, and AFP's Kerpen has a weekly platform on Fox's well-traveled Web site.

The News Channel's newest addition, Fox Business News (FBN) channel is also getting in on the act. FBN´s John Stossel is hitting the road with AFP's Phillips to argue against "government-forced health care" at AFP rallies. Stossel hosts a weekly show on FBN, and appears on Fox News Channel as a commentator. Stossel also appeared on Mike Huckabee´s Fox News show, where he advocated for the right of insurance companies to charge more for, or to dump, patients who have pre-existing conditions. Per Stossel; "I mean, an insurance company helps us by saying, 'We're gonna charge the town drunk more for car insurance than we're gonna charge you.' " It´s disgusting to compare someone who has "multiple sclerosis", with the town drunk. Apparently Stossel believes that MS is the result of a person´s bad behavior. In the same segment, Stossel said insurance companies should have the right to charge women more because, "women go to the doctor more often. ... some discrimination is good."

3. Fundraising for Republican Political Action Committees (PAC´s)

Fox personalities encourage on-air viewers to contribute money to Republican PACs and to visit the Web sites of specific Republican-affiliated political action committees. There is no apparent instance of either CNN or MSNBC doing anything of this kind for Democratic causes.

Yes, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC raised money for free health clinics for the uninsured, but that also includes uninsured Republicans as well. And Rachel Maddow raised money for baseball jerseys for an Iraqi baseball team (who had learned the game from American troops).

As reported by Media Matters, Fox political analyst Dick Morris used an appearance on Fox's Sean Hannity program to promote Republican Trust, a PAC for which Morris works, saying that "we've raised now $2 million to run ads ..." Former Arkansas Gov. Huckabee, who hosts a Fox Sunday night show on the "alleged News Channel", took a softer approach when he directed viewers to the Web site of his Huck PAC, the fundraising mechanism for an expected Republican presidential campaign.

4. Bill O'Reilly:

Bill O'Reilly stalks those opinions he doesn't like. Using multiple avenues of research, no one was able to find any news show host at another cable news channel who pays his producer to stalk people whose opinions he or she doesn't like. Nor could we find anyone who had ever locked out the media from hearing the remarks that they were delivering in their acceptance of an award from a nonprofit religious group.

At the annual conference of the religious-right political group, Family Research Council Action (FRC), O'Reilly received an award for his vilification of Dr. George Tiller. Tiller was an abortion provider who was gunned down in his church by a man who obviously took to heart references by O'Reilly and others that called him, "Tiller the baby-killer". FRC Action gave O'Reilly its first "Media Courage" award for what he said about Tiller, only to see the Fox host lock out all of the media from watching or hearing his acceptance speech.

One of the trademarks of Fox is The O'Reilly Factor. They are known on the "Factor" for dispatching their producer/stalker Jesse Watters to ambush liberals who have expressed opinions with which O´Reilly disagrees. Watters then pummels them with questions framed around misleading statements, and captures their shocked replies on video. This is then edited for maximum effect and played on the "Factor" nightly.

But when Watters tailed Think Progress blogger Amanda Terkel for two hours and bushwhacked her at a resort town where she was vacationing, he awarded Terkel a moment of fame that did not play well for O'Reilly. Fox defenders say that Watters uses techniques developed by the legendary Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame. They however, neglect to mention that Mr. Wallace does not sic his producers on people who criticize him. He only goes after people that are alleged to have committed crimes who refuse to return his calls.

5. Republican falsehoods:

Fox has a Sunday talk-show host who promotes Republican falsehoods. Fox Anchor, Chris Wallace, son of Mike Wallace, was a real journalist, just like his dad. Then, when he joined the Fox team as host of Fox News Sunday, Wallace became a full-fledged Fox "wing-nut". This first occurred when he promoted a Bush administration mischaracterization of a booklet in the Veteran´s Affairs medical system as a "death book" for military veterans. The Fox guest who made the allegation was an author whose book about end-of-life options had been rejected for distribution by the VA. The author, Mr. Jim Towey, was also the former director of the Bush administration's office of faith-based initiatives.

Towey's appearance on the show was due to an op-ed he published in the Wall Street Journal slamming the Obama administration's VA department. While you may not agree with the framing of the issues on NBC's Meet the Press, CBS' Face the Nation, or ABC's This Week, we don't recall David Gregory, Bob Scheiffer or George Stephanopoulos ever promoting a similar misrepresentation of any Bush administration policy.

6. Parroting GOP press releases:

Fox hosts and pundits parrot GOP press releases, or they just make up stuff, such as promoting the notion that their organization is on some sort of Nixonian White House "enemies list". Fox personalities first trotted out the "enemies list" theme when the Obama White House was asking for Americans to send the administration any unsolicited e-mails they received that promoted false information about health care reform legislation. Fox misreported that the Obama administration was actually just compiling an "enemies list."

After Obama administration officials began hitting back at Fox for its misrepresentation of administration policies, Fox personalities declared themselves to be the main targets on the White House´s imaginary "enemies list".

Fox and Friends anchors have recited as fact a false claim in a GOP press release that reported administration projections for 2011 jobs to be created by the stimulus package, but they listed 2009 figures. A graphic on-screen during the segment incorrectly read: "STIMULUS GENERATES UNEMPLOYMENT," a claim that no credible economist has ever made.

This wasn't the first time Fox has looked to Republican press releases as substitutes for their program scripts. In February, Media Matters caught Fox passing off as its own research slides, apparently a "cut-and-pasted" slide from a Senate Republican Communications Center release. How did Fox get caught? They passed on an actual typo from the original SRCC document, citing the date for a Wall Street Journal report as "12/19/2009".

7. Fox urges viewers to join political groups:

Fox hosts urge viewers to join specific political groups. During the run-up to the big right-wing 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington, Fox entities and personalities repeatedly flogged viewers to join the Tea Party Express, a bus tour of anti-Obama activists.

Advising viewers on "how you can join" the tour, Fox and Friends hosted Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams, vice chairman of the "Our Country Deserves Better PAC". This group is part of the "birther" conspiracy movement for people who contend that Obama wasn't born in America. At the Fox Nation Web site, viewers were treated to a promotional piece that asked, "Will You Join the Tea Party Express?" We certainly don't see the other cable news outlets soliciting members for, say, MoveOn.org.

8. Promoter of paranoid conspiracies:

Glenn Beck, is the undisputed, deranged inventor of paranoid political conspiracies. There is a Beck exclusive that you won't hear on any other cable news network and it is about: OnStar, the GPS/emergency-alert system available in General Motors cars, which is being indirectly funded by the auto-industry bailout. Beck says that this is all being done so "the government can spy on you in you car".

To be fair, Beck said all this on his radio program, which is not a Fox product. On the radio is also where he compared that Fox would have supported the Jews during the Holocaust, while those other world news outlets acted as silent bystanders, which of course Fox would never have done. In the same radio segment, he cast Obama as a "brutal dictator".

But statements such as these seem to serve no detriment to Beck´s Fox career. Compare this to MSNBC, where David Shuster got sidelined for a whole month during the height of the 2008 campaign season just for a bad choice of words regarding Chelsea Clinton stumping for her mom. And of course, there's no shortage of outrageous and paranoid material to choose from on Beck's Fox television show.

Obviously, the big one is Beck calling Obama a racist, and then going on Fox and Friends to declare that the president has "a deep-seated hatred of white people and white culture".

As an added item, there's all the bad acting when Beck cries on the air. On other cable news channel opinion shows, you sure don't see much of that kind of activity.

And don´t forget: Beck's claim that he couldn't debunk the conspiracy theory that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is building internment camps for America´s political dissidents. Per Beck on Fox and Friends: "We are a country that is headed towards socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination.."

After the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called out Beck for this claim, Beck dialed back the rhetoric.

Now, this is all the kind of stuff you won't find on any other cable channel that "is" a real news outlet.

Well, there it is. I´m glad that there is another, well respected on-line publication that feels as I do and that has taken the time to also dig out the facts.

Thank you Stan Adele and AlterNet.org.

Copyright G.Ater 2009

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