What defines a “responsible” Republican in the era of Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle and Rand Paul? Ask Bob Inglis, soon to depart from Congress after six terms as a Republican representative from South Carolina. Having suffered a landslide defeat in a primary this year — largely because he challenged the extremism of the far right and refused to pander to the “birthers” in his district — Inglis is now speaking out about the direction of his party.

In what amounts to an exit interview with the Associated Press, Inglis warned that the GOP’s eager embrace of a motley crew of media frothers, ideological fanatics and bizarre conspiracists is inflicting grave damage on the party’s integrity.

According to the AP, he denounced the “death panel” myth popularized by Palin as an example of “the lowest form of political leadership. It’s not leadership. It’s demagoguery.” He is also appalled by the undue influence of figures such as Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News gang, especially Glenn Beck, whom he described as a “divisive fear-monger” at a town hall meeting earlier this year.

“I think we have a lot of leaders that are following those (television and talk radio) personalities and not leading,” he said. “What it takes to lead is to say, ‘You know, that’s just not right.’” The obvious result is that the country becomes too polarized and too distracted by phony issues to address real problems.

As a white Southerner, Inglis said he is also sadly convinced that racism is among the motives of the most fanatical Obama opponents. He recalled being “shocked” as he watched Tea Party protesters heckling Rep. John Lewis in the Capitol last spring. Although he was too far away to hear the alleged racial slurs hurled at Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement in the South, he saw that the behavior of the mob was “threatening and abusive.” At the time he said to Lewis — who was beaten by racists in 1961 in Inglis’ home state as he tried to register black voters — “John, I guess you’ve been here before.”

via Facing extinction: The “responsible Republican” – Joe Conason – Salon.com.

Fox News is the *only* media outlet that has ever gone to court to win the right to fabricate stories and broadcast them as news. The attorneys for Fox argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves.” And they won. Learn about the alleged deception (regarding BGH in milk). Read the appellate court’s opinion (Feb. 2003) which essentially says that there’s no law against a news outlet’s lying to the public.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre were first asked by FOX News and later an attempt was made to bribe these reporters, to downplay a story they had on a cancer-causing bovine growth hormone (BGH) called Posilac that was found in milk. The reporters decided to blow the whistle on FOX News and filed a law suit. After the ordeal was over, it was discovered in the appeals court that it’s actually not against the law to falsify the “News.” To make matters worse, Monsanto Corporation (makers of Posilac), lobbied dearly in Congress to prevent consumer awareness and labeling of their products. Monsanto, the world’s dominant biotech company, is one of the most controversial companies in the world. The company that made Agent Orange and PCBs has gone to great lengths to make sure that Americans don’t know whether their food has been genetically engineered nor whether it is safe for human consumption. Just what are they afraid of?

“We are criminal in this country in that we are turning out a new generation of people worse educated than their parents,” Murdoch added.

Fox is simply the propaganda arm of the Right Wing Aristocracy. Like any good, modern televangelist they sell fear and salvation and take a cut while doing it. As long as you are willing to put your eyeballs on their advertising platform they will tell you anything you want to hear. So many of their stories and propaganda are fed to them through right wing think tanks and movements like the Heritage Foundation, AEI, Club for Growth, etc. And who funds these think tanks? Large right wing donors many of whom inherited their money and corporate power. In the end its all about the bottom line, getting tax breaks, and deregulating the marketplace, in whatever market we’re talking about. The rest is smoke and mirrors.

Which of these is easier to believe:

1) Fox is fair and EVERY OTHER MEDIA OUTLET is super-duper liberal,
or
2) Fox is obscenely biased and openly shares the politics of Rupert Murdoch, it’s founder and president, and is willing to push that agenda no matter what.

Think about that. Occam’s razor is not on your side.

Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.

• Step one: Turn off the television. Learn about neuromarketing and why turning off the television is a good idea.
• Step two: Do the research yourself, and don’t be too lazy to read primary sources. Consider the veracity of the source (whether digital or in print), as well as who benefits in pushing a particular viewpoint.
• Step three: Critical thinking helps to distinguish fact from propaganda.
• Step four: Realize that the popularity of something does not necessarily mean anything good. Much can be learned from history about popularity and the atrocities brought on by ideas that were very popular at some point. The same is true whether we are speaking of politics, medicine, news, or products for sale to consumers.

David Frum admits what most of the media ignores — that Fox News works for the GOP — but then turns it on its head.

Frum: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”

Frum has been outspoken against a lot of the tactics the GOP has been using since Obama took over office and even called the passing of HCR the GOP’s Waterloo.

via Frum: Republicans work for FOX News Now

“Good God, people, get a grip! Do you still have freedom of speech? Freedom of association? The right to vote? To choose your religion? To live where you want, choose your own occupation, decide what kind of family you want to have? Because those are real freedoms. You haven’t lost any of that! It’s still the freest country on earth, you loons! If you think that paying taxes means a loss of freedom, you’re wrong — it just means you’re living up to your end of the social contract. Are you part of that, or not?”

Well, those were the words in my head, anyway. And I realized then that, for all these people who have been watching Glenn Beck and Fox News and listening to Limbaugh and Palin and Hannity lo these many moons, that really is their stark reality now: Sunday night was “the night America died.”

And that’s really a dangerous prospect. Because it means the American Right has come completely unhinged. And unhinged people begin not just saying unhinged things, but doing them.

via The ominous side of the Tea Partiers’ defeat: They really believe their own outlandish rhetoric | Crooks and Liars.

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.”

Fox repeats this as gospel. But as a matter of historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News, this assertion ranks somewhere between debatable and untrue.

The American people and many of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change. Yet congressional Republicans have managed effective campaigns against health-care changes favored variously by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton.

via Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News? – washingtonpost.com.

Honest journalists? Very few of them get cable airtime or work for corporate media. Corporate media doesn’t want honest journalists or honest journalism. The fake debates with purported “liberals” (who aren’t actually liberals but hand-picked shills) show the true agenda of mainstream corporate media. Honesty is not at all welcome as it would expose the corporatists as the bought and paid for hypocritical arseholes they really are. Fox News reminds me of pro wrestling from about 15-20 years ago. They keep insisting they are legit, and there are a frightening number of rubes who believe them, but anyone with a little sense knows they are 100% fake. Covering actual news would take qualified staff.

So when did Howell Raines (the author of the article excerpted above and former executive editor of the New York Times) develop a “professional conscience”? Do you think Raines, who was the editor who oversaw and condoned Judy Miller’s Iraq War disinformation and propaganda, should really be the one to exhort journalists to call out Fox for its false journalism? Heh. Irony and hypocrites.

Miller, btw, now works for Fox News.

Yet as striking as are the differences among the channels there is one overwhelming similarity: whatever it is that corporate news may be, it is largely not journalism. The corporate media, from the New York Times on down,  is best regarded as propaganda and an enemy to an informed electorate. I advise everyone to turn off television news, and online isn’t much better but at least you can click away from it with little to no ill effects. Everyone, accept advertisers and brainwashed consumers apparently, knows that corporate news is crap, but people watch it anyway in the mistaken belief they can filter out the crap. But I’m quite positive that one can’t filter out the crap. It’s just basic neurology that if you hear something, whether it’s a lie, distortion, misinformation, advertisement, or propaganda, repeated enough times, it affects your thinking and your actions to some degree. Ever heard of “neuromarketing“?

In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey’s financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the New York Times about the Pentagon’s use of former military officers–many lobbying or consulting for military contractors–to get their talking points on television in exchange for access to decision-makers; and in 2009 bloggers uncovered how ex-Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe had guest-hosted Countdown With Keith Olbermann while working at a large PR firm specializing in “strategies for managing corporate reputation.”

These incidents represent only a fraction of the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news, a four-month investigation by The Nation has found. Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials–people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests–have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens–and in some cases hundreds–of appearances.

via The Lobbying-Media Complex.

The Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990′s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What’s interesting about this data is that so-called “high-information” voters — these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress — weren’t better informed than “low-information” voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn’t erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn’t follow Republican talking points — and Clinton’s deficit reduction didn’t fit the “tax and spend liberal” stereotype — then the information is conveniently ignored. “Voters think that they’re thinking,” Achen and Bartels write, “but what they’re really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they’ve already made.”

via Cable News : The Frontal Cortex.

Click here to view the embedded video.

11 January 2010 on MSNBC: Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, and Chuck Todd

“The level of ignorance is astounding.”

Who could have seen it coming? Mavricky maverick Sarah Palin stunned the political world this week by announcing that she would be joining Fox News as an analyst and occasional contributor. Will the Maverickosity never stop?

[...]

After Palin said thanks but no thanks for her previous job to nowhere, aborting her job as governor of Alaska in her first term to become a celebrity community organiser, and before she’s yet uttered a(n officially) paid word on Fox, bookies are already taking bets on when she’ll bail out. Smart money says she won’t make it through the end of this year.

But smart money doesn’t know Sarah Palin or Fox News! Free money just to say stuff, that doesn’t even have to be true, accurate, correct or even coherent is celebrated at Fox. Palin has just landed her dream job. As Jeanne “AK Muckraker” Devon, the award-winning Alaskan blogger and noted Palintologist observed upon hearing the news yesterday, “Since her talent for producing copious amounts of fiction that people swallow hook, line and sinker is now manifest, where else could she go,” but Fox News? “It’s a perfect fit,” Devon bubbled enthusiastically.

via Sarah Palin goes rogue, joins Fox | Brad Friedman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Heh. Jon Stewart is going to have loads of material for his show now. LMAO

Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law says family members are “ashamed and sickened” of the mogul’s right-wing channel Fox News, in what Murdochologists said could be the opening salvo in a public battle for the soul of America’s most-watched news channel.

The attack on Fox by Matthew Freud, the British public relations guru who is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, caused an immediate sensation in the media industry, as much for the fact that it was made in public as for the strength of the words chosen.

And attention was focusing last night on the future of Fox’s combative founder and boss, Roger Ailes, the former aide to Richard Nixon who shaped the channel’s coverage in his own image as a right-wing rabble-rouser.

[...]

Agreeing to contribute his thoughts to a New York Times profile of Mr Ailes, Mr Freud stated: “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”

via Freud fires opening shot in battle for soul of Fox News – Americas, World – The Independent.

“Ashamed” and “sickened”… heh. How about “apologetic” since the wealthy corporatists are always saying they’re sorry, but never really meaning it. Better still, why not finance a rival network that’s based on fact and funds investigative journalism? Or, they could always fire Ailes, and thereby prove it’s not just him that is the problem there. I’d be questioning why anyone would hire a Nixonian thug in the first place, we all know what criminals they are. It’s a reflection of the judgment of those at the top of the corporate flowchart now, isn’t it?

“The Daily Show” takes down Fox News’ Glenn Beck, digging into how the tales of doom and depression he tells on his show seem to have at least a tangential connection to the fact that he’s a paid spokesman for a company that deals in gold. Because, of course, gold just happens to be Beck’s prescription for how his viewers can protect themselves from said doom and depression.

Also see: Making money from rightwing paranoia, and Glenn Beck promotes gold to audience while profiting from gold investment firms

On its website, Ask.Heritage.org includes a quote by Rush Limbaugh stating that “Some of the finest conservative scholars alive today live, work, and breathe at the Heritage Foundation.” Admittedly that breathing thing is pretty important, but coming from Limbaugh, a man who relies on just taking breath as the prime requisite for spewing outlandish commentary it lacks gravitas. One of his best bits of foolishness was when the NY Times supported Sherrod Brown for the Senate. In his ultimate racist stupidity Limbaugh claimed that of course the Times would support him because he was black and that fit their agenda. Ah, what’s in a name? The fact is Ohio Senator Brown has always been and continues to be white.

via America’s Language Barrier | BuzzFlash.org.

As Fox kept insisting, all eyes were glued on Doug Hoffman, the insurgent tea party candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. A “tidal wave” was on its way, said Sean Hannity, and the right would soon “take back the Republican Party.” The race was not “even close,” Bill O’Reilly suggested to the pollster Scott Rasmussen, who didn’t disagree. When returns showed Hoffman trailing, the network’s resident genius, Karl Rove, knowingly reassured viewers that victory was in the bag, even if we’d have to stay up all night waiting for some slacker towns to tally their votes.

Alas, the Dewey-beats-Truman reveries died shortly after midnight, when even Fox had to concede that the Democrat, Bill Owens, had triumphed in what had been Republican country since before Edison introduced the light bulb. For the far right, the thriller in Watertown was over except for the ludicrous morning-after spin that Hoffman’s loss was really a victory.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down – NYTimes.com.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rachel Maddow points out what has been largely overlooked in the discussion of the White House feud with Fox News, that explains why Fox is not news. [October 23, 2009]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Robert Greenwald Discusses Fox News on The Ed Show. For more information, go to Fox Attacks.

Dunn is right: Fox isn’t a news network in the traditional sense. Everyone knows its “fair and balanced” tag line is a wink-wink joke.

[...]

Fox adopts the outward forms of the establishment US media and pretends to hew to its standards – in order to undermine those very things. Fox claims to give its viewers the straight story, while proclaiming it’s the New York Times and CBS that are really biased.

Of course, CBS and the NYT have their problems. But to believe Fox tells it like it is is to conclude that a basic idea of journalism – that what’s happening in the world can be understood and fair-mindedly explained – is a sham.

via Fox among the pigeons | John McQuaid | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk .

As Rep. Alan Grayson has already amply proven, the only way to deal with a bully is to confront the bully head-on. Remember what happened to John Kerry when he thought fighting back against the Swift Boaters was beneath his dignity?

It cost him the Presidency.

Former Bush White House adviser Karl Rove has compared President Barack Obama to former President Richard Nixon, saying the Obama administration’s feud with Fox News is proof the White House is creating a Nixonian “enemies list” that “demeans” the office of the president.

“This is the White House engaging in its own version of the media enemies list,” rove told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. “It’s unhealthy for the country and undignified for the president of the United States so to do.”

via Rove compares Obama to Nixon, accuses WH of keeping ‘enemies list’ | Raw Story.

First, Rove, STFU. You and your viewpoint are irrelevant. No one gives a shit about what you say anymore, unless it’s under oath before a court or Congress. And even then, we’d like to see the polygraph.

Second, you were Nixon’s monkey way back when, and I seriously doubt you objected to his “enemies list”. In fact, we all know your specialty was “over the top” language, disinformation, and “catapulting the propaganda”. Remember Donald Segretti, your mentor? Stolen stationery… does that sound like something you would do, Rove? Of course it does, you dirty Ratfucker.

And here’s a blast from the past:

1994: Rove becomes political adviser to George W. Bush in his race against incumbent governor Ann Richards. Bush aided by $1 million pumped into the race. Rove dreams up idea of staging calls to voters from supposed pollsters who ask such things as whether people would be “more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians.”

Pot meet Kettle.

Third, Fox News is the enemy of the American people in their attempt to undermine the democratically-elected Obama administration.

Fourth, Rupert Murdoch, a foreigner spending billions to mislead and misinform the American people, ought to thank his lucky stars that he’s even permitted to do business in the United States.

The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he’s doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, “fair and balanced” is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media’s role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes fair play. But it’s a demonstrable deceit that no longer deserves equal time.

via The O’Garbage Factor – Newsweek.

UPDATE:

More here: Fox News — home of outrageous smears, falsehoods — promotes “tea parties” protesting “journalistic malpractice”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez takes us through a recent Fox News report dealing with the Patriot Act. As you will see, it’s not a question of Fox making a mistake here or there—the entire Fox report is essentially devoid of fact, concocted in some politically supercharged alternate reality.

via Harper’s Magazine online.