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Fox News Gunning For Candy Crowley To Be Fired

Rather than admit that their guy, Mitt Romney, didn’t just lose the last debate but specifically blew it on the right wing’s pet witch hunt of Benghazi, Fox has been trying to blame moderator Candy Crowley both as a scapegoat and as a dust cloud of distraction. But this morning, Fox & Friends kicked both the scapegoating and the distraction up a notch by starting a new witch hunt for Crowley’s head.

For those not following the issue, Crowley halted Romney’s rude and disrespectful attack on Obama for supposedly not using the words “act of terror” for 14 days when referring to the attacks on the American consulate at Benghazi. Crowley interrupted to say that Obama had, in fact, used those words. And he did, the very next day. But on Fox News, fact-checking in a debate is bias – when the facts are not in the Republican candidate’s favor, of course. Can there be any doubt that Fox would be cheering Crowley had she done the same thing to Obama?

Now, to up the ante, Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson started calling for Crowley’s firing.

I thought this was the defining moment in the debate… I was stunned. You literally couldn’t have a more destructive moment in a debate. You couldn’t more clearly help one candidate against the other. This is the kind of moment where, you know, people’s careers are destroyed. In a normal world, you couldn’t work in journalism again after doing something like that.

Well, unless she had caught President Obama in a falsehood. In that case, she might have been offered a job at Fox News on the spot. Then she could have joined birther Heather Childers, still playing an objective news host on Fox, even after she sent a tweet asking for “thoughts” as to whether or not the Obama campaign threatened to kill Chelsea Clinton in order to keep Bill and Hillary Clinton from spilling the beans about then-candidate Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Or birther and bigot Lou Dobbs, now at Fox Business but a regular on the News Channel.

Speaking of Dobbs, Carlson was on Dobbs’ show last night where he compared Crowley to John Wilkes Booth. Now THAT’S journalism, Fox style.

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This is fucking hilarious. I want you “both sides do this” people to tell me this is what happened on MSNBC after the first debate. I fucking dare you.

Fox contributor Karl Rove’s political groups have invested more than $900,000 in Akin’s U.S. Senate race.

mediamattersforamerica:

Despite this conflict of interest, Fox News brought Rove on air to discuss Akin’s claim that it’s “really rare” for women subjected to “legitimate rape” to become pregnant. 

Naturally, Fox forgot to disclose Rove’s special interest in the situation.

Naturally.

(Source: )

Get Informed! This *IS* huge.

mediamattersforamerica:

This is huge: Today the FCC launched an online database revealing political ad records for stations linked to 4 big networks.

Fox Orlando Affiliate Calls Neo-Nazis ‘A Civil Rights Group’

A Fox Orlando affiliate decribed Neo-Nazis as “a civil rights group” on a television broadcast and online. The group of Neo-Nazis, known as the National Socialist Movement, has been conducting armed patrols of the streets of Sanford, Florida, the town where Trayvon Marting was shot dead.

The Fox Orlando affiliate, WOFL, aired a shockingly uncritical report of the group’s activities. The Fox reporter introduced the group by saying, “There’s another civil rights group in town.” She also conducts an interview with the group’s leader, Jeff Schoep, without challenging any of his claims about the nature and mission of the group.

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Rush Limbaugh and Ideological Warfare from Fox News and Right-Wing Media

There have been several studies (e.g. this one) over the last few years that have shown that Fox News viewers are not just more misinformed than consumers of other news outlets; they are more misinformed than people who watch no news programming at all. In other words, if you watch  Fox News, you are going to be misled and you will form opinions based on lies. This fact alone should lead civic-minded citizens to worry about the negative impact of right-wing news organizations, including Clear Channel’s Premiere Radio Networks. It’s one thing, after all, to disseminate news with a political perspective. It’s quite another to simply replace news with completely nonfactual information and perspectives. The former is normal political debate; the latter is simple disinformation. It’s this making-people-stupid element of the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer that makes it an appropriate target for more than just Democrats, but concerned and responsible citizens of all stripes.

Having said that, the battle with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of the stable of right-wing media/entertainment figures is part of a larger legitimate ideological war. To understand it, you must first understand that the right-wing has been waging an unforgiving and unrelenting war on the rest of us.

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Bill O’Reilly sticking up for Ellen is part of Fox’s planned move to the center…and it’s pissing some conservatives off.

Across the Conservative Political Action Conference this year, there were similar grumbles among conservative activists that the cable channel was no longer speaking for them as it once did.

The grumblers were picking up on a strategy that has been under way for some time — a “course correction,” as Fox chief Roger Ailes put it last fall — with the network distancing itself from the tea party cheerleading that characterized the first two years of President Barack Obama’s presidency. Lately, Fox has increasingly promoted its straight-news talent in the press and conducted some of the toughest interviews and debates of the Republican primary season. Just last week, it hired the openly gay liberal activist Sally Kohn as a contributor.

All along, Fox watchers warned that it risked alienating conservative true believers as it inched toward the center.

Well, consider them alienated.

read more at politico

In the discussion regarding this on reddit, many think that this is part of an attempt to shift the overton window. 

That is, they went so far right that they can shift back to a position they now call “center” that is actually a lot further right of what center used to be.

You can see an example of how this works in the fact that what is considered liberal in the US is right of center everywhere else.

Interesting move, maybe they are trying to get more moderate viewership, or maybe they are trying to shift center further right than it used to be.

It could also be that they have realized just how fucked up their viewership is becoming, perhaps they feel they’ve created a monster and lost control of said monster, but I doubt it. That seems far too decent of them. 

Right-wing media critic: Obama is like ‘a skinny, ghetto crackhead’

By Andrew Jones | Raw Story

Just in time for the holiday season, the conservative media critic Brent Bozell provided some rare good cheer towards President Barack Obama. Or not.

Appearing on Fox News’ Hannity Thursday evening, Bozell talked about his usual subject of describing the “liberal bias” in the media. Angered by Chris Matthews comparing Newt Gingrich’s looks to a car bomber earlier in the week, Bozell gave Obama a not so racially friendly comparison.

“How long do you think Sean Hannity’s show would last if four times in one sentence he made a comment about the President of the United States as a skinny, ghetto crackhead?” he said. “Which by the way, Barack Obama does.”

[FULL STORY & VIDEO]

Careful there right wing, your racism is showing. 

How Fox News is helping Barack Obama’s re-election bid

by Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian

Whoever wrote the political rulebook needs to start rewriting it. It used to be an iron maxim that voters’ most vital organ was neither their head nor their heart, but their wallet. If they were suffering economically, they’d throw the incumbents out. Yet in Britain a coalition presiding over barely-there growth, rising unemployment and forecasts of gloom stretching to the horizon is holding steady in the opinion polls, while in the US Barack Obama is mired in horrible numbers – except for the ones showing him beating all-comers in the election now less than 11 months away. Even though the US economy is slumped in the doldrums, some of the country’s shrewdest commentators make a serious case that Obama could be heading for a landslide victory in 2012.

How to explain such a turnaround? In the United States, at least, there is one compellingly simple, two-word answer: Fox News.

By any normal standards, Obama should be extremely vulnerable. Not only is the economy in bad shape, he has proved to be a much more hesitant, less commanding White House presence than his supporters longed for. And yet, most surveys put him comfortably ahead of his would-be rivals. That’s not a positive judgment on the president – whose approval rating stands at a meagre 44% – but an indictment of the dire quality of a Republican field almost comically packed with the scandal-plagued, gaffe-prone and downright flaky. And the finger of blame for this state of affairs points squarely at the studios of Fox News.

It’s not just usual-suspect lefties and professional Murdoch-haters who say it, mischievously exaggerating the cable TV network’s influence. Dick Morris, veteran political operative and Fox regular, noted the phenomenon himself the other day while sitting on the Fox sofa. “This is a phenomenon of this year’s election,” he said. “You don’t win Iowa in Iowa. You win it on this couch. You win it on Fox News.” In other words, it is Fox – with the largest cable news audience, representing a huge chunk of the Republican base – that is, in effect, picking the party’s nominee to face Obama next November.

[FULL STORY]