Is Fox News really all that bad?

[John_Stamos_Left_Ear]

Fox News is doing it again, screaming “Benghazi” over and over again until their faces turn blue. They do this a lot: Pick on something by themselves that is at best based on dubious facts and at worst loony tunes tin foil hat brigade conspiracy theory nonsense and beat it to the ground until viewers decide that it’s a fact, other mainstream media outlets feel forced to comment on the story and even politicians buy into it.

Here’s an editorial from The Washington Post that touches upon this:

SINCE THE Senate is solely responsible for the confirmation of Cabinet officers, it’s not often that members of the House of Representatives jump into a debate about the nomination of a secretary of state — particularly before there has been a nomination. That’s one of the reasons a letter sent to President Obama this week by 97 House Republicans, challenging his potential choice of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for the State Department job, is remarkable.

Another is blatant disregard of established facts. Drawn up by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), the letter alleges that “Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public” about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. But as congressional testimony has established, Ms. Rice’s comments on several Sunday television talk shows on Sept. 16 were based on talking points drawn up by the intelligence community. She was acting as an administration spokeswoman; there was nothing either incompetent or deliberately misleading about the way she presented the information she was given.

Though the Benghazi attack involved clear failures of U.S. security, Republicans have concentrated on a dubious subsidiary issue: the alleged failure of the administration to publicly recognize quickly enough that the incident was “a terrorist attack.” In fact, Mr. Obama has acknowledged that “the information may not have always been right the first time.” But if there was a White House conspiracy to cover up the truth, Republicans have yet to produce any evidence of it — much less a connection to Ms. Rice, who had no involvement with the Benghazi attack other than those television appearances.

The oddity of the Republican response to what happened in Benghazi is partly this focus on half-baked conspiracy theories rather than on the real evidence of failures by the State Department, Pentagon and CIA in protecting the Benghazi mission.

Needless to say, Fox News Is Leading The Attack Against Susan Rice.

The tragedy here goes beyond the four dead Americans. The tragedy here is that in a quest to pin those deaths on Obama personally, and allow truth to be a fifth casualty in order to do so, the ability to investigate what actually happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again will become secondary and could get lost in the hubris.

There should be an investigation into what happened in Benghazi. But Fox News is not trying to figure out what happened. They are trying to pin it all on Obama and anyone close to him (David Petraeus, Hilary Clinton and now Rice… Who next, the White House janitor who has a cousin who once visited Benghazi?) rather than push for a simple investigation.

And once again, Republicans are letting Fox News lead them by the nose. They never learn, do they…