Time to once again dust off this item I mentioned years before:
"This was from a few years back so I’m not sure how FOX is doing nowadays with replacements, but when I looked at FOX news when people like Hannity or O’Reilly got sick or they had something personal to do, their replacements on their shows were people like Huckabe, Newt Gingrich or even freaking Chuck Norris. People that very clearly are right wing ideologues.
When at CNN ABC or CBS got temporary replacements for the talking heads we got… Who the heck was this guy or gal? It was usually a plain vanilla in training anchor or host that tried to be fair, and an unknown in the political arena.
If the right was correct about how leftist the mainstream media was/is I would expect something like this:
“Tonight, on CNN’s The Situation Room., substituting Wolf Blitzer tonight: Michael Moore!”
But since we live in the real world I have to say that that does not happen as much as the left would love to see it."
I would like to see it if only to contemplate the heads exploding from the right if replacements like that were happening regularly in the “leftist” mainstream media.
I like this. My favorite thing is that she does longer pieces, with historical references, that pull in all kinds of information that builds into a big picture. I learn things watching her show. I also like Chris Hayes.
I think of Lawrence O’Donnell as the Rush Limbaugh of the group. I can’t watch him. It’s just bitching and very over-the-top presentation.
My friend put up a Rachael Maddow video the other day for me to watch on the TV. It was a fascinating, elaborate bunch of dots and lines that connected a Russian banker to the Whitehouse and/or the original campaign.
The delivered this story in her typical shotgun monotone, which was a bit of a problem for me. this story ran on for something like 25 minutes, of which I was able to keep up with about three total. There is very little texture to her presentations, which tends to not be to her benefit, in terms of being able to reach the widest audience.
Fox, by contrast, tends to have too much texture to their shows.
What’s amusing is how many people can correctly see the spin of Fox News and yet remain blissfully naive that you have equal spin of “the stories we want you to know about” on pretty much every other network.
CNN has made up numerous stories, including the gassing of deserters from the Vietnam War and trying to suggest George Zimmerman uttered a racist slur.
NBC got caught making up tales about General Motors and paid out the wazzu.
ABC got caught manufacturing the news on some crooked TV preachers (they were crooked, but the visuals were staged and misleading).
And Dan Rather? Here’s a guy who showed up President Nixon, got into a tiff on-air with VP Bush, and manufactured a story with help from the Kerry campaign claiming Bush was AWOL from the Guard. (Amazingly enough, this objective reporter never managed to get into the deep dung when Democrats were in charge).
So is Fox News atrocious? Absolutely.
Is it any MORE atrocious than what you see on other networks? Nope, which is why I don’t pay much attention when anyone complains. The spin on Fox doesn’t even come close to regressing to the mean the nonsense other networks make up - and most of them have much larger audiences.
No network is perfect and you can find errors that any have made if you look back far enough (e.g. 20 years for the first story you alluded to).
The difference with FOX is:
The frequency – show me any episode of Hannity that doesn’t include a gross misrepresentation of facts or outright lies
The fact they almost never correct anything they’ve said – they just move on to the next nonsense
The fact that they spend a lot of time, like Trump, telling their audience not to trust any other media. Far from not caring whether their viewers are ignorant, their business model depends on it.
Said it before and I’ll say it again, when it comes to comparing left and right factions, the conservatives and “enlightened centrists” have no adult concept of “they’re just the same”.
News networks occasionally get things wrong. Occasionally they milk sensationalism for a bigger audience share. Fox is orders of magnitude worse, they fabricate howlers and comically lopsided spin on a minute-by-minute basis.
You dug back decades and made a short list of a handful of things that every single other non-Fox news did wrong. Many of which are not in any way political, and most are pretty damn obscure; I have no idea what “preacher” story you are referring to. And some, I know for a fact were retracted and apologized for the mistake (yes, mistake. Dan Rather did not “manufacture” anything, that’s a lie in your post).
Read through this thread and you can 100X more things that Fox has done in the last year that eclipses all of this. That this is all you could find on every single other non-Fox news source combined answers the question of the thread that, yes, Foxnews really is that bad.
When I was visiting my dad over x-mas vacation, he was watching Fox News out of a perverse desire to “know what the other side is thinking”, and he started a pool to guess how long after the commercials before the host would utter something hateful, and he won with 12 seconds. (It was sort of meta-hateful, since the host described some Middle Eastern regime as “malevolent”.)
It’s possible other commercial news networks do this, but I don’t recall hearing this sort of extraneous adjective or asides from a non-Fox news anchor in over a decade, at least the last time I remember. (The last time was an MSNBC newsperson covering the impending execution of someone and crowing about how awful a person the convict was and how happy the anchor will be when he died. The convict, not the anchor).
Then again, I don’t listen to other commercial news networks when I can help it so my exposure to them has been limited lately. I listen to NPR which almost never has this sort of blatant spinnery (on its news programs), and the Beeb which has very little, but slightly more than NPR IMO.
I’m trying to think of even one thing that LO has in common with RL. Lies? Bigotry? White aggravation?
To me he is necessary after Rachel. I want the headline of the moment from someone who is engaged and passionate. Rachel has gone deep already and may have lost a lot of short attention people.
Lawrence is great at finding the handle, and jerking it. Meaning that when the president does something queer in public, he is the one who can get through the haze and identify the actual crime committed and covered up. This is while CNN will debate whether you can even say what the president meant at all.
Hey, Fox has some really hard-hitting news. I mean, scrolling down the front page just a little, I see, Just In: Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme lives in upstate New York with her ex-con boyfriend. Neighbors say she is very friendly.
Oh, I did look (on their website), and they did have a story about Stone. It was about how the FBI surrounded his house with a bazillion tanks, scared his wife, scared his dogs and severely manhandled him. Worse than that, somehow cnn found out about the siege and was right there with a camera crew – how did they find out about it in advance?
