Sean Hannity did a show recently with several people whose lives have been negatively affected by Obamacare. A writer for Slate saw it and thought it sounded really fishy, so he contacted the people who were on it and interviewed them himself. One guy said his small business was hurt so he had to reduce the hours of his workers and make them part-time.
Two other couples said that their current plans weren’t compliant with the ACA rules so they were being discontinued and a replacement policy would be 50 or 75% more expensive. Interviewing them turned up that neither couple had checked for rates under Obamacare. The Slate writer found plans that were better than what they currently had for 60+% cheaper than what they were paying currently.
Hannity’s entire show was a complete pile of B.S. It was all lies.
And when news about the edited audio tape broke, the producer responsible for the misleading edit was fired.
I’ve looked around for stories about Fox News personnel being fired for filing wildly inaccurate, if not outright slanderous, stories. The only story i could find was one about a pair of reporters who were fired for reporting (truthfully, as near as I can figure) about contaminated milk.
Plenty of examples of wildly inaccurate and/or slanderous stories being reported on Fox News of course, just nothing about Fox ever doing anything about it.
Sorry, I thought that equating the prominence and influence of Ward Churchill (whom nobody would have ever heard of if Fox hadn’t devoted hour after hour to him) with that of the sitting president made the sarcasm obvious.
But that’s what Fox (and right-wing media in general) does. They find some nobody on the fringe left, and act like what he says or does is as important and representative as what McConnell or Boehner says, which is what MSNBC concentrates on.
The “one time.” I linked to several hundred videos of this guy as the Fox News go-to guy. Maybe he never said anything as controversial as this but it isn’t like he was some unknown quantity who went rogue or something.
I posted several polls and studies that showed that Fox News viewers were more misinformed or uninformed about news than viewers of other news shows, people who get their news from a Comedy network or people who don’t pay much attention to the news at all.
Dan Rather backed a dubious report that turned out after further investigation to be fraudulent. The person who gave the network the documents lied to Rather about how he got them. The end result? Even though it could barely even be said to have been Rather’s fault, he apologized, the network retracted the story completely, and he lost his job over it. This is such a completely failed comparison that I barely even know where to start.
Courtesy of, well, me. Fox is easily the worst network on TV nowadays. The only sources popularly used that could be said to be worse are talk radio like Limbaugh and sites like PrisonPlanet and Infowars.
Using Hannity or O"Reilly as an example of incorrect reporting is not really fair, as they are political entertainment programs and not news. Or if you think that’s fair, then the proper comparison is not against Dan Rather, but Pierce Morgan, Lawrence O’Donnell, John Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Ed Schultz. They’re the ‘other’ media’s equivalent to Hannity and O’Reilly.
What would be fair would be to show examples of egregious bias from Shepard Smith, who is the actual news anchor at Fox.
There was once a time when Shepard Smith disparaged the climate change deniers, but that was the exception. Currently the bias in a subject like Climate Change has been a reflection of what other mainstream sources deal with it, by not talking much about it.
However when the subject is talked about it, FOX is still bad. In the previous discussion I posted several examples of FOX news proper (and even FOX business) just reporting climate change denial with extreme false equivalencies.
I think Stewart would slaughter Hannity and O’Reilly in accuracy, even including his jokes.
Maddow bends over backwards to be fair (but admittedly not balanced, though at least she is honest about her liberal bias), and corrects any mistakes on the air as soon as she finds them. There’s no comparison between her and a guy like Hannity, who will repeat discredited stories for YEARS.
BTW, I still think that when the day comes that opinion shows like Hannity drop the omnipresent “FOX NEWS” logo, then that will be the day I would think it is no longer fair to point at shows like Hannity as examples of how bad FOX news is.
There is no clear separation of what is opinion or just plain news, and even on the opinion shows, the bumpers used in those shows also claim “fair and balanced” and “we report, you decide”.
Nope. I’m on the record on this very board as stating, nay, promising my future constituents that despite having only seen snippets of him on Jon Stewart’s show, when I’m God-Emperor of the Universe I shall appoint an Imperial Guy Who Punches Sean Hannity In His Goddamned Mouth Whenever It Looks Like He Might Speak. Dental plan, decent bennies, job security out the ass.