Sorry, I’m totally on board with Fox News being despicable, but I don’t see it here. The article is from CBS, and I don’t see where it claims there is any affiliation with the Girl Scouts. If there are rabid comments, that’s the intertubes for you.
Tony, I’m sorry I was trying to link to the facebook content but couldn’t figure out how to do it without it linking to my personal page. Here is the first line of the Facebook post from Fox:
“There’s a new Girl Scout troop in California, but these girls aren’t selling cookies or learning to sew. They call themselves the “Radical Brownies” and they wear berets that pay homage to the Black Panther party, and they spread the Black Lives Matter message.”
Yeah, I don’t see much FOX there, but never fear; FOX will always come through with more examples!
This time even Politifact is calling what Fox News host Dana Perino and others said a few days ago about what the climate scientists are doing with the temperature data a “Pants on fire lie”
When you realize that lies like that one are made to not only fool a good number of the American people, but are also made to fool most Republican politicians you begin to realize the harm they are doing by not giving our leaders and the people proper information about the costs of not doing a concerted effort to control emissions. It is a bigger scandal when you realize how reporters nowadays could be dismissed for self aggrandized lies but when a team of them is telling big lies to the American people that will affect policies of the government it is OK.
Bill O’Reilly has repeatedly claimed that he was a war correspondent during the Falklands war and that he saw combat first hand there.
Yeah, turns out that’s probably not true.
I haven’t followed the Brian Williams debacle, so I don’t know how Williams’ and O’Reilly’s fibs compare. But if Williams had to step away from his post for a while to atone for his sins, maybe we can expect the same of O’Reilly. Right? Right?
In this article about O’Reilly’s war lies, O’Reilly basically says that he’s paid to lie.
[Quote]
The host also draws a distinction between his job and Williams’, saying he’s not required to give viewers unbiased facts. “It’s perfectly fine for commentators like me to give my opinion about events — that’s what I’m paid to do… But when hard-news people deceive their readers to advance a political agenda, that’s when the American people get hurt.” [unquote]
So not only is he paid to be biased, he’s admitting there’s no “hard-news” on Fox.
more here.
Why do you guys keep making me defend Fox?
He didn’t say he’s paid to lie; he said he’s paid to give his opinion. Huge difference.
He didn’t say Fox had no hard news; he said it’s not the job of commentators like him to give hard news. Whether Fox’s hard news anchors actually do report objectively is a separate question, but O’Reilly certainly didn’t “admit” that they don’t.
That said, he is utterly despicable, as illustrated in your quote. Nobody has accused Brian Williams of trying to advance some political agenda by claiming he was fired at (although a case could be made that he was cheerleading along with the rest of the media during the early stages of the Iraq war), but now O’Reilly’s faithful listeners will think he was.
“On Fox, A Train Spilling Oil Is An Argument For Keystone XL, But A Pipeline Spill Isn’t News”
Maybe this will get this thread back on track.
See what I did there? It’s about a derailed train!
Maybe for someone; not for O’Reilly
In this case, comparing his situation with the BW situation, he’s saying he’s paid to give his opinion. He’s not admitting guilt or not, but what he’s admitting is that you can’t hold him responsible to tell the truth, that he’s paid to lie, so he can’t be reprimanded like BW.
BW is the hard-news O’Reilly is referring to–the news where Americans get hurt if the truth is distorted.
O’Reilly is opinion, where you can make shit up and no Americans get hurt.
It’s actually quite simple…
MSNBC has an obvious liberal “lean” to their reporting.
CNN tries very hard to remain neutral, but if truth be told, they have a slightly liberal perspective.
FOX simply makes “shit” up!
Unfortunately there is no such clear distinction. Anything that affects how voters cast their ballots is potentially damaging, whether it’s news, opinion, or political or issue advocacy advertising. It all falls under the great ubiquitous blanket of “I heard it on TV” and as long as the rubes march to the voting booths with ideas thus informed, lots of people can get hurt, say by stupidly motivated foreign wars or outrageous economic policies. The evil genius of Fox News is that not only is the “news” part selective and distorted, but they completely blur the distinction between news and the outright lies of their talk shows – it’s all just one vast blaring right-wing echo chamber.
You see how cunning that is? Not only does O'Reilly imply that Brian Williams is advancing some political agenda (of the other party, and therefore it's bad, which goes straight to the appeal of his base) but at the same admits he's giving opinions on a network that clearly calls itself a news program, as if this were a priori, natural-as-can-be acceptable (this jiu-jitsu tactic of openly admitting probably the weakest and/or worst thing about what you stand for as if it's perfectly natural and OK), glossing over journalistic ethics, principles of balanced and fair reporting (which again--jiu-jitsu--this is the very tagline of this network(!)), etc., and also that by the logically fallacious converse (if a hard news person deceives, then Americans get hurt; since I'm not a hard news person ("safe" in the realm of opinions), no Americans get hurt) "no Americans get hurt" by running this sideshow mixture of political opinion and news facts, nevermind the overriding hypocrisy of his statement. All that in two little sentences. And people who are too busy or without sufficient mental resources to parse this, or who are too deep in the particular political base this panders to, will just go on eating this stuff up.
This following scene excerpt is from the movie "Network", which has several quotable moments if you can get over some of the usual Hollywood hyperbole:
[Howard Beale has recently broken down live on air and gone on a rant, just after it's been announced he's being fired as a senior news anchor. This scene takes place in the news room with everyone who works in the network there, including Howard]
...: "...wait till you hear this. I've just come back from Frank Hackett's office and he wants to put Howard back on the air tonight."
...: "You're kidding."
...: "No, apparently the ratings went up five points last night, and he wants Howard to go back on and do his angry man thing."
[laughter]
...: "They want Howard to go on spontaneously letting out his anger, a latter day prophet denouncing the hypocricies of our times."
[short edit snip]
...: "You're kidding aren't you?"
...: "I'm not kidding. I told them I said look we're runing a news department down here and not a circus. And Howard Beale's not a bearded lady. And if you think I'm going to go along with this bastardization of the news you can have my resignation along with Max Schumacher's right now. And I think I'm speaking for Howard Beale and everybody else down here in news."
Howard: "No-no-no, now waitaminute, that's my job you're turning down. I'd go nuts without some kind of work. And what's wrong with being an angry prophet denouncing the hypocricies of our times?"
[the answer, of course, comes later in the movie as this "news" network goes more and more into op-eds and sensationalism--one thing that develops is this network's cutting a deal with a special interest (communist-terrorist) faction, and soon is airing the "Mao Tse-tung Hour"]
This morning was interesting with the jobs report. Over the past few months I’ve watched (and then mocked here) that when the jobs report is good, all the major news sites have a big banner about it on the top of the page, and Foxnews.com ignores it.
This morning, I happened to be at my computer when the numbers were released, less than an hour ago. They are better than expected, so I went to Foxnews.com and to my surprise there was actually a Foxnews alert on the top of the page about it. I came here to admit that they had gotten it right this month. But, I went to get the exact wording of the alert a few minutes later and the banner was gone. So, it seems like they might have some automatic thing that pushes important news into an alert on the page, but then there is actually someone who manually removes it.
Maybe somebody at Fox got a stern talking-to for posting the Alert in the first place.
Maybe they could have said
WORK SLOWDOWNfor Benghazi investigators
To be fair, they did keep a small headline under their Fox Business banner about the jobs numbers. It’s not exactly the 42 point font lead story that every legitimate news organization currently has it at, but it’s actually there, which is more than they do most months.
Well, one article about the good jobs numbers followed by two articles about how the good jobs numbers might have bad consequences, but baby steps…
Seems like the jobs numbers have been good enough for long enough that continuing to simply not report them wasn’t tenable anymore.
Is Fox News that bad? It depends.
If you are firmly of the opinion that the other news networks deliver the unvarnished facts, with no liberal bias whatsoever, even in the selection of stories, then yes, Fox News is that bad and serves no informative purpose.
If however you concede that the other channels do have a liberal bias, to whatever extent, then Fox serves a vital purpose. It gives an alternative view of the world and surely even the most confirmed liberal may tire sometimes of having his own opinions and views constantly reflected back at him. It can be refreshing to have one’s beliefs challenged sometimes.
A news organization not reporting the jobs numbers when they imply that your political adversary might be doing a good job is not “an alternative view”.
There is that and as it was pointed before based on what it was found FOX harping on the Benghazi issue just showed an effort to keep a **manufactured **controversy for political purposes. Same goes for “pants on fire” lies about what climate scientists do, the intention is not to challenge beliefs, but to challenge reality and science. The kind of people that believes that that is fair and balanced does not know about the false balance fallacy.