Fox News Hosts - Who is the worst?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/13/foxs-cavuto-claims-networ_n_186156.html

CAVUTO: Just a reminder, we are going to be right in the middle of these protests because at FOX we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March, even though, as I pointed out, it turned out to be well shy of a million men. We were there for the Iraq War protest, and the protest against the Iraq War protest. So see, we really don't decide what populist causes matter. Just that when a whole lot of people gather, in a whole lot of towns and cities across America, it is indeed worth checking out, not just shutting down. Which is why we are in Sacramento on April 15 for the one of the biggest of these, at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time.

...

Neil Cavuto has been defending FOX News' coverage of the upcoming tax day tea parties by repeatedly suggesting that FOX News gave similar coverage to the Million Man March. But the Million Man March occurred October 16, 1995 whereas FOX News was not operating until October 7, 1996, nearly a year later.

^^^classic

watching studio b. they love reports on cute dogs but this time shep was like, well, this was covered on all the sunday shows, i don't even know why we're talking about it.

anyway, my point here would be: holy shit, judith miller is on talking about this pirate thing. judith miller! credited as "pulitzer prize winning journalist" with no mention of the new york times! i knew she signed on but i never saw her on there until just now.

you know nobody at fox will ever ask her about those WMDs in iraq..

This kid is the number one FOX News Host for 2019

Wha? What?

Oy, that ad.

"ttyih"

you have seen the Fox Nation site right? their answer to HuffPo I suppose?

http://www.thefoxnation.com/justice/2009/04/10/obama-picks-easter-church

^^^ these comments have been up for days. i hit the "report" button on the one (3rd one I believe), this morning. still there.

"Why bother? Just because you sit in church doesn't make you a Christian. I can sit in my car all day, and that doesn't make me a car."

lollllllll

wtf

also, this
http://homepage.mac.com/mkoldys/iblog/C168863457/E20060207160313/index.html

shep sounds like a nascar announcer when they're really hyped about a three-car battle going around the turn

xpost: haha, I thought long and hard about making that my new display name too

http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=videolandingpage&streamingFormat=FLASH&referralObject=4282776&referralPlaylistId=playlist

idiot glenn beck delivering "public service announcement" on how global warming isn't real (many fox hosts are great at this: one snowstorm somewhere in the country = no such thing as global warming)

a tour of the fox studios!
http://homepage.mac.com/mkoldys/iblog/C168863457/E20060228024121/index.html

"No! O'Reilly is angry! Where's Olbermann!?"

cable news is my substitute obsession until it's time for football season again.. still 5 months til kickoff ;_;

http://homepage.mac.com/mkoldys/iblog/C168863457/E20060602155929/index.html

more goofing on o'reilly
also, where do i get one (1) drudgesiren for my desk?! WANT

&

"Then there was the media, specifically the FOX news channel, including Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Both are looking forward to an up close and personal taste of teabagging themselves at events this Wednesday."

ROLFL

classic

oh my damnn!

that was an epic round of teabag puns.

dick army... good one

juvenility aside, some v important points made

fox is pretending they're not sponsoring this thing despite promoting it w/tons of segments, commercials, calling them "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties," etc. it's kind of unprecedented for a news organization to promote protests like this & they are (I thought) a news organization first

wondering if the shows who are supposed to be just news will be covering this.. as it deserves. don't let me down, shep!

SIR —

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/04/the_voice_of_the_opposition.cfm

The comments to that "Obama picks a church" article on the Fox website make me question whether the human race deserves to continue.

granted, every political site on the interwebs that allows comments is full of ugly, horrible stuff but.. imho this rightwing 'we're on the way to communist/fascist/ socialist/totalitarian new world order' + 'obama isn't a christian and will take all your guns' crap.. it's headed down a really dangerous road & fox is promoting it esp with glenn beck.

...and the DHS report has sent these ppl into overdrive

about 15 minutes ago @ studio b, shep had an intelligence analyst on who completely debunked this nonsense that the DHS report = obama administration targeting political opponents

also, this

Basically Daria, what I am getting from you is that Fox runs reasonable stories in the middle of the day while everyone is at work and batshit insanity during the morning program and at prime time. Is that a fair assessment?

"OBAMA = USSA UNITED SOCIALIST STATES OF AMERICA"

"TIME FOR AmRevII"

Good luck, USA.

let's see..
fox probably runs some actual news from about 10am to 4pm, but probably has a lot more right leaning stories and talking heads on there. i don't really watch until studio b is on at 3. fox used to be "news" from i think 10am until "opinion" started at 8 with o'reilly, but IMHO.. cavuto is a rightwinger (4pm show), beck is on there at 5pm being insane, so..

"reasonable story" time would be from 10am - 4pm, 6pm - 8pm. so, yeah, effectively, if prime time starts at 8pm, that's when it goes off the rails.

i love shep

megyn kelly and trace run a really entertaining mid-day program imo

I am not worried about these people. I'm not particularly worried about FOX News either. They're entertaining, and they play to a demographic that ebbs and flows like all audiences. As far as their journalistic integrity goes, they don't have any, but I don't see why that's any cause for alarm. This country has a rich and storied tradition of demogoguery, "yellow" journalism, whatever you wanna call it. Ever since the country's inception wide swaths of the media have been wildly biased, slanderous, exploitative, etc. from the Gazette of the United States (Jefferson called it "a paper of pure Toryism... disseminating the doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy, and the exclusion of the people" - thx wikipedia) to Hearst and any number of other baldly partisan news outlets. Cable TV is no different, FOX is just an extension of this tradition (just as CNN would like to think its in the tradition of Pulitzer, or Ben Franklin, or whoever)

"As a partisan [Noah Webster] soon was denounced by the Jeffersonian Republicans as "a pusillanimous, half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot", "an incurable lunatic", and "a deceitful newsmonger … Pedagogue and Quack." Fellow Federalist Cobbett labeled him "a traitor to the cause of Federalism", calling him "a toad in the service of sans-cullottism", "a prostitute wretch", "a great fool, and a barefaced liar", "a spiteful viper", and "a maniacal pedant."

some days I don't think there's anything more entertaining than American history

some of it i don't worry about. i think it's a shame, though, when shows like cavuto really push rightwing talking points & left-leaning news outlets don't use their airtime effectively. i mean, i don't know if keith o. or maddow have even spent time covering something like the employee free choice act, and they *could*, and how much time have they spent on silly stuff that doesn't matter.

but some of it i really do. the extremist rhetoric about obama & his administration disturbs me & people who have an audience of millions are throwing fuel on it.

Yah, what daria said -- I worry about the less stable parts of the audience who are being fed a steady diet of this stuff. When all we really had was Rush Limbaugh and the John Birch Society, we got Tim McVeigh. Amplify that x1000, and who knows? We've already had the Pittsburgh cop-killer, that dude who shot up a church last year, and a few others. When "their" party is out of power, it can only be worse.

^^^yeah I think that's the real, concrete danger here - I'm not worried about any kind of organized armed insurrection (the very idea from either end of the spectrum is totally unworkable and preposterous) but yeah we are liable to see an uptick in right-wing loony attacks, militia activity etc. which is a bummer, and hopefully the appropriate authorities will be prepared for it.

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/the_militia_right.php

What’s interesting in particular about the militia mindset, however, is that its narrative sources are very different from those of left-wing radicalism. People who believe in violent revolution and the murder of American soldiers and policemen generally, if on the left, appeal to basically anti-patriotic attitudes. Which is about what you would expect from advocates of the violent overthrow of the established political order. But the militia crowd exhibits much more the attitudes one would expect from a coup leader—a Franco or a Pinochet who’s actually appealing to the concepts of patriotism and nationalism as justification for violent revolution.

I suppose there are some different ways of characterizing the asymmetry, but the underlying issue seems to be that rule by conservatives is integral to the right’s conception of the United States of America. This is part of the rhetoric of the “heartland” and “real America”—a period of political victory by a coalition grounded in the coasts and Greater Chicago is a period in which America has ceased to be herself.

Don't know where else to post this:

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/1291/sp3220090415160311.gif

i hope the authorities are.. competent. what struck me abt that DHS report was that they pointed out that some of these groups might target returning veterans, and there was this instant screeching outrage.. newt gingrich on twitter wrote that the person who wrote it was obv against conservatives and attacking veterans and should be fired. excuse me? it's just a fact that this might happen, and that some people will come home from war with problems and might be recruited by these groups and might be dangerous. it's just a fact. all this tough talk about security and then there's a security threat they don't like and the answer is to cry foul and stick their heads in the sand. joe scarborough (surprisingly) was on the same tack this morning. wtf.

I'm reading Nixonland right now and that kinda stuff seems hand-in-hand with violent rightwingers complaining about the lawlessness of the left/civil rights activists/antiwar "communists" etc. when most of the violence was actually being committed by... rightwing racists. its a very self-serving ideology, transparently so.

^^^er shoulda appended "in the mid-60s" to my post there

i have not read the DHS report, so i can't comment on its tone or content exactly, but i have read excerpts. it seemed pretty clear to me that the report was about st*rmfr*nt and militia types, not 'staunch conservatives' as such. what i find interesting is that the malkin crowd immediately thought the report WAS about them.

when wobbly hippies and ANSWER and them were being kicked off planes in 02 you couldn't get an establishment democrat w/in 100 paces of them or their complaints. now, with the right out of power, its tea bag city. they're running toward this shit (notable exceptions of course)

btw i checked in at my favorite ex-puma obama hate site and they had this:

http://i43.tinypic.com/1z6dzdd.jpg

^^^critical commentary there lolz

when wobbly hippies and ANSWER and them were being kicked off planes in 02 you couldn't get an establishment democrat w/in 100 paces of them or their complaints. now, with the right out of power, its tea bag city. they're running toward this shit (notable exceptions of course)

the dynamic in play here is obvious - for the right the admonitions/threats from the left are to be worn as a badge of honor, as symbols of their true commitment to conservative causes. its a way of playing to the base, and solidifying their credentials. But the Dems have never shared this kind of rabid dedication to their base, primarily because their base is more fractured and made up of a weird agglomeration of mutual interests - so they feel vulnerable to attacks on their patriotism and the like. They see it as limiting their political viability, not solidifying it. By contrast, the rightwing persecution complex is kinda central to their identity, they have no qualms about fomenting it and reveling in it.

is there a thread about these tea party protests?

afaict it's been covered a little here and a little on the TAX thread.

TAX QUESTION thread, that is