Fox News Hosts - Who is the worst?

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

I bet Newt Gingrich listens to Grateful Dead while he's planning these tea party protests. Stick it to the man, Newt! Yeah!

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2009/04/obama_meets_privately_with_the.html

Shep shoots down Fox's idiocy about the DHS memo.

That Shep bit was pretty good.

yeah, i mentioned this upthread as well, this segment was on the day the report was released. he's done a couple reports to that effect. meanwhile the majority of shows on fox carry on as if this had never been reported.

also, something else i saw via related vids on youtube, this is after the election - carl cameron finally reports on all the crazy happening behind the scenes re: palin, and shep says his team looked at the polls & saw the point at which obama really broke away started *not* with lehman brothers crash, but after palin's couric interview.

i remember the shit hitting the fan pretty fast re: mccain camp attacking palin, but didn't know it was from fox. the rightwing blogs went apeshit over this.

haha, ok this. was looking up some particular examples of why people might be a little irritated with dana milbank, who devoted a whole column this week to complaining about haters on the interwebs who write him nasty emails and post rude comments. (? everyone in media gets hate mail.)

so, milbank basically fabricated an obama quote last summer and everyone on the tv news freaked the F out over it. but check the clip at the very end XD

shep narrating this tractor trailer thing is amazing

Just to back up a bit: R Maddow, at least, has spent lots of time covering EFCA -- actually she started covering Hilda Solis during the confirmation process, pointing out that Solis' support of EFCA was almost certainly the issue Repubs were delaying her for, regardless of what they were saying on the record. She has re-reported on EFCA many times since then, including what right-wingers are saying about it in the news, and how they're simply factually WRONG about what EFCA contains and what it would mean for employees in practice.

lol daria, that is amazing

xpost - hahaha i totally saw that! fantastic. one of my friends messaged me like 'ZOMG TRUCK CHASE! WATCH STUDIO B'

the talking points memo had a video the other day with every news program going nuts over this swine flu thing..
a-ha!

lol Buchanan calling Obama "America's Hot Dog"

shep seems rather pissed off at 1) people writing in blaming "illegal aliens" (the crazy emailers words) for the flu outbreak and 2) eric massa on studio b right now making this a thing about closing borders and free trade (what?)

you guys watch fox news

"there's a flue. forty people have the flu."

copneb returns

fuck i always mistype 'flu' what is the DEAL with THAT