johnny dollar's archive: may-june 2008

Times are tough in the Fox haters echo chamber. Has the economic slowdown also affected our pals the newshounds (another fine product of the Outfoxed mafia)? Perhaps so, since despite the exorbitant funding that keeps their place afloat, they can't seem to muster the dogpower to do their job and are already begging for help.

Tossing more mongrels into the mix is only going to make the canine confusion even worse. The sort of confusion that can't keep a simple spin point straight from one day to the next. Example: the evil phrase "flip-flop", and how Fox never uses it to describe a Republican:

• Republicans couldn't call John "I was for it before I was against it" Kerry a flip-flopper often enough. To this day, that campaign is remembered for the Swift Boaters and for the words, "flip-flop," and Fox News couldn't get enough of either. That "flip-flop" is totally absent from this report (imagine the tone if a Democrat was doing this), is yet more proof that "fair and balanced" is nothing more than a crock of bull.
  
• Mitt Romney's endorsement yesterday of John McCain was characterized not as a flip-flop but as a matter of pragmatism.
  
• Tip-toeing Around Romney's Flip-Flops. The f-word has disappeared from the vocabulary of Fox News personnel. If ever there were a segment demanding the use of the f-word -- flip-flop -- this was it. But can you heard the f-word anywhere in this segment?

So what happens when one of the bowsers stumbles across Fox using the term on a Republican (as they have hundreds of times)? All of a sudden, the biased bassets do a complete 180:

Substitute host Brenda Buttner wondered about McCain's flip flopping. (You might be surprised that Buttner would ascribe such a negative term to one of her own, but doing so is a tactic I've seen Cavuto employ countless times. It's a way of preemptively spinning criticism that the audience might hear from other sources.)

Yes, calling someone a flip-flopper is now a tricky Fox tactic to defend them. And it will be until the next time it's used on someone other than a Republican.

But we wonder if the kennel really needs more volunteers, or whether they are simply succumbing to the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Lately, there have been more and more posts that are just pointers: look what someone wrote over there. A lot easier than creating original content, but a danger when your writers are not exactly Einsteins. Just today Priscilla turned in a marvelous pointer:

Fox Recycles Its Garbage. On June 19th, conservative Monica Crowley, while interviewed on the Laura Ingraham show...

No, Monica Crowley was not being interviewed. She was hosting the program. But it gets better:

...claimed that Barack Obama’s brother Malik Obama’s statement shows that Barack Obama “has a really solid Muslim background.” Problem is that this story, circulated by the right wing blogosphere and Brit Hume , has been discredited...

Well, the contents of a newspaper report have been debunked, but Obama's "muslim background" has been raised by more than just the "right-wing". Even the sainted Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT:  We've had a Clinton official in New Hampshire resign because he began to talk about your drug use as a, a young man.  A Clinton official resigned here who talked about--on the Internet about your Muslim background.
SEN. OBAMA:  Right.

But let's return to Priscilla's brilliant piece of investigative journalism:

but that doesn’t stop Fox from repeating a story... Ah, the Fox beat goes on and on.... Fox is still getting mileage from this. Those who watch Fox will continue to be validated in their “suspicion” of Obama... Fox never lets facts get in the way of its propaganda because facts are unimportant in a "faith based" Fox world.

The beauty of all this is that Priscilla's reading skills seem to be highly impaired. She's goes on about Fox repeating a story, "getting mileage" from it, yada yada yada, but none of this is true. Because the Media Matters story she is pointing to isn't about a Fox News program, or even a cable news program. It's all about a radio show that wasn't broadcast on Fox at all!

We pointed this out, and immediately came the ritual knee-jerk responses, e.g.:

• Nice try pretending it didn't happen on [Fox] News. Just apologize and go back to your inane smear campaign.
  

At which point, Priscilla rewrote her article and admitted it didn't happen on Fox News. (Sorry, patsy!) Of course, since her reading skills are no better than they were a few hours ago, the "corrected" version is still full of errors: the headline now reads "Laura Ingraham Recycles Fox Garbage", the article claims that she interviewed Monica Crowley, and adds:

To reinforce Crowley’s statement, Ingraham played the original Hume piece.... right wing pundits (Ingraham), who are also employed by Fox News, never lets [sic] facts get in the way of its propaganda...

All of that is nothing short of amazing, given that Laura Ingraham wasn't even there: she's been off her radio show for weeks!

It's bad enough when the biased bassets lie about something they saw on Fox News. But if they're going to outsource the heavy lifting to other sites, perhaps they do need additional volunteers: people who can read English and know the difference between radio and television. liars fox news