It's just the first week of the New Year, and the Fox haters are out in force. But who told The Lie of the Week? With J$P Audio & Video!

2007 found many people making New Year's resolutions. But what about the Fox haters? Have they turned over a new leaf? The surest way to check is a visit to the newshounds (another fine product from the Outfoxed gang). There we experience a strange sense of deja vu regarding Fox & Friends and Nancy Pelosi:

Fox News Belittles Most Powerful Woman in Politics
...Fox News displayed a banner reading "Congress Catfight." The term "catfight" is a belittling term often used to ridicule disagreements among women, casting them as fights among animals (especially an animal that is often seen as fickle and hard to understand like a cat). Saying a disagreement among women is a "catfight" is akin to saying that the women are less than human and their disagreement is based on something other than rationallity, intellect or principle.

The anti-Fox terriers pretend this is an FNC trick. The truth? You can read about political "catfights" in the Washington Post, the London Independent, Time Magazine, and the Village Voice. What's more you'll find this term used by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, not to mention the Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground. Is this starting to sound familiar? It should. It's a replay of the same phony argument the curs trotted out just a few weeks ago. But they have another news flash about Fox:

Their stable of women “commentators” follows a right wing ideology which is hardly supportive of strong and independent women.

We can do a fact check here too by referring to The Fox Guide, where we find FNC women commentators include:

• Tammy Bruce
• Elanor Clift
• Nina Easton
• Susan Estrich
• Mara Liasson
• Kirsten Powers
• Ellen Ratner
• Laura Schwartz
• Greta van Susteren
• Lis Wiehl

But the newsliars are just getting warmed up. Here they decide to smear Bill O'Reilly, and start out with an old hound favorite--doctoring quotes:

Bill O'Reilly Uses Mike Tyson To Smear Barack Obama
Bill O'Reilly joined the chorus of vultures picking at Barack Obama over his admission of marijuana and cocaine use...it was preceded with a segment about Mike Tyson's recent cocaine arrest in Arizona. Then O'Reilly immediately went into the Obama intro claiming there may be another cocaine problem with the Senator.

There is no falsification too menial for the newspoodles. O'Reilly went into a commercial break (not the intro) saying there may be another "cocaine situation". Why lie about the break? Why change "situation" to "problem"? His actual words weren't spicy enough to match the headline, so the hounds just change them. But wait, there's more. What exactly did Mr Bill say about Obama that smeared him? How exactly was he a "vulture" "picking" at him? The alert reader will note that the biased bowsers give zero quotes from this vicious O'Reilly attack. Perhaps this will explain [QuickTime video]:



Why do you suppose newsmutt Deborah left that out? Possibly because it would expose her entire premise as a lie? Ya think? Such deceptions are nothing new for the whippets, just as outrageous fabrications are the stock in trade for Keith Olbermann. On Friday he blustered about Bill O'Reilly:

His paranoia about NBC tonight reaching the stages of tertiary syphilis; attacking Chris Matthews and me by trying to push around Andrea Mitchell on the air. Then telling her, “We’ve checked you out. You’re ok”…like some twenty five cent edition of Joe McCarthy…or like you could carry Andrea Mitchell’s pencil. Listen big boy, if you want to hit Matthews or me come on down and do it like a man. Not like a Bill O’Reilly…

Where to start? O'Reilly didn't push anyone around. He didn't "attack" Chris Matthews: he merely said he's a liberal who worked for Tip O'Neill. But the crowning achievement in falsification is Olbermann's egomaniacal insistence that O'Reilly attacked him, so important that he had to state it twice. The truth is revealed: you can see the the video or listen to the audio of the entire first program block [mp3 audio]:



O'Reilly never attacked Olbermann. He never mentioned him. He never referred to him even obliquely. Where did Keith get the idea that he did? He made it up!

There's that feeling of deja vu all over again. Last year, Olbermann bellowed his hatred of O'Reilly for something he said. Only O'Reilly never said it. It was one of our Top Ten Lies of 2006 (#6 to be precise). It's too early to tell if Keith's latest calumny will be included in this prestigious list 12 months from now, but there's no question that it is The Lie of the Week.