Ted Turner, Oliver Willis, and Roger Ebert all have something in common with the Outfoxed gals. They're wrong. Updated!

CNN founder Ted Turner, who had to apologize when he compared Rupert Murdoch to Adolph Hitler, is at it again:

[Turner] followed up by pointing out that Adolph Hitler got the most votes when he was elected to run Germany prior to WWII. He said the network is the propaganda tool for the Bush Administration.

The old mantra revived. Great thinkers like Roger Ebert have insisted that "Fox is a Republican propaganda machine". Of course, the newshounds (another fine product of the Outfoxed cabal) proclaim that Fox is "the propaganda arm of the RNC", an article of faith that informs every paragraph they write.

By an amazing coincidence, Turner's demented remarks came just as Oliver Willis revived a moldy oldy: his tiresome story about how Fox doesn't allow on-air criticism of the Bush administration.

It's hard for any thinking individual to believe, but there are actually people who think this tomfoolery is true. However even the rabidly loony Media Matters declared Fox's coverage of the inauguration to be by far the most balanced of all the news channels. When Brock's Brigade comes up with a finding like that, we decided it was time to put the claims of Turner, Willis, Ebert, and their ilk to the test. Let's look at a 12-hour block of Fox News, from 10:00 am to 10:00 pm, and see how well the arguments of the anti-Fox noise machine hold up.

We went straight to January 25, the date Ted Turner's babblings were reported. As we scanned through our tivo, spinning it into overdrive, it quickly became apparent that the challenge would not be to find counter-examples to Oliver's story. On the contrary, there were so many that we had to restrict ourselves to just live interview guests, and winnow those down to a more practical representative selection.

The fun begins on Fox News Live, where we meet Bob Beckel:


BECKEL: The 30 billion dollars now puts over 300 billion dollars now in Iraq and Afghanistan...I think the real problem for George Bush and Condoleeze Rice, and by the way this debate is not about Condoleeza Rice, it's about Bush foreign policy, is that the American people are beginning to lose support for this war and they expect our troops to come home.

How odd. Brigitte Quinn didn't have a MeltDown (tm Oliver Willis) and nobody cut off Beckel's mic.

A bit later on FNL the Rice nomination was discussed:


SEN JACK REED: I have serious reservations, and I'm really leaning in opposition at this moment.

Of course David Asman interrupted, talked over him, and cut off his mic. Right?

ASMAN: Did you feel the same before Sen Boxer spoke out last week?
REED: I've felt that there were serious questions that have arisen as her tenure as National Security Advisor...It's not just one incident; it's a collection of what she's done...

And he went on. Obviously more GOP propaganda.

On Dayside with Linda Vester, Kamal Nawash was critical of the US handling of the Iraq elections:

NAWASH: The United States must do all it can to make sure Sunis are at the highest levels of government....That's probably one of the only ways we can have peace in Iraq if we have it at all.

Later, Your World with Neil Cavuto gave Avi Cover an opportunity to criticize the administration on the issue of prisoner interrogation:

COVER: The Geneva conventions certainly do apply to the conflict in Iraq; and as to the whether it applies to Abu Zarkhawi...we would maintain that it does. But certainly the convention against torture does...

The next hour finds The Big Story with John Gibson hosting Nita Lowey:


LOWEY: We have a 368 billion dollar deficit this year...we have to be sure that the money is spent wisely. We know that the planning was poor, we know that the execution is questionable, and we need to get some honest information from the White House...

Somehow Mr Gibson didn't get the memo and didn't cut off her mic. The discussion also included Congressman Foley; Ms Lowey got both the first and the last words.

On Special Report with Brit Hume, there is more talk about the deficit from NPR's Mara Liasson:

LIASSON: It's going to be very hard to cut the thing in half unless you do some smoke and mirrors, which is call a lot of things off-budget, which he already has started to do....I think it's going to be very difficult...

Then, on The O'Reilly Factor, the discussion on Iraq funding was weighted against the administration by a factor of two against one:

P.J. CROWLEY: You're going to be seeing 80 billion dollars for one year....We have to look at, what more can our military forces accomplish?
O'REILLY: We just can't keep writing checks, and two more years? Two more years in that country?...There is no excuse for, after two years in that country, having the terrible training that these Iraqis have gotten. That is just a flat-out mistake. All our military analysts here, or most of them, at Fox News, say it. And the President has got to be held accountable...You're giving them a blank check....What have we been doing for 20 months?

Bill O'Reilly, don't you know, is that "conservative" ideologue. That's quite some Bush administration propaganda he's spinning there, isn't it Mr Turner?

The next hour brings us Hannity and Hannity. At least that's how the newspups like to portray it. But here we find an entire segment with Carol Mosely Braun and it's Fox news employee Alan Colmes who, if one actually believed Oliver, was not allowed to speak these words:


ALAN COLMES: Why should we promote somebody who bungled the war, bungled the aftermath, didn't plan well? We're seeing now what she has wrought. Why would we promote that kind of incompetence?
BRAUN: ...The war has been a debacle; Abu Ghraib was a debacle...

But our favorite example of the day occurred during Studio-B with Shepard Smith. Two blocks of this broadcast were combined, with the commercial break dropped, so that FNC could broadcast live Barbara Boxer's Senate comments against the nomination of Condoleeza Rice.


Roughly midway through this segment, we checked to see if CNN was carrying Boxer's statement. How about MSNBC? No, only Fox News Channel, that propaganda arm of the Bush administration, where critics get their mics cut off, saw fit to cut into regular programming, scrap a lucrative ad break, and broadcast nearly ten minutes of her speech. Live.

The newspups claim they watch Fox News "so you don't have to". They document every objectionable syllable spoken and every eyebrow twitched, to concoct a veritable Niagara of unceasing pro-Bush, pro-Republican propaganda. They posted over a dozen articles covering January 25. Let's see how they did:

Fox News Live/Bob Beckel: not reported by the newshounds
Fox News Live/Jack Reed: not reported by the newshounds
Dayside/Kamal Nawash: not reported by the newshounds
Your World/Avi Cover: not reported by the newshounds
The Big Story/Nita Lowey: we have a winner! The newshounds actually mentioned this, in their own inaccurate, biased fashion
Special Report/Mara Liasson: not reported by the newshounds
The O'Reilly Factor/P.J. Crowley: not reported by the newshounds
Hannity and Colmes/Carol Moseley Braun: not reported by the newshounds

And needless to say:

Studio-B/Barbara Boxer live coverage: not reported by the newshounds.

Not reported--even though a day earlier the tail-waggers scolded Fox for giving the President of the United States all of three minutes of live coverage. That was such a journalistic transgression they just had to hammer it, but the Boxer coverage somehow doesn't get a mention.

How does our research square with Roger Ebert's incisive analysis? It doesn't; he gets two thumbs down--way down. And what of Mr Willis's claim that critics of Bush are either shouted down or get their mics cut off? Oliver's story proves to be little more than a fractured fairy-tale.

Update: Mr Willis responds and does himself little good. Some conservatives actually believe Fox News is too liberal! But it's not.