The Obama Haters: Behind the Right-Wing Campaign of Lies, Innuendo & Racism

9 Fox News: The Anger Machine Gushing Out Nonstop Propaganda

123 fox news: the anger machine gushing out nonstop Propaganda 9 After they give their opinions, which is fine with me, they then state as facts things that aren’t facts at all. —Bernard Goldberg If Fox News were a person, it would be Sarah Palin: lots of flash, dash, and trash; vain; saucy; treacly; boastful; insecure; insincere; mean-spirited; prone to twisting facts and exploiting emotion; loved by supporters; despised by the other side; and unsure why it is not universally adored. The raison d’être of Fox News is to deliver a singular message to make its side look good and the other side look bad. If it wants to incite anger toward the other side, by all accounts, it succeeds wildly at that goal. Rightwingers who watch Fox News get madder by the minute at every news report that justifies their hatred for Obama and its other targets. Fox is highly successful at its real mission: to serve as a propaganda machine, a free infomercial , for the hatemongering right-wing cult. The dictionary defines propaganda as “the spreading of ideas, information , or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause or a person; ideas, facts or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s case or to damage an opposing cause.” Scott McClellan, Bush’s former press secretary, admitted that Fox News served as a lackey for the Bush administration. He said on July 25, 2008, on MSNBC’s Hardball, “Certainly there were commentators and other pundits at 124 — — — — — — tHe oBama HateRs Fox News that were helpful to the White House.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that same day quoted McClellan as telling him that the White House sent talking points to Fox News, whose commentators served as spokespeople with a script that gave the Bush administration “its desired results.” Former Fox employees have said that they must adhere to the “message of the day.” David Brock, a former right-wing hit man, said in the 2004 documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism that the network puts out “false, distorted caricaturing” in which “wrong pieces of information are repeated through an echo chamber.” Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote on March 16, 2007, on the website RealClearPolitics, “Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere.”1 Jeffrey Lord, a former political director in the Reagan White House, acknowledged Fox’s rightward tilt: “Rupert Murdoch’s invention of Fox News was a television network waiting to happen. Suddenly, beaming into American living rooms through satellite and cable was a different world view altogether, a conservative world view,” he wrote in The American Spectator.2 Even the New York Post, also owned by Murdoch, began calling Fox a “conservative network” in November 2009. Liberals are invited to speak on Fox News, but many don’t return after being shouted down. “People come on the air and they insult them as they did me, they cut off their mics as they did me, they shout at them and they interrupt them as they did me, and they even curse at them as they did me,” Alan Grayson, a Democratic congressman from Florida, said on October 21, 2009, on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. If Fox’s news reports were submitted as college term papers, they would get an F for lack of research, absence of critical thinking, and utter disdain for facts. Fox News operates on the assumption that every other news organization is “in the tank for Obama.” They won’t admit that the mainstream media were in the tank for Bush until his second term began to crumble. Serious, unresolved questions about the Supreme Court order to stop the 2000 vote count in Florida vanished as soon as Bush took office. After September 11, FOx neWs — — — — — — 125 2001, Bush was portrayed as a leader; news organizations hesitated in probing whether lapses in leadership and judgment contributed to the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. When Bush waged unprovoked war on Iraq, the New York Times and almost everyone else beat the drum. Bush’s image turned negative only after his reasons for the Iraq war were proved false; after nonpartisan commissions showed serious gaps in leadership leading up to the 9/11 attacks; after ineptitude during...