SO MANY LIES…………………SO LITTLE TIME

Numbers games, death threats, fifth graders, and more. It’s an eclectic stew of vitriol in the latest action-packed edition of Fox Haters Week in Review!

Fuzzy Math:
We all use math every day: to predict weather, to tell time, to handle money. And then there are those who use math to falsify cable news ratings. Submitted for your consideration, an attack on Glenn Beck that goes the extra step, ridiculing Beck by citing imaginary numbers:

It was funny to hear Beck and his crew claim that nobody watches Morning Joe, when everyone knows that is the top rated morning cable news show. The “Independent” Beck once again revealed his true colors.

That’s odd. According to the latest monthly ratings chart, Morning Joe has fewer viewers than CNN’s American Morning. And neither one comes close to Fox & Friends, which has more people watching than Joe and CNN combined!

Meanwhile, our pal Eric Boehlert, last seen lying about Fox News FOIAs, has resurfaced again. Fresh from his bizarre assertion that Communist Lee Harvey Oswald was actually an agent of “right wing hatred”, Boehlert adds this delightful dissertation to his resume:

By now, everyone knows that on Sunday, Obama will make the rounds on the morning news shows but that Fox News Sunday, hosted by Wallace, will be left out…. Here’s the funny part, though. During one pity party session, a Fox News host claimed Obama was skipping out on “the highly-rated Fox News Sunday.” Here we go with more alternate universe stuff from the GOP Noise Machine. Because if by “highly rated” Fox meant dead last, than yeah, it’s an accurate description. The facts: Wallace hosts, and has hosted for years, the perennial Sunday morning news show loser. Fox News Sunday pretty much gets lapped by the rest of network field…. we’ll offer up this novel advice to Wallace: Get more viewers! Maybe if your show wasn’t a ratings doormat (like, for a decade running), Obama would make time for you. But why should the White House make an effort to include Fox when Wallace’s show at times barely draws one million viewers?

Mr Boehlert isn’t exactly telling the whole truth. Two of the network Sunday shows–Fox News Sunday and NBC’s Meet the Press–are played again on their respective cable news channels. And guess what happens? MtP picks up about 500,000 more, and FNS adds around 2,000,000 to its totals. And when we “count every vote”, we find the “doormat” of Sunday shows is CNN’s. Fox News Sunday is right up there neck-and-neck with Meet the Press in the race for the most viewers.

Crying Wolff:
In what purports to be an analysis of the “cold war” between President Obama and Fox News, writer Michael Wolff lays out a case for his proposition that Fox News is guilty of a “continued, insidious demonization” of the President. To make his point, he claims that just about everything anti-Obama that is “kooky” is FNC’s fault:

Much of the kooky stuff, the birther business…is Fox-driven.

It is? Who on Fox News is pushing the “birther issue”? Is it Glenn Beck? Apparently not. O’Reilly? Even Media Matters doesn’t claim that. We couldn’t find anything in FNC transcripts promoting “birtherism”. (Besides, isn’t Lou Dobbs the guy who’s supposed to be “driving” that issue?) What exactly is Wolff’s claim based on? Does he just throw crap against the wall, based on nothing whatsoever, and expect it to stick as long as it’s a smear of Fox? That’s not journalism. That’s just crying Wolff.

Worst Reporting in the World:
One thing that’s always a bit risky: judging something you haven’t seen. That’s generally regarded as disreputable, and in some circles it’s a firing offense. But it’s all in a day’s work for Keith Olbermann, who on Tuesday decided to take a shot at Bill O’Reilly for doing a story Olby assiduously avoided: ACORN. Olbermann was speaking to his impartial expert guest, Markos “Screw ‘Em” Moulitsas:

OLBERMANN:  As if we needed an underscoring, you mentioned Bill O‘Reilly‘s name.  At this hour, as we speak, the segment he is doing is about ACORN, as if Barack Obama were its founder, president, and made million dollars a year or a week off of it.  It underscores it perfectly. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos—always a pleasure, my friend.

Now it takes a bit of chutzpah to brazenly characterize something you can’t possibly have listened to (Olbermann was on the air opposite O’Reilly) but since accuracy is optional on Countdown, that’s not so much of a problem. However, for those who are interested in the truth, O’Reilly–far from trying to join Obama and ACORN at the hip–went out of his way to do just the opposite:

O’REILLY: The only link to Obama is a link from his own words. That’s all. Now, if more stuff comes out–just because a group supports you doesn’t mean that you have any relationship with the group.
McGLOWAN: His own campaign gave close to $900,000 for a get-out-the-vote campaign in a Presidential election… That’s breaking the law, Bill, that’s a non-profit organization…
O’REILLY: If it’s proven that the President knew about law-breaking then he’s in big trouble, but it’s not anywhere close to that.

Does Olbermann ever tell the truth about Bill O’Reilly?

Making It Up Is Easy to Do:
It was just two weeks ago when newshound Priscilla’s ignorant ramblings on the Rifqa Bary case were exposed as fallacious. But she’s back this week and ready to smear anew. Prissy is up in arms again about–you guessed it–an interview on Fox & Friends. What is both memorable and amazing is how she manages to parlay a handful of videos she found online into a full-out assault on all of Fox News:

Fox News has been all this case like flies on you know what and while they did have a few “fair and balanced” pieces, the preponderance of coverage was done from the perspective that Bary’s allegation that her parents will kill her for her conversion has credibility despite the evidence to the contrary.

Well if Fox News has covered this case so much, then Priscilla should be able to cite how she knows what the “preponderance of coverage” actually is. Yet the evidence she cites are a few other F&F segments and her own discredited report. FNC is the only news channel with a one-hour evening newscast. Prissy says nothing about the many reports aired there. She conveniently avoids citing any coverage on Studio-B, Special Report, The Live Desk, and America’s Newsroom. But she still knows what the “preponderance of coverage” by Fox is, because she cited her own articles!

Question for Priscilla: did you see the coverage on all those programs and choose to leave it out on purpose, or did you pull an Olbermann and just decide to characterize something you didn’t even see? Take the America’s Newsroom coverage, for example. Did this segment not fit your agenda–is that why you never mentioned it? Just how is it anything other than fair and balanced? Or how about spending over six minutes–which the newshounds have described as “an eternity” in tv news–interviewing the attorney for the parents? Why did you leave that out? Are you deliberately avoiding dozens of reports that aired on Fox to prop up phony claims about the “preponderance of the coverage”? Or are you just a fabulist, who speaks from ignorance and cares not about truth? Enquiring dog-catchers want to know!

Dumber than a Fifth Grader?
In her zeal to cover-up for the repulsive caught-on-tape behavior of ACORN, Ellen seems to have lost it. Her smears have become so transparent and juvenile they are embarrassing. She insists that one of the ACORN tapes is a “fake video”. How is the video fake? Oh the ACORN worker lied. Hey Ellen, that doesn’t make the video a fake. It makes the ACORN worker a fake. You do get the difference, don’t you? Then Brodsky starts ranting about the “lies” of Hannah Giles:

Giles falsely told Hannity, who hinted he knew better, that in every visit to an ACORN office where Giles appeared, pretending to be a prostitute, the organization had been willing to assist her proposed illegal activities….But the evidence indicates that at least one ACORN office kicked Giles and her partner out and then called the police. According to the Philadelphia Daily News: “When the phony pimp and prostitute tag team visited ACORN’s local office, on Broad Street near Parrish, on July 24, they were apparently shown the door. Philadelphia ACORN president Carol Hemingway said in a statement on Monday that ‘after causing a major disturbance, they were asked to leave the office, and a police report was filed.’ Hemingway e-mailed copies of the incident report to the news media”. Furthermore, ACORN has stated that the filmmakers’ efforts failed at five ACORN offices, including Philadelphia and San Diego…. Hannity undoubtedly knew these facts, or he should have.

Note: because ACORN made a statement, suddenly everything they said constitutes “facts” that Hannity should have known. Just their word becomes instant proof! It’s a shame they wasted all that money trying Scooter Libby. After all he said he was innocent. Why wasn’t Prosecutor Fitzgerald aware of that fact? By the way, did Ellen ever bother to read that police report from Philadelphia? Hannah Giles is nowhere mentioned in it. Brodsky called her a liar based on a police report that doesn’t even have her present, let alone thrown out!

But wait, there’s more:

A contact at ACORN confirmed my suspicion that the San Diego worker did not believe the ruse. According to ACORN, the man called the police as a result of Giles and O’Keefe’s visit.

An anonymous source from the organization under investigation says something, and once again, Brodsky’s Law applies: it’s automatically a true fact! Sadly, it was only hours later when ACORN fired the San Diego worker, after a closer examination of the tapes and a study of the fired worker’s self-contradictions. Say, wasn’t San Diego one of the cities where Ellen said the filmmakers “failed”? Is that yet Another Hound Lie?

Ad Hominem Ad Nauseam:
We laid out in last week’s report just how the newsmutts were turning their fire on the young undercover stingers. Because smearing them with ad hominem attacks makes the videos go away. Didn’t you know that? Well as often happens when such methods don’t work, ACORN employees get fired, and FNC ratings soar, why not just kick it up a notch? If smearing Hannah Giles isn’t enough, how about going after her parents?

Hannah Giles – Who’s Her Daddy?

Let’s start with some prurient innuendo:

It’s not her “pimp,” “independent filmmaker” and future model for Halloween pimp costumes, James O’Keefe – although they’ve been traveling around together…nah, they’re good Christian kids so it’s all very chaste…. I must say that Ms. Giles is quite convincing as a make a believe hooker.

Then go after the girl’s father, because that really will make the videos go away:

Giles is a manly man who, as noted above, is fighting that evil gay agenda….a similar radical Christian, Pastor Wiley Drake, is praying for Obama’s demise….

Do you like the reference to the “similar” Christian? Heh heh, you can link anybody to anybody that way–just say they’re “similar”. Brilliantly done! Finally to put the cap on this adventure, how about some more insinuendo, maybe about her upbringing. After all, that’s utter speculation and you can make up anything you like:

Growing up with a testosterone infused “God’s Warrior,” who is cross between Mancow and Ted Nugent, might explain Hannah Giles’ motivation which is certainly serving her well now.

The kennel-dwellers jumped right in:

• All I could think of was Ted Haggard and we all know how that ended. On some level, I feel sorry for Hannah and her mother.
• If her father is a RW whack job – so is she. Couldn’t be clearer.
• Some sites say he has been married 18 years, others say 20 yrs. As his daughter is 20 now, was dad married nine months before daughters birth?
• Her father is a total nut and really into male domination issues. I wonder what went on behind closed doors at the Giles household.

Just for the record, it was the same newspoodle, Priscilla, who wrote a scathing denouncement of Fox Nation–not an article mind you, but just a lone comment, that attacked…Obama’s father! Meanwhile she uses her website to bash not just people who appear on Fox, but their parents as well.

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention Brodsky’s latest example of “death threats” against Obama. In a Fox Nation thread discussing the CIA, one commenter wrote: “CIA? You have our permission to take this pres down!” Ellen sez:

Fox Nation moderators have approved another death threat to President Obama. Almost as disturbing as the moderators’ failure to weed out these comments is the fact that there is no way to contact Fox Nation and ask them to please be a little more careful in their moderating. Or is that deliberate? In any event, I reported the comment via the “report” button.” But there’s really no excuse for these kinds of comments to get through in the first place.

Now even though dictionary.com offers four definitions for the verb phrase “take down”–and none of them is any kind of death threat–we’ll play along with Ellen. The comment she noted was gone from Fox Nation as soon as we checked it out. But to be fair, we did spot another troublesome comment:

• Big mistake, very big mistake. Like quicksand, we’ll take him down.

Pretty disturbing, eh? This comment wasn’t quickly deleted like the other one. But then it isn’t on Fox Nation either. It’s a “death threat” against Bill O’Reilly, approved for posting by the newshounds over two years ago, and still there today. As Brodsky would say, there’s really no excuse for these kinds of comments to get through in the first place. But once they’re up, leave ’em there for two years!