Gullible audience

Fox lies all the time, although you do have to ask whether "Fox and Friends" - the show that dominates the news stupidity in a media landscape that's filled with media stupidity - knows for sure that their bullshit is bullshit.

Here's another lie from Roger Ailes's right-wing propaganda machine:

Fox deceptively edited Obama's answer to only include the portion of his response in which he discusses long debunked myths related to the talking points, removing the beginning of Obama's answer to the question about the Benghazi attacks and the related talking points. 

Obama began his response by saying that "Americans died in Benghazi." He followed by asserting that he wanted to ensure that a similar situation doesn't happen again and that the assailants would be "held accountable."

If you watch Fox and believe it, I don't understand how you actually have enough sense to make a living and not get fleeced out of it by retail scam artists. There are a couple of possibilities:

• You live in a group home with a guard at the door.
• You like being lied to because otherwise you'd have to cope with a complex world whose complexion is not to your liking.
• You're so fearful you can't think straight.

Does Brian Kilmeade remind anyone else of Emily Litella?

By the way, did you know that the word gullible isn't even in the dictionary? Probably another Obama conspiracy...

Bullshitting for a living

Click image for full Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune cartoon.

What you might see at the ophthalmologist

Fox News is making inroad everywhere.  It's in doctors' offices.  It's even in the cafeteria at work.

Yesterday, though, during eager non-stop (heh) coverage of the USAir flight that ditched in the Hudson River, I realized the truth about Fox's coverage - and its ratings success.

The intent of Fox News is not to inform.  It's not even merely to entertain.  They are trying to induce emotions in their viewers, not thoughts.  That's why they bring on gushing psychologists to anticipate post-traumatic stress disorder in the passengers and crew.  That's why their platinum blonde newsreaders maunder on about how terrible the fear must have been.

Whenever you see TV news coverage, you should understand that you're making buying decisions all along.  Most people decide to buy - whether products or stories - based on emotion, not on careful, dispassionate consideration.  Roger Ailes (the evil one) knows this, and he doesn't mind manipulating his audience.

Roger Ailes doesn't give a damn

Fox "News" is a blight upon the American media landscape. Could their reactionary politics be any better displayed by their slips of the tongue?

As it turns out, yes:

[Liz Trotta's] mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.

In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.

If Huckabee had said something about whitey, well, that wouldn't be so easily forgiven.

(Of course I mean the evil Roger Ailes, not the good one.)

Tool of power

Even big media apologist Howard Kurtz can't hide the obvious opinion of Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly that their role in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is to act as a propaganda tool. Fox is about O'Reilly's puerile, egotistical, bullshit form of entertainment, not about informing its audience.

It's good to see Kurtz even report this story. Of course, there are some things he does wrong. The most glaring is that he doesn't provide GE/NBC's rebuttal of O'Reilly's delusional gasbaggery until the very end of the story. I'm sure Bill himself has some investment somewhere with tendrils into Iran, so by his own logic even such a saintly one as he is killing American soldiers.

Kurtz's omissions are also glaring. He provides no background on the alleged factual error Keith Olbermann made when describing Roger Ailes as providing advice to Rudy Giuliani. Fox's non-denial denial ("If he was offering Rudy advice, you think Rudy would have done as badly as he did? No way Roger was giving him advice.") should have been counterposed against the known history of Ailes advising the Bushists.

Later, Kurtz alludes to a Kos blogger who did an ambush interview with O'Reilly. Even Olbermann criticized it. Here's the thing: O'Reilly sends his producers out all the time to ambush their prey. He's supposed to be immune to this because he's in the media? No way. We have the power now.

It has always puzzled me that Bill O's viewers can't see that everything he says needs first a sniff check for bilious bullshit - from a safe distance where you won't be overcome by fumes.

Good white boys

I was having dinner in the Countdown Pub the other night with Toby Keith, and I couldn't get over the fact that, even though MSNBC is a white-owned network and most of its on-air talent is white, they weren't all bloated, jowly, arrogantly stupid gasbags.

This is what black America doesn't know. They think white culture is dominated by Bob Novak, George Will, and the Roger Ailes posse.

Michael Deaver dead at 69

Deaver taught the Washington press corps that they could be manipulated and like it. He made all those pretty Reaganite pictures that meant so much more than mere words and lowered the common denominator - though not nearly as far as subsequent GOP media people. But Deaver was never evil like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove or smarmy like Ken Mehlman and Ed Gillespie. I guess he could always leave the dirty work to Roger Ailes, who has a network full of hacks who are both evil and smarmy. Ironic that CNN has the headline before Fox, though there's as yet no story to link to.

It's continually amazing how the depredations of the Bushist regime make me nostalgic for previous, less nasty Republican Administrations - for just a second or two, anyway.

Update: I had forgotten about Deaver's felonies. Just another Republican criminal, I guess, even if he did have a pleasant manner.

Out of context, but...

Comment on what?:

Taking a wicked nixon on the ideals and the work of the Founders...