Is a new "Fox watching" site playing it straight? With J$P Video! Updated!

It's getting to be a pretty crowded field: websites dedicated to attacking Fox News, exposing their "propaganda", and ridiculing their personnel. The latest entry in the Fox-watching sweepstakes claims it will use "specific examples" of how FNC is "failing in its promise" to be fair and balanced. So is Eyes on Fox a serious attempt at honest analysis, or just another gang of agenda-driven Fox haters?

It's not a good sign when they recommend articles from a website that has been caught in literally hundreds of falsehoods about FNC (yes, the newshounds). Neither is it encouraging when they misrepresent the panel of journalists on Special Report:

the standard panel of 3 conservative parrots: Fred Barnes, Mort Kondracke, and Charles Krauthammer. No intense debate here. Diversity Fox style.

Of course, this is untrue. The standard panel is Barnes, Kondracke, and Mara Liason of NPR. But she does not appear on Fridays, and just by coincidence the Eyes Guys chose a Friday to discuss the panel. With all the wikipedia links in their article, perhaps they got their false information about the make-up of this panel from the ludicrously inaccurate wiki page.

Also note the description of independent Kondracke as a "conservative parrot". This is the same Mort Kondracke who dismissed Ronald Reagan as a "second tier president", and said:

I’m for stem cell research. I’m pro-choice, you know, I believe in evolution, all that stuff... on economics I tend to be a little bit more liberal... I believe in estate taxes, I believe in raising the minimum wage.... I think it’s more important to have enough revenue for the government and not run up big deficits and have to borrow a lot of money.

Now all this is from an early Eyes entry, so we can't draw any conclusions yet. But moving on a bit, we find the Eyes Guys taking a shot at Mr Bill O'Reilly:

I’m not data-mining here, I encourage you to check all the numbers yourself. Since O’Reilly is #1 and does the most self-promotional boasting, he gets the spotlight. By the numbers, he’s king of prime-time 8 pm. If I read MediaBistro’s number correctly, he has a Nielsen audience of 1,844,000.... However, look at the critical 25-54 demographic that’s the real advertising money-maker. Bill grabs a mere 345,000, less than 20% of his audience! The rest do comparatively far better: Zahn: 163,000; Olbermann: 191,000; Grace: 169,000. Add the competitors up now and they dwarf O’Reilly in this critical demographic.... I have a sneaking suspicion he’s most popular amongst the Polident set.

The most obvious trick here is "add the competitors up". You will almost always "dwarf" the box office receipts of the #1 movie if you "add up" the cash taken in by the competitors. But there's something even more deceptive here. Their claim for Mr Bill's audience numbers is based on one day: August 24. And, in another one of those increasingly shady coincidences, they skipped over three days of that week, and just happened to select the first day when Bill O'Reilly wasn't even on! Obviously the numbers are much lower when he isn't there, so the numbers they attribute to Bill are actually all about somebody else.

If that isn't evidence enough, watch as the Eyes Guys show their cards. They post a clip of Fred Barnes using the pejorative term "Defeatocrats", with the following commentary:

His co-host, Mort Kondracke, says he’ll address Fred’s smear. Notice my video ends there. Why? Because there’s nothing more to show. Mort, who allegedly sits across the table to Fred to add some balance, never bothers.... Fairness and balance Fox News style.

Their video ends there, but ours doesn't. Here's what they didn't want you to see, what they claim never happened, all from that "conservative parrot" Mort Kondracke [QuickTime video]:



Mort "never bothers" to address the Defeatocrat remark? There's "nothing more to show"? The Eyes Guys have concocted a fabrication truly worthy of their heroes, the newsliars.

Their website claims: "We also do not intend to be faceless here and will not hide our political beliefs." Well, they're half right. But they remain rhetorical snipers, as they conceal themselves with screen names and courageously cloak their domain registration behind a firewall of privacy. A good try, but these FNC bashers have still earned themselves a couple of black eyes.

Update: The Eyes Guys have replied to our criticisms. To their credit, they admit they misrepresented Mort Kondracke and have posted a correction. On the other hand...

In addition to his Johnny Dollar web site he's also very active at Fox News Channel Central, another fan site.

We are "very active" there? Perhaps they could cite some examples. We aren't holding our breath however. The last time we asked for documentation for one of their false claims about us, we received nothing but silence. Twice. On our noting that Krauthammer is not part of the standard panel, they change the subject :

[Fox] has an obligation to replace Mara with a real liberal

An interesting point, but a totally new one, and not part of their original article. They represented a one-day panel as the "standard panel of 3 conservative parrots", and threw poor Mara under the bus. They don't explain this misrepresentation, and the "corrected" article still includes this falsehood. As to the Kondracke controversy:

I missed Mort’s comments which come later in the show.

Of course they did. Responses to a statement always come later. If they came earlier than the statement, they wouldn't be responses. If the point of this is to suggest that they came way later, then it's only fair to note that Mort addressed the issue all of 50 seconds after Fred finished speaking.

he coincidentally edits out parts of the video that don’t fit his case.... Johnny's clip excludes points where Mort agrees with George Bush.

Of course it does. Our "case" wasn't that Mort disagrees with Bush on everything in the world, and the purpose of the clip was not to present all of Mort's opinions on everything. Our "case" was that the Eyes Guys misrepresented what he said. Straw Man: Kondracke agrees with Bush on some points. We never said otherwise. But that's irrelevant to the issue we raised: did the Eyes Guys tell the truth about what he said? They didn't. They also take up the fudging of ratings numbers:

What Johnny doesn't mention is I used O'Reilly as an example as noted in the post.

No you didn't. You used a weekender who was substituting for O'Reilly. It's pretty easy to use O'Reilly as an example: use his monthly numbers, or the ratings from one of the days of the week when he's there. To select a day when he's gone, fail to reveal that fact, and from there extrapolate conclusions about O'Reilly's appeal to "the Polident set", all based on numbers that weren't even his, is hardly the epitome of forthrightness. Finally they take issue with our noting their secrecy:

What does any of that have to do with who we are as individuals, what our mission statement obviously means?

It has a lot to do with it. It's one of the reasons why the Media Bloggers Association has a policy regarding "anonymous" bloggers. It means we don't know the credentials, the reputation, or the track record of the writers. The reader is unable to determine the bloggers' independence or freedom from conflicts of interest, and has nothing from which to assume good faith. We don't dismiss those who wish to remain anonymous, but they start out with a handicap. They have to demonstrate credibility and earn respect. That takes time, particularly if their first steps evince an uncertain relationship with the truth.

Of course, that criticism coming from "Johnny Dollar" means a heck of a lot.

We couldn't agree more. We don't hide our identity. Name? On this site, in every URL, at Olbermann Watch, and registered with the Media Bloggers Association. Domain? All information public.

The Eyes Guys appear to be a tad defensive and disingenuous about all this, but we have to give them credit. They did put up a correction, and even a flawed correction is more than we usually get from the Outfoxed gals.