johnny dollar's archive: sept-oct 2009

What's worse than lying about what you've seen? Lying about what you haven't seen! Details in today's thrilling edition of Fox Haters Week in Review!

The Loony Bin:
It's been a while since we dropped in on those geniuses at oreillysucks.com. It's really something of a chore to wade through their swamp, since the sucksters just slap a month's worth of posts on a single page, with no way to link to any specific article! Perhaps that's to avoid embarrassing contradictions that keep cropping up. They complain about discussing Afghanistan troop levels, based on this principle:

I say let the president decide, and whatever decision he makes is what I will support, whether it's more troops or not....I say we should support what the president wants to do, and not listen to O'Reilly or Code Pink.

OK but then the sucksters also say:

Geraldo was on to talk about Afghanistan, and he said Obama should send the extra 40,000 troops, so he agrees with O'Reilly on it. Proving that Geraldo is drinking the right-wing kool-aid. Because from what I have read we can never win in Afghanistan, so we should just get the hell out and let them rule their own country.

What happened to "let the president decide"? That sure evaporated quickly! Or how about this:

Billy had Judge Napolitano on who said under equal protection the illegals will have to get the health care. It's nonsense, and O'Reilly knows it.

Followed just a few sentences later by:

I am not a legal expert so I have no idea if they are right or not...

And then there's this from the sucksters:

O'Reilly does a weekly media bias segment with his good buddy Bernie Goldberg, in this segment they cherry pick examples of what they see as liberal bias in the media.... But they never report on any of the conservative bias, they cherry pick an example of liberal bias then claim it proves they are always biased to the left. Not to mention, they never report on any conservative bias at FOX, because they work for FOX, so they just ignore it all.

Now we realize that controlled substances can affect human memory, but given that this happened just the previous week could this be another outright lie from the sucksters?

Garbage In, Garbage Out
You never know what idiocy is going to spurt from the newshounds (another fine product of the Outfoxed cabal). For reasons that remain unclear, one "guest blogger" decided, in the middle of a rant against Glenn Beck, to bring up George Bush and the "fake Turkey" he posed with in Iraq. Never mind that this urban myth was disproved years ago--there's no old wives' tale too hoary for the old hounds to recycle and try to pawn off as truth. It gets rather more embarrassing for the "guest blogger" (we will withhold her "name" to spare her any additional humiliation):

Then he gave us a revisionist history of The Constitution that really has to be heard to be believed. Beck told us why Blacks only counted as 3/5ths of a human being and, according to Beck, it was all the Founding Fathers fault. Southerners wanted slaves to count as one whole person, while Northerners didn’t want to count them at all. The 3/5ths of a human being was, apparently, a compromise. I’ve never heard anything about this, but then he goes on a lot about stuff I’ve never heard of before.

What an admission! Apparently the educational system just ain't what it used to be. For the edification of the dog pound's "guest blogger":

The Constitution was a document based upon compromise: between larger and smaller states, between proponents of a strong central government and those who favored strong state governments, and, above all, between northern and southern states. Of all the compromises on which the Constitution rested, perhaps the most controversial was the Three-Fifths Compromise, an agreement to count three-fifths of a state's slaves in apportioning Representatives, Presidential electors, and direct taxes.

While we're on the subject of Glenn Beck, we have to wonder why Julie takes the trouble to comment on programs she hasn't seen:

Glenn Beck devoted his entire program yesterday talking about the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine – and I have to ask, what kind of viewer would sit through an hour of that? The man of the hour, Beck himself, was O’Reilly’s guest to talk about why he gave it so much time (bet my bottom dollar it has something to do with a massive government conspiracy).

She then goes on to complain that they missed an opportunity "to actually [sic] inform the public about the vaccine". Um, Jules, isn't that what the full-hour program was all about? The one you critiqued without viewing, and (not surprisingly) got wrong?

But Mr Beck was small potatoes this week; it was "all hands on deck" to smear Fox & Friends for its Nobel coverage. Queen Bee Ellen Brodsky wasted no time in recycling clips from Media Matters to make her case:

I woke up to the news that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Not so typically, I suspect, my first thought was to find out how Fox News was covering it. Surprise, surprise, surprise! They're doing their best to downplay the honor and/or outright demean it. I have yet to hear a word of congratulations or good cheer.

Well, since the only clips Brodsky offers came from Media Matters, is it possible, perhaps, that Brock's editors might have snipped out those words of congratulations? Ya think? Maybe that's why she didn't hear this, or at least claims she didn't. But this is what happens when you let Media Matters watch Fox so you don't have to. Brodsky goes on to complain that a chyron read: "Awarded for reaching out to Muslims". She even posts a screengrab as proof! But proof of what? Telling the truth?

“One of the first things he did was to go to Cairo to try to reach out to the Muslim world, then to restart the Mideast negotiations and then he reached out to the rest of the world through international institutions,” Thorbjorn Jagland said in Oslo on Friday after announcing that Obama had won the prize.

It only gets better when our pal Julie chimes in. She apparently got the same talking points that Ellen did, and in an amazing coincidence, also uses a clip from Media Matters as her source material:

Fox & Friends is already in I’m-taking-my-toys-and-going-home mode....Gird your loins, people – Fox & Friends has greased the gears for seven days and seven nights of how-could-this-happen and what’s-this-world-coming-to?

Julie bases this on one clip from Media Matters. But what's missing from all their edited clips? For example, there was a panel discussion on the Nobel award with three participants, but Media Matters used a snippet that featured a comment from the one conservative--Mike Gallagher--and then quickly cut off when the others started talking. Why do you suppose that was? Here is the complete discussion; you can decide for yourself if this was, to coin a phrase, fair and balanced:


The newspoodles didn't mention this. Neither did they mention another segment on that same program. Watch it and then ask yourself if Julie's characterization of the coverage was correct, and if Ellen was telling the truth when she claimed there wasn't even one "word of congratulations or good cheer":


All this stuff wasn't left out by accident. But this is what happens when Ellen and Julie let Media Matters filter what they see. It was bad enough when Julie misrepresented a Glenn Beck program without watching it, but at least there she made no secret of it. Here however, she comments on the Media Matters clip by saying "Carlson weighed in..." Did she even watch the clip before posting it? Gretchen Carlson isn't in the clip, and she wasn't on Friday's show at all! Julie's spewing about F&F coverage and it's clear she didn't even watch the program! This may not be as bad as lifting other people's words without acknowledgement, but it is bad. Credibility, meet drain.

Beneath Contempt:
Another week, another "death threat" discovered by Ellen Brodsky. Again this was purportedly posted at Fox Nation, where a commenter hoped that Obama would get "what Kennedy got". As before, when we actually went to the page where this comment supposedly sat, it wasn't there. So if it existed at all, it was removed by the moderators in a timely manner. And yet...we wonder about the double standard Brodsky applies. It isn't so difficult to find threats of violence, or "death wishes", in the newshounds comments sections, all of them allowed by Ellen or her subordinates. Not only have they been approved, they are still there months, even years later [Update: at least they were there; then several of them suddenly disappeared. No matter we saved screengrabs]:

• Bill O'Reilly should be shot in the head with a Laser gun.
• He should be loaded into a cannon and shot into a brick wall.
• Kristol is a Zionist agent! He should be shoT!
• Ugh, John Gibson... seriously, that man should be shot.
• [Charles Krauthammer] is the perfect example of a modern nazi. I hope he dies of bowel cancer.

Another reminder that to be a Fox hater, you first have to be a hater.

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