johnny dollar's archive: sept-oct 2009

Attention Media Matters, Think Progress, Slate, and the rest. You will be exposed in this special two-part blockbuster edition of Fox Haters Week in Review!

Over the Hill:
Reaction to FNC's firing of contributor Marc Lamont Hill has been swift and vocal. Our first stop, the newshounds, where the headline claims:

Fox News Reportedly Fires Liberal Contributor Marc Lamont Hill For His Political Views

We looked through the kennel archives for April-May 2008 to read their post praising Fox for hiring Dr Hill. But there wasn't one. Be that as it may, Ellen Brodsky goes on to say:

Think Progress has the info on the alleged firing of liberal contributor Marc Lamont Hill because of his support for a convicted "cop killer."

Wait, didn't she just say he was fired for his political views? Or was he fired for his views on a criminal case? No matter, because when you go to the Think Progress link Brodsky provides, it has no information about why Dr Hill was fired. It talks about criticisms he has received, but perhaps mindful of the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (as well as other factors that may have been involved), TP is careful to not say what caused the firing. In fact, to quote the TP piece:

Murdoch did not say why Hill had been fired.

Oops. That's kind of like the opposite of what Ellen claimed. (By the way, we searched Think Progress for their article praising Fox for hiring Dr Hill. There wasn't one.)

And then there's Media Matters scribe Eric Boehlert, who has accumulated an enviable record of lying about Fox. He chimed in with a variant on Brodsky's misrepresentation:

Fox News fires liberal commentator for being too liberal...One of Fox News' few liberal contributors has been fired for his political views.

To support this claim Boehlert relies on: post hoc ergo propter hoc! Evidence? Schmevidence! (We looked up Media Matters's post commending Fox for hiring Dr Hill, and came up empty.) Then Eric tosses in this little gem:

I gave Bill O'Reilly credit for having the guts (since almost nobody else at FNC will) to put an smart, persuasive, articulate liberal on his show...

Almost no one else on Fox would put Marc Lamont Hill on the air? Puh-leeze! Examples:

• Fox & Friends
• On the Record
• Laura Ingraham hosting The Factor
• America's Newsroom
• America's Nightly Scoreboard on FBN
• Geraldo at Large
• Monica Crowley hosting The Factor
• Happy Hour on FBN
• Hannity & Colmes
• And a ton of appearances on Red Eye

And these are just shows where we could find video clips. We could also mention the dozens of appearances on FNC's Cost of Freedom business block. Eric's misinformation comes as no surprise. We're used to these supersized servings of Boehlert's Boehlony.

Dunn and Dusted:
We never expected to deal with an official of the US Government as a Fox Hater, but then we hadn't come across Anita Dunn before. As part of her taxpayer-funded jihad against a member of the press, Dunn had this exchange with Howard Kurtz on CNN:

"Did you see coverage of that [the Sen. John Ensign scandal] on Fox News? I'm not talking Glenn Beck, Sean, the Factor, I'm talking Fox News." "I will have to check on that," Kurtz responded.

If Howie did check it out, he didn't mention it today. But someone did his homework for him. As noted by Steve Hayes on Special Report:

In that interview that Anita Dunn did, she specifically talked about Fox News, news reporting and not the opinion shows, and made it sound like all of Fox News, the reporters and the anchors are conservatives or come from a conservative viewpoint. And the example she used was the John Ensign affair story. And she said basically if you watch Fox, you didn't know about that story. So I went back and looked at the month after the John Ensign story broke, and on this show, we discussed this 11 times, sometimes in extended reports, sometimes in a discussion like this. That's 11 times in 20 days. That's every other day. It is a tremendous amount of coverage for a story that I would argue has some relevance. It was interesting, but is it defining the national agenda? So clearly she was wrong about that.

That's Right, You're Wrong:
Fabrication and misinformation are coin of the realm at the dog pound. It's been a busy week so we don't have time to cover them all. We'll start with the "guest blogger" who last week claimed that the constitution's 3/5 compromise was a figment of Glenn Beck's imagination. This week she tells us that Beck did a special program about healthcare, with an audience of "doctors [who] talked about why they hate Health Care using the same misinformation and scare tactics we've seen elsewhere". Did she watch the program? If so is her claim that all those doctors hated Obama's health care plan a deliberate lie? Because one of the first things Beck did was ask who here supports Obamacare. The result:


Meanwhile, Julie Driscoll comes up with a gem of legal analysis: the First Amendment doesn't protect people from lawsuits! Gee, the First Amendment Center and the US Supreme Court might disagree. Perhaps it's this sort of insightful legal analysis that caused Julie to lose her title of "Chicago Law and Politics Examiner".

Ellen Brodsky adds to the sterling reputation of the newsmutts by presenting a video supposedly of Rush Limbaugh racist statements. The source?

from Brave New Films, with whom we are proud to be associated.

While a handful of the quotes in this video are actual sound bites, most are just read by the Off-Screen Announcer of Doom. And sure enough, we find the phony quote about James Earl Ray--debunked years ago--and the one about slavery, described by Anderson Cooper as something Limbaugh never said. Well, this is hardly the first time Brodsky has been proud to associate with liars.

We want to thank blogger Chris Golas for sending in this report:

Newshounds has this blaring headline up:

Fox Nation Uses Russell Simmons To Divide And Demonize America

Fox nation links to this article, which points out a string of comments by Russell Simmons, such as:

• Sometimes I’m amazed that we are still breathing. With horrible abuses of animals, the planet and human kind, it’s amazing that we are still here.
• America, our country is under indictment. And we will be found guilty if we don’t act. If we allow these nasty, malicious people, who harbor so much hate with views that separate us from the rest of world, to continue to tell us how to think, we will be found guilty of charge one.
• If we allow leaders of a political party that only know one word, and that is “no,” to work against the best interests of our country...we will be sentenced by God to self-destruction.

Ellen quotes one paragraph of a lengthy article, without mentioning that it wasn't written by Fox, and suggests her one paragraph represents the entire piece--which she never links to. And despite her claim that this is Fox Nation "dividing and demonizing America", the fact remains that the statements in question are those of Russell Simmons. His words are the ones "dividing and demonizing" America. Blasting Fox Nation for citing Russell Simmons's own words is irresponsible to the extreme.

Picking up on Chris's post, we find this is a pattern with Brodsky. Here she is whining that Fox Nation called the Nobel Prize Chairman a "Socialist":

Sure enough, Fox Nation sussed out the smears so that we don't have to....From 1999 through 2008, Jagland was vice president of Socialist International.

Once again, while complaining about a lack of facts, Ellen doesn't even link to or quote from the full article, only the excerpt. And just how did Fox Nation "suss out the smears", when Fox Nation didn't write the article? Nor does she explain what seems to be the kennel's very own innovative, brand-new definition of a "smear": something that is true but we don't want people to mention. And then Brodsky does it again:

Fox Nation Cooks Up A Conspiracy Theory To Baselessly Suggest Obama Connected To "Killing" Limbaugh's NFL Bid

Of course the article didn't implicate Obama at all, so that's a lie. The Fox Nation headline:

Did a Former Obama Official Kill Limbaugh’s NFL Bid?

First Ellen quotes two paragraphs with this description:

Here's the entire Fox Nation article that goes with the suggestive headline

Well, it's not a Fox Nation article. The Fox Nation merely linked to this column by Joseph Ashby. Ellen: wrong. Ellen's claim that Fox Nation "cooked up a conspiracy"? Wrong, since Fox Nation didn't write the article. Oh, and Brodsky's description of a two-paragraph blurb as "the entire Fox Nation article"? Another lie, and Ellen knows it. When she cut and pasted those two paragraphs she had to carefully adjust the mouse to make sure the last two words were left out: "Read more". In truth the "entire" article is ten paragraphs long, and still wasn't written by Fox Nation. Which makes that four times Brodsky was either wrong or lied. Maybe five, depending on how you count.

We take on Slate, Think Progress, Aaron Barnhart, and the latest round of anti-Fox racial slurs in part two of this special edition of Fox Haters Week in Review. fox news nh mm ad