Around the Interwebs

After we called out Eric Boehlert for alleging that Shirley Sherrod was asked to resign as a reaction to a 'smear campaign' from 'Fox News', he responded that he wasn’t talking about Fox News Channel, but about one post on foxnews.com. We pointed out several problems with that explanation, the main one being that--contrary to his claim--the article didn’t appear on foxnews.com until after she was told to resign. Boehlert’s dishonest comeback was to lie about what we wrote and claim we were agreeing with him!

Yesterday, I patiently pointed out that "Fox News," in the form of FoxNews.com, did in fact "peddle" the Sherrod story long before she resigned with a report that was picked up by right-wing bloggers. And yes, Johnny Dollar was forced to concede that I was factually accurate on that point. ("Yes, there was a post on foxnews.com.")

Au contraire. We did not concede Boehlert was ‘factually accurate’. We proved he was dead wrong because the foxnews.com post did not appear 'long before she resigned', but in fact after. Boehlert’s quoting of seven words from our post, ignoring everything else to change the context, is so very Breitbartian.

Politico and others confirmed what we first reported: the article wasn’t posted until around 6:00pm. Boehlert was forced to confront that inconvenient fact. Rather than admit he was wrong about the article, he just changed the timeline by claiming that Sherrod 'resigned shortly before 8:00 pm'. Where did he get that from? How quickly Eric forgets (or sweeps under the rug) Sherrod’s own timeline. She was told to pull over and resign because she was going to be on Glenn Beck that day. Glenn Beck airs at 5:00 pm. Does Boehlert ever tell the truth?

Boehlert’s bosses at Media Matters didn’t seem too impressed by the fact that the foxnews.com article wasn’t posted until 5:58 pm. You recall their fake timeline, the one that placed the article’s appearance between 11:18 am and 12:13 pm? It still does! There are thousands of links to that timeline on a ton of websites, but hey, why correct a falsehood if it can be used to smear Fox?

Needless to say we’re still finding people who insist that FNC got Shirley Sherrod fired:

Fox News, which shares Breitbart’s goal of raising the conservative colors and attacking liberals, ran with the story, its pundits hammering the president. Obama and his Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack totally over-reacted. Instead of demanding an explanation from Sherrod and finding out the real facts, Sherrod’s immediate resignation was demanded and received and she was out of a job.

The Morning Sentinel took it to the next level, claiming Sherrod was fired because the administration was 'intimidated by a faulty Fox News story on Sherrod', while leaving Breitbart out of it entirely by claiming the clip was a 'Fox News video'! After commenters posted the facts, the story acquired a correction:

It did not start with Fox News, which did not run any material about Sherrod until her resignation was made public that evening.

Just how could Gordon L Weil, 'weekly columnist', have been so ignorant about his subject matter? This must have been a royal embarrassment for the paper, because they threw in the towel and deleted the whole thing, correction and all. Enjoy the cached version while it lasts.

Stupid Hound Tricks

Our canine pals at the newshounds have been up to their usual chicanery, including the time-honored technique of cherry-picking. It’s easy to claim that Fox & Friends has been 'advancing the right-wing meme' about the Ground Zero mosque, then rinse and repeat. But that’s because the newsmutts are careful to ignore coverage that disproves their smear. Peter F Johnson appeared on F&F to give his analysis of the mosque controversy. Not a word about it from the mongrels. Apparently they want to preserve the fiction that such opinions aren’t heard on Fox.

When you get to the sort of loopy logic of dog pound ‘guest bloggers’, almost anything goes. One Aunty Em (whose true identity and lack of credentials are secret) has decided to jump on the Glenn Beck Is Dangerous bandwagon. (S)he comes up with a real gem of an example to make her case: a shooting in San Antonio. The police said gang members went to shoot up a rival’s place, only they shot up the wrong building (Solidarity House, a progressive non-profit). As the gang members were shooting, they were yelling the name of a woman--who was in fact in a nearby building.

Ah, but Inspector Em is on the case. The police? What do those uniformed hacks know? Inspector Em has decided that the evidence presented by the police is 'scant', and likes her own theory: it’s the work of deranged, racist, anti-immigration psychos inspired to kill by Fox News and Glenn Beck. Of course the evidence for Em’s theory isn’t just scant--it’s nonexistent! But it’s not like (s)he’s just making it up. No, (s)he has a source: People’s World, successor to The Daily Worker and tireless advocate for Marxism, socialism, and the Communist Party. Yes, when we prosecuted cases, we often had to decide whose evidence to believe: the police and their eyewitnesses, or People’s World.

And then there’s newspoodle Priscilla, who was faced with a conundrum. Steve Doocy interviewed a man who produced a movie about the border. It was an unexceptionable interview about a film that was well received critically, so what’s a Prissy to do? Here’s an idea: invent a claim of bias!

Funny, the film was done in 2006 and I don’t recall Fox & Friends talking about the issue at the time. Oh right, Bush was President then.

Unfortunately, Priscilla is wrong again. Not only did F&F talk to Burgard about his movie back in 2007--and Bush was President then, duh!--but the newspooches wrote an entire article about it! (Of course that article was built around a lie made up out of thin air, but we expect no less from the biased bassets.) It’s clear Priscilla doesn’t know what airs on FNC. But can’t she at least know what’s posted on her own site?

It Didn't Start with Breitbart

From all the fuss you’d think Andrew Breitbart was the first guy in history to promote edited quotes that didn’t reflect the full context of the original remarks. But this technique has been used to smear Fox News long before Breitbart. We pointed out last week how The Huffington Post, MSNBC, and the newshounds resorted to the same sort of dishonest editing and misrepresentation. For another case in point: Slate.com. They concocted a video that compared reaction to Michelle Obama’s convention speech on MSNBC vs FNC:


How skillfully Emily Calderone edited that montage. She managed to clip comments from Fred Barnes and Chris Wallace in mid-sentence, while making people like Juan Williams completely disappear. Here’s the footage Slate didn’t want you to see:


For the record, Slate called Andrew Breitbart a ‘race-baiting fraud artist’.

Talking Points Memo used much the same technique in quoting a single sentence from Fox’s Peter F Johnson Jr, during a discussion about special debriefings for Muslim soldiers:

The third host, Fox legal analyst Peter Johnson pressed Rivera. "You won't countenance special screenings for Muslims, will you?" he asked. "That would be a hard step for me to take," Rivera responded.

TPM presented this as if Johnson were calling for such screenings, and that’s exactly how Keith Olbermann took it when he quoted that one line, giving it his own special spin:

You won't countenance special screenings for Muslim soldiers, WILL ya?

Olby went on to make Johnson one of his worst persons in the world, adding that blacks, Asians, and Hispanics aren’t allowed to succeed at Fox News or something. But Johnson was slandered by TPM and by Olbermann. Before asking that question to Geraldo, Johnson said:

JOHNSON: Well that's absolutely accurate, and it calls for restraint, and it calls for concern for fellow citizens. And obviously whether an assailant is Christian, or is Muslim, or is Jewish, is irrelevant.

Then came the exchange with Rivera, this time including the part TPM and Olbermann don’t want you to see:

JOHNSON: You can't, you won't COUNTENANCE special screenings for Muslim soldiers, will you?
RIVERA: You know, it's a hard--
JOHNSON: You CAN’T! As a civil libertarian, can YOU countenance that, Geraldo Rivera?
RIVERA: It's a hard step for me to take, to countenance. This is an American born person.
JOHNSON: Yeah it is!
RIVERA: This is not a naturalized citizen.
JOHNSON: Right!

Peter F Johnson was actually arguing against special screenings for Muslims--the exact opposite of what TPM and Olbermann claimed. Just as in the Sherrod matter a quote is wrenched out of context and used to smear someone as a racist.

For the record, TPM called Andrew Breitbart a ‘cowardly character assassin’. Olbermann called Breitbart’s editing ‘slander’.

Our final example has so many parallels to the Shirley Sherrod case that it’s almost eerie. A quote caught on tape. Cropped to remove context. Spreads through the interwebs. The speaker of the quote is accused of racism. Complete context reveals the truth. Copious apologies. In this case, the speaker was Megyn Kelly, with the quote snipped from a radio interview discussing the previous night’s convention speech by Michelle Obama:

KELLY: I stand by my comments on the Michelle Obama dress...bluish-green is not the color for these women.

This was immediately snapped up by the newshounds, with Queen Bee Ellen Brodsky chiming in:

Megyn "I love to smear people of color" Kelly was disgusting as ever... That woman would probably say the "n-word" if she thought it would advance her career. God knows, it won't happen because of any real talent.

Jossip added their two cents:

Megyn Kelly is the worst kind of moron: tthe [sic] blond, perky, Republican kind.... Hemmer needs to put a ball-gag on that woman before they're both axed for being too racist--even for Fox News.

Alas, Jossip is now defunct (a sad loss for the world of journalism).

Now to the ‘revealing the truth’ part. At the convention, speakers stood in front of a blue background. At one point in the coverage, Megyn said:

KELLY: Chris Wallace commented on Michelle Obama’s look. I thought she looked fabulous, although I thought the dress blended in too well with the background.

The newshounds trumpeted one sentence from the next day’s interview. Was the context as Ellen Brodsky wants you to think: Megyn Kelly smearing people of color? Or was it Megyn Kelly talking about the colors women wear when speaking before a blue background? Here’s the one sentence the mutts used, this time followed by the part they skipped:

KELLY: I stand by my comments on the Michelle Obama dress…bluish-green is not the color for these women.
HOST: And it blended in--you were right--it blended in with that background.

Yahtzee! Nobody was talking about race; it was about dress colors too similar to background colors. And yet even after the deceptive editing was exposed and the true context was known, Ellen Brodsky and her bigoted bassets continued to race-bait Megyn Kelly with this phony racial smear, over and over again. And why not? The response it got from the kennel-dwellers is just what Brodsky was after (some vulgarities have been disguised):

• What a catty, racist bitch!
• For Meg to truly display her fashion sense, she should wear a scarlet letter "A".
• And I bet Michelle Obama does not show up to work wearing a "pussy pelmet" to further her career like Kelly does. Kelly is just a talentless whore who is going nowhere,so she decide to join the Klan, like you do when you have nothing going on.
• F@ck you Megan Kelly. Racist "these women" brainless bitch. You look like a Goddamed blood clot in that ugly "Dress Barn" shapeless $40.00 Kmart blue light special, just get it the f@ck out of inventory, red dress.... If you had lips, you'd look like f@ckin' Bozo instead of a cheap classless whore. And that cheap fragrance you're wearing puts the FUME in perfume. Blech - makes me want to puke. Give your asshole co-anchor a raise for having to be seen on camera with you.
• Megyn thinks that all Black women should dress like Aunt Jemima. A scarf around the head would be a nice touch.
• Give Megyn a break. Do you know how many law school professors and Fox execs she had to have sex with to get to that coveted anchor slot?
• You see this is what happens when these White bigoted bimbos spend most of their day in that racist cocoon called Fox News HQ. I bet the "N" word and Black jokes are spoken freely in certain areas of that building.
• Send that bitch back to Nazi Germany. What an unbelievable despicable human being. I am guessing under that dress she has a dick which goes nicely with that tranny look.

The parallels between the hounds’ smear and what was done to Sherrod are stunning, from the methodology to the race-baiting intent. But we admit we were wrong about that ‘copious apologies’ part. Ellen believes in repeating lies, not correcting them.

For the record, Ellen Brodsky said Andrew Breitbart engaged in ‘race-baiting via deceptive videos’. She oughta know.

What If…?

All of a sudden there’s been a flood of talk accusing Fox News of being racist. It is, of course, entirely coincidental that all these allegations seem to have sprung up at the same time. After all, it’s not like there’s an echo chamber or anything. Be that as it may, you can find the claim of race-baiting on one site after another, not to mention on competitor news channels. Plus you have people like Howard Dean lying about FNC while calling them racists. All of this is played out before a background of frequent laments about the lack of diversity in cable news.

But what if something happened to shake up this deplorable situation? What if somebody actually gave a black man the opportunity to host a cable news program, not on some little-watched hour in the middle of the day, but in the heart of prime-time? And rather than getting lost in the Nielsen shuffle, it turned out to be a ratings winner: the most-watched cable news program of the day. Now that would show those racial race-baiting racists at Fox News! Media Matters, Color of Change, Howard Dean would rush to celebrate the host for showing how diversity in cable news could not merely succeed, but triumph.

Well actually, it already happened. Last week. The black host in question not only had the most-watched cable news program of the day, but had more viewers than the three competing channels combined. (And not for the first time, either.) So did Color of Change salute this development? Did Media Matters trumpet the conquest of opportunity over race-baiting? Did Dr Dean express his pride for the success of a black journalist? The silence has been deafening. But why? What accounts for the lack of congratulatory admiration?

It really is puzzling, isn’t it?

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Tags: newshounds, mediamatters, boehlert, olbermann, slootsky