Around the Interwebs

Richard Backus claims to be a ‘journalist’, but in an unhinged diatribe against Fox News, he reveals himself to be a poseur who doesn’t even know what airs on FNC or when. He asserts that Rush Limbaugh is a Fox News commentator and suggests that Glenn Beck airs after Sean Hannity. The ignorance cranks up to ‘11’ when he claims Beck’s program is followed by ‘an assortment of blond talking heads’. That would be Bret Baier and Shep. Of course Backus gleefully crosses the line of decency: he compares Fox News to...(wait for it)...the Nazis! Pinhead.

A site called Opposing Views presents this headline:

Pew Research Chief: Fox News Polling is Partisan

Scott Keeter of Pew said no such thing. He was discussing the spread in the DE Senate race:

KEETER: Gannett did a poll just in the last few days that has Coons up by 19 points. There was a partisan poll that had him up by 18. Fox News polled there, they have him up by 16. So--

Clearly Keeter was describing two different polls: a partisan poll, and then a Fox poll. But the dopey interviewer talked over Keeter and said: so Fox News polls are considered partisan? Which of course is not what Keeter said at all. And he made that clear:

KEETER: Most of my fellow polling professionals feel that their samples are not tilted in a Republican direction...They’ve been within the range of other polling, and that has historically been the case. If my memory serves me, they actually may have been one of the only polls in 2004 that showed Kerry with a slight advantage of George W Bush in the final analysis. So I don’t think it’s the case that their samples are tilted. Reasonable people can disagree about whether their questions are straightforward or not, but that’s not my place to say.

So did Pew call Fox News polls ‘partisan’? No. There’s a technical term for that sort of headline. It’s a lie.

A few months ago, someone in Greta van Susteren’s control room put up a wrong piece of video: Shirley Sherrod when it was supposed to be Maxine Waters. Scandal! The blogosphere erupted with hundreds of posts, including:

• Huffington Post
• News One
• Politifi
• Media Matters
• Talking Points Memo

Fast forward to October 20. John King of CNN mistakenly aired video of Corrine Brown when it should have been Kendrick Meek. And the blogosphere erupted with...silence?

• Huffington Post: nothing
• News One: nothing
• Politifi: nothing
• Media Matters: nothing
• Talking Points Memo: nothing

If it weren’t for double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.

A 21st Century High-Tech Lynching

Juan Williams appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, and his remarks were seized upon by Think Progress, a blue blog with a questionable reputation. In their time-honored tradition, TP snipped out 45 seconds (featuring the now-famous ‘Muslim garb’ statement) and trumpeted that on their Soros-funded website. They were free to claim that Williams was ‘defending’ O’Reilly’s ‘Muslims killed us on 9/11’ comment, because they only used 45 seconds and said nothing about the rest.

Media Matters (also Soros-funded) chimed in, and in a generous move they allowed their clip to go on for a whole 85 seconds. But not to give any more time to Wiliams. Indeed, their clip cut off at precisely the point when Williams was about to make further comments. So it really gave no more context than TP’s 45 seconds did. Plus, MM helpfully pointed out that O’Reilly had mentioned NPR in the conversation.

Enter CAIR, one of the few Muslim rights organizations that is also an unindicted co-conspirator. CAIR issued a press release claiming that Juan Williams ‘backed’ O’Reilly’s statement, and referred readers to a video. What video did CAIR select? The 45-second TP video, of course! Just hours later, NPR fired Juan Williams and CAIR rejoiced, calling it ‘good news’.

The press release made a dubious charge:

NPR should address the fact that one of its news analysts seems to believe that all airline passengers who are perceived to be Muslim can legitimately be viewed as security threats.

CAIR doubled down, suggesting in interviews like this one that Juan Williams supported ‘racial and religious profiling’! We just don’t have the space to document how many people have recycled these smears, but they thrived due to the heavy editing of the clip that CAIR chose to make its case. In fact, Williams never said it’s legitimate to view Muslims as ‘security threats’, and certainly didn’t endorse profiling of any kind. The claim is preposterous, since Juan Williams has been arguing against profiling Muslims for years.

In case you still don’t get why TP and Media Matters, and CAIR, removed all the rest of the segment, perhaps this is a clue:

In a debate with Bill O’Reilly I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith.

From the transcript:

WILLIAMS: Wait a second though, wait, hold on, because if you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don't say first and foremost, we got a problem with Christians. That's crazy.
O'REILLY: But it's not at that level. It doesn't rise near to that level.
WILLIAMS: Correct. That's -- and when you said in the talking points memo a moment ago that there are good Muslims, I think that's a point, you know?
O'REILLY: But everybody knows that, Juan. I mean, what are, in 3rd grade here or what?
WILLIAMS: No, you don't -- but you got to be -- this is what Barbara Walters was saying --
O'REILLY: I got to be careful, you just said it. I got to be careful. I have got to qualify everything 50 times. You know what, Juan? I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not doing that anymore.
WILLIAMS: OK. So, be yourself. Take responsibility.

There’s more:

WILLIAMS: But, Bill, here's a caution point. The other day in New York, some guy cuts a Muslim cabby's neck and says he's attacking him or you think about the protest at the mosque near Ground Zero --...
O'REILLY: Look, Americans are smart enough to know, Juan.
HAM: But I don't think -- the point is the rhetoric was not pushing him to do that.
WILLIAMS: I don't know what is in that guy's head. But I'm saying, we don't want in America, people to have their rights violated to be attacked on the street because they heard a rhetoric from Bill O'Reilly and they act crazy.

So CAIR repeats the TP claim that Wiliams was ‘defending’ O’Reilly, but cites a video that omits all of the above, just like their press release. There are two possible explanations. Either CAIR didn’t want any of this context known and deliberately excluded it, or they based everything on a 45-second clip and had no idea that any of this was said. Neither explanation passes muster.

This jumping to conclusions based on a heavily-edited video...it has a familiar ring to it. Where have we seen this happen before? William Saletan at Slate:

You have to explain to others why they, too, should transcend their anxieties or resentments and treat people as individuals. That's what Shirley Sherrod did in her speech to the NAACP. It's what Juan Williams did in his interview on Fox News. It was wrong of conservatives to take Sherrod's remarks out of context. It's just as wrong of liberals to do the same to Williams.

Washington Post Editorial:

Mr. Williams was attempting to do exactly what a responsible commentator should do: speak honestly without being inflammatory. His reward was to lose his job, just as Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod lost hers over purportedly racist remarks that turned out to be anything but. NPR management appears to have learned nothing from that rush to judgment.

Indeed.

Lie Like a Dog

What FHWiR would be complete without a visit to the dog pound, home of the newshounds? ‘Alex’, one of that sites most fluent liars, trumpeted a spectacular rally called the ‘March Against Hate!’ It was to take place on Saturday, October 23, at the Fox News HQ. ‘Alex’ giggled some helpful suggestions:

Don’t forget to bring signs!... How about a devil or other creepy mask?

It was good of ‘Alex’ to hype this seminal event, despite the background of Elaine Brower, who’s promoting it. Brower is a supporter of Lynn Samuels, convicted felon (fraud, conspiracy, aiding terrorism). Brower is on the National Steering Committee of a group spun off from the Revolutionary Communist Party. Oh, and she participated at an event with Korey Rowe (producer of Loose Change); her service to the cause was noted by--you guessed it--911truth.org! (This exposition of past associations is sponsored by newshound Priscilla, who uses the technique repeatedly.)

Thanks to ‘Alex’, the March Against Hate was a smashing success. Just look at all the Google News articles about it. ‘Alex’ also weighed in on the Juan Williams flap, in a way that is soooo very newshounds (h/t Chris Golas). She presented several quotes from Wililams, including this one:

...The war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts.

Juan said that? Um, not exactly. You see, ‘Alex’ made a teeny, tiny little edit. Compare her doctored version with what Juan actually said:

Mr. Williams also made reference to the Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty this month to trying to plant a car bomb in Times Square. “He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts,” Mr. Williams said.

Juan Williams quotes a convicted terrorist, and ‘Alex’ removes ‘he said’ and passes it off as Juan Williams’s own words! Pretty despicable, even for ‘Alex’.

UPDATE: After we published the above, the biased bassets printed a correction and apology for Alex’s doctored quote. Just kidding! They took the coward’s way out: they deleted the entire piece...silently, in stealth mode, without acknowledging their lie. But it’s not that easy to wipe something off the interwebs. The newsmutts are nothing if not predictable. We knew they would try to hide their embarrassment and bury it forever. That’s why we saved this. --J$

But that’s not the only quote-doctoring at the pound. Here’s Priscilla, making up stuff about Laura Ingraham:

She gave “three cheers” to Karl Rove for his comment about a “national momentum to shut down NPR.”

The credulous kennel-dwellers lapped it up as if Priscilla didn’t have a history of fabrications:

• So Laura Ingraham is concerned about the left's tactics of shutting down speech and debate but gives three cheers to Karl Rove for his comment about a “national momentum to shut down NPR.” What a hypocrite . And a boring hypocrite at that --bunnygit

All you have to do is watch the interview for yourself to know that Prissy isn’t telling the truth:

INGRAHAM: Three cheers for what Karl Rove said. I think we have a national momentum to defund NPR.

Another lie from Priscilla? Not exactly a Fox News Alert, is it?

Finally, if it’s the newspoodles and if it’s Juan Williams, then somebody has to make a demeaning racial slur. Of course the mutt mods are happy to let that sort of stuff through, so as we publish, this is still proudly displayed there:

Spot something you’d like to see in the next Fox Haters Week in Review? Send us an email!

Tags: huffpo, mediamatters, thinkprogress, newshounds