Murdoch and Morris: total incongruity

BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Jeffrey Joseph

Rupert Murdoch tends to avoid putting himself in the spotlight, generally preferring to allow his media conglomerate do the talking for him. His recent appearance on The Kalb Report yielded some explanation for keeping away from direct questioning -- Murdoch's statements about ethics in journalism and the actions of FOX appear totally incongruous. Though Murdoch complained other networks's contributors "tend to be Democrats" and that people at FOX "are not Republicans," he need look no further than to Dick Morris's many appearances on the network to find otherwise.

Morris has no qualms about pushing his Republican agenda throughout FOX's programming. Appearing on a show with Sean Hannity, who faces his own set of ethical quandaries, Morris introduced his "adopt-a-Democrat" campaign. Morris intended to create a program so that people could target specific Democrats they despised and fund their Republican opponents, candidates Morris would redirect them toward. As Morris put it, with "every penny you give, we'll go right on the air attacking the Democrat who you adopt." He also leaves no ambiguity to his target audience. Hardly a champion of the middle class, Morris hoped to "get wealthy people" across the nation to fund his Republican attack ads regardless of whether the people live within the district of the Democrat Morris seeks to depose.

In fact, Morris's turn to the right has gotten so hateful toward the Democrats that even fellow FOX personalities have felt compelled to temper his rhetoric. Peter Johnson, Jr., asked Morris on Fox & Friends if Democrats would regret voting for healthcare reform. Morris suggested that Democrats would more than regret it, but also that healthcare would "be a tombstone; the only question is how many Democrats are in the grave.

In light of all the particularly incendiary comments and actions in the current political climate, much of which FOX carries substantial blame for instigating, one would hope that FOX could exercise a little better judgment. Johnson had the wherewithal to correct Morris, in a way, by interjecting, "A political tombstone, Dick." Not long after Laura Ingraham derided MSNBC host Ed Schultz for saying that Dick Cheney's heart was a political football, Morris implying the death of Democrats because of healthcare reform appears in particularly bad taste. Since adding "political" before a sentiment proved inadequate for Johnson's colleague Ingraham, Johnson's qualification of Morris's statement fails FOX's own standard for rhetoric. Thus, Morris is left with a potentially violent and saliently Republican sentiment that he had the opportunity to push on several FOX shows. No wonder that Murdoch failed to name a single Democrat on his network.

Murdoch had a valid point in suggesting a serious news organization would have scores of ethical issues once it began promoting a specific political party. His criticism of the other networks for supporting Democrats, as he alleges, might have had more weight if not for his own network airing Dick Morris on so many shows overtly doing the work of the GOP. In attempting to claim the moral high ground, Murdoch hypocritically accused his competitors of political leaning while keeping unabashed political proponents on his own programming. Either Murdoch has no grasp of what goes on at his network or he simply does not care and the appeal to journalistic ethics serves mostly as window dressing. Whatever the case, viewers should demand Morris receive admonition for his potentially violent and obviously Republican rhetoric -- and in the meantime, choose to Turn Off FOX.

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Originally posted at Turn Off FOX.
BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Let The Sun Shine In......

Stewert Rips Faux Noise A New One

 But never fear, all will be forgotten in the next 5 minutes because they all apologized and everything will get back to normal, forthwith. We all know what "normal" means at Fox.

As much as we all might value BuzzFlash, a picture, or in this case a videotape, is worth a thousand words.

BuzzFlash has launched "a get America to Turn Off FOX" campaign -- and other online sites have gathered tens of thousands of names opposed to FOX. And several sites, including Media Matters, have regularly documented FOX's deceitful and dishonest coverage.

But, as we all know,  it takes Jon Stewart, with his visual images proving his case, to really erode FOX's credibility and undercut the influence of the FOX brand, which we all know is unfair and unbalanced but for some reason the corporate mainstream media defends.  In fact, the MSM scurried to FOX's defense when the White House correctly noted that the very same corporate "journalists" in D.C. and NY often take their cues from phony FOX coverage.

So, it was with hearfelt thanks that we saw Stewart bring FOX to their knees, actually forcing them to admit that they had used footage from a spring Teabagger rally to make Michele Bachmann's latest freak show gathering in D.C. appear much, much larger than it was.

What allows Stewart to be so devastating to FOX is that he assembles clips that would be damning in court, as they are in the court of public opinion. And these are reports aired on FOX, so how can they accuse their own reporting of being manipulative, incendiary and false?

So it was that after Stewart aired the kind of old Soviet Union style FOX propaganda "news" clip to pump up Bachmann and the Teabaggers, Hannity was forced into the rarest of FOX admissions: Stewart was right -- he had caught them in the act that they so often commit and rolled the tape to prove it.

According to a late November 11th New York Times Internet story, Hannity confessed on Wednesday night to “an inadvertent mistake":

On his show on the Fox News Channel Wednesday night, Sean Hannity admitted to using scenes from a different rally to illustrate a report on a health care protest last week....

Wednesday night Mr. Hannity admitted that “we screwed up” in using the “incorrect video.” He called it “an inadvertent mistake.”

Mr. Hannity did not address specifically how the mistake came to be made but he said somewhat ruefully: “It pains me to say: Jon Stewart was right.”

The cumulative, well-documented charges of FOX's manipulation and creation of partisan stories -- even promoting, sponsoring, and covering Teabagger events as if FOX were one and the same with the barbarians at the gates -- has started to take a toll on the FOX brand.

I've never seen them this defensive before. Even right wing media baron Rupert Murdoch found himself condoning Glenn Beck calling President Obama a racist, while denying that anyone on FOX News compared Obama to Stalin, which they are documented as doing. That ended up with a Murdoch spokesperson forced to "clarify" that Murdoch really didn't say what he said. Got it?

American corporations depend on what is called "brand identity." FOX has -- by being ubiquitous, using flashy television techology and graphics, and reinforcing a warped world view to a small segment of the American population -- has managed to get the mainstream media to regard it as a legitimate news channel.

Time will tell, but it appears the cumulative exposures of the fraud that is FOX News are starting to impact the "brand identity" of "fair and balanced." And if it loses its luster of credibility among corporate news networks, its influence will be considerably diminished.

And while others have laid the groundwork (don't forget to join the BuzzFlash "Get America to Turn Off FOX Brigade") Jon Stewart has the most impact because he airs the video proof, and some 70% of Americans get their news from television.

Jon Stewart, as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News notes, is doing the investigating and exposing that the corporate media should be doing. And you have to add that Stewart has growing stature as a debunker of media charlatans -- and the mainstream media watches him.

FOX will no doubt be hiring Lou Dobbs, now departing CNN for a more compatible venue.

If that's the case, Dobbs may be the right wing nut job tonnage that tips FOX "News" irreversibly into a tarnished "brand name," with its credibility sinking ever lower.

Whatever happens with Dobbs, the growing defensiveness and tarnishing of FOX will be in no small part due to the visual -- and witty -- evidence aired by Jon Stewart -- backed by an army of Internet researchers and campaigns.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Good Odds that Rupert Murdoch Will be Responsible for the Next Timothy McVeigh or Assassination Attempt

The Constitution guarantees free speech. It does not guarantee huge megaphones to people who incite hatred and/violence against elected officials, judges or ordinary citizens.

If terrorist events or assassinations occur as a result of their blabbering on our airwaves, these people should be held responsible and, trust me, they will be.

by Mark Karlin (Buzzflash)

Yes, with the civil war talk on the program of the recently acquired FOX News demagogue, Glenn Beck, inflammatory talk by Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh's nativist rants that equate Obama to something akin to an amalgamation of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, the right-wing media is stirring up the dangerous angry white male resentment to a dangerous frenzied pitch.

And we all know where that ended up with Timothy McVeigh and the militia movement of the '90s, which was enabled by the right-wing media barons -- such as Rupert Murdoch -- to create a literal armed militia movement against the government of the United States.

Call it treasonous, call it demagoguery, call it treachery: it is what comes down the pike when the wealthy Democratic elites are more content to fund organizations that criticize the apocalyptic, brown-shirted Murdoch media barons rather than buying up media and delivering an alternative message that emphasizes loyalty to the truth, Constitution and democracy.

Sure, we love Media Matters, but they are just a fly on a donkey's butt as far as Rupert Murdoch and the gang are concerned. Media Matters will get an occasional correction of factual errors -- if they pull out all their guns for one, but it's too little a compensation for the energy put into the effort. And the people who take in the corporate media remember the misleading assertion, not the rare convoluted retraction.

The reality is that the only thing that matters in media is owning it. Murdoch knows that and couldn't give a horse's fart for what Media Matters has to say, nor does CBS which just hired a Democratic-hating Republican stalwart as their senior communications executive.

Nor do any of the mainstream corporate media: including radio, television and print. They will just keep on doing what they are doing because they own it and they know what they want: an oligarchy.

The troops for this formidable army of images, mistruths, and emotional manipulation are the angry white males, the guys who have felt displaced by minorities and women and immigrants ever since the Civil Rights and Feminist upheaval began in the '60s.

And these displaced white guys are armed to the teeth, courtesy of the NRA and the senators and representatives who lie down like doormats for the gun lobby in Congress.

And bristling with guns -- including the .50 caliber sniper rifle that is legal in all but California -- they feel enabled and patriotic in rising up against the legitimate Constitutional government of the United States.

As rabid as Hannity and Beck and Limbaugh may seem, their ratings have actually gone up since Obama's election. The white male who has been shafted by the wealthy elite, pick-pocketed and left in humiliation, falls prey yet again to the siren song of the Murdoch/Ailes stable of Goebbels disciples and their cohorts such as Limbaugh and Savage.

This is no exaggeration. Glenn Greenwald discusses it as do the superlative FOX trackers at FOX Newshounds.

And its impact is seen drilling down to discussions on Sean Hannity's website of armed rebellion, military coup, and secession.

Those Obama supporters who think I am being hyperbolic have a short sense of history. This is what we saw in the Clinton administration that led to the domestic terrorist Oklahoma bombing and trumped up impeachment.

And before the right-wing media was as consolidated as it is today, we saw our liberal leaders gunned down one by one in the '60s, resutling in the election of Richard Nixon -- and the beginning of the well-funded corporate mainstream media consolidation owned by people beholden only to the oligarchy, not the American public.

Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few in number, far too few.

And Murdoch may do his own non-apology about his New York Post's thinly veiled racist incitement cartoon of two white police officers shooting a chimp representing -- in full bigoted Murdoch fashion -- Obama.

But when the armed angry white males decide to act because of the Murdoch/Limbaugh et al. incitement to rise up ringing in their ears, the blood will be on the hands of Rupert and his fellow right-wing corporate media barons -- and he won't be sorry for it.

He'll only feel one thing: Mission accomplished.

Let The Sun Shine In......