Fox On the Run

A couple of weeks ago Rupert Murdoch made his long-expected - and in some cases, eagerly awaited - retirement announcement, with plans to hand over control of his media empire to his son Lachlan.  As far as I'm concerned, good riddance to bad Rupert. 

By hiring the late Roger Ailes to start the Fox News Channel, Murdoch probably did more than any other individual in America to corrupt broadcast journalism with lies, smears, racism, and reactionary politics.  His anchors and commentators did a great deal of damage to the body politic by promoting all sorts of conspiracy theories and corporate-friendly analyses of serious issues such as taxes and the environment.  And the channel's bashing of liberals and Democratic politicians for the sake of character assassination for fun and profit only widened the divide between the two major parties in Washington.  Also, I need to point to Murdoch-owned papers like the New York Post, which only amplified Murdoch's right-wing polemics in print.

It wasn't just Fox News, of course.  Murdoch dumbed down popular culture with its sister broadcast network, which, despite airing a couple of watchable sitcoms and dramas, mostly aired shows lacking in taste and dignity.  It's as if the Fox network, which went on the air in prime time in 1987, aimed to attract the same undereducated, low-information proles to watch lowbrow entertainment to prime them for the ethically challenged "news" channel that came later.

It should be noted that Murdoch broadcast shows to appeal to lucrative audiences that would enable him to obtain the capital necessary to launch the Fox News Channel in 1996.  Even as he was appalling folks with "Married . . . With Children," Murdoch aired respectable black sitcoms like "Roc" and "Martin," which inevitably drew black audiences to Fox and helped his bottom line.  None of that had anything to do with a desire to help black actors break through to wider audiences. He pretty much much made the money he needed to start a cable news channel off the eyeballs of black audiences and the popularity of black celebrities.  And when the Fox News Channel debuted in 1996, it began running racist stories about how food stamps were used the most in poor "urban" (read black) neighborhoods with liquor stores.  This was some time after Murdoch had black-oriented public affairs shows on local stations he'd purchased, like WNYW-TV in New York (which he'd bought from MetroMedia) canceled entirely.

No wonder Martin Lawrence - a comedic genius with the same level of intensity and madness as the late Robin Williams - went crazy.

I can also assure you, dear readers, the Fox's acquisition to broadcast rights to National Football League, whose games it began airing in 1994, had nothing to do with the Australian-born Murdoch having a personal interest in American football.  It didn't even have anything to do with expanding the broadcast schedule of the Fox network (which still ends prime-time programming an hour earlier than the Big Three networks).  It was all in the interest of funding the Fox News Channel.  And the purpose of the Fox News Channel was to keep the Republican Party dominant in American politics.

While I'm happy to see Rupert go, lets not kid ourselves.  Lachlan Murdoch is every bit as conservative and ruthless as his father, and he will most likely keep Fox News' standard for journalistic malfeasance going strong.  Besides, after 27 years ofthe Fox News Channel on the air and 37 years of its sister broadcast network on the air, Murdoch has already done so much harm to American culture that it will likely never recover from it.

After all, despite his own better judgement, Rupert Murdoch promoted Donald Trump.

Tucker Carlson's Superiority Complex

Once upon a time, Tucker Carlson was looked upon as a dweebish, if somewhat abhorrent, nerdy conservative type who resembled William F. Buckley, Jr. and wanted to follow in Buckley's footsteps.  He came across as a fool.  He came across as a spoiled rich kid.  He came across as the sort of fellow who would have his butt kicked if he ever took a walk in New York's East Village.  He did not come across as a white supremacist.

But once he failed to be the "conservative conscience" at CNN or MSNBC, he found himself at Fox News.  And even though he could have played the role of Buckley wannabe with aplomb there and let Sean Hannity play the role of arrogant snot-nose (while Laura Ingraham played the role of the upper-middle-class neighborhood bitch who complains about the kids playing street hockey in front of her house),  Carlson saw an opportunity for TV stardom by engaging in conspiracy theories, such as the idea that immigrants are coming to replace white people, or that wokeism is a form of mind control, or that January 6 was not an insurrection.

It turns out that a text he sent to someone at Fox on January 7, 2021 is the reason Fox fired him.  Carlson texted that he was watching a bunch of insurrectionists ganging up on and jumping an Antifa protester and found himself loving it.

"Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable, obviously," he wrote. "It's not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it.  Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn't good for me. I'm becoming something I don't want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed.  If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?"

At first glance, Carlson sounds genuinely remorseful, and he probably was. But there are three obvious and obviously huge problems that make his remorse insincere at best, heinous at worst.  First, he implied that a gang of toughs jumping a guy is not how white men fight but how men of color fight, and he believes white men are supposed to be superior to non-white men.  Carlson obviously never walked along an active waterfront at night populated by drunken sailors.  Second, Carlson admits he would still hate the Antifa protester personally if he knew him, but in fact, he doesn't know anything about him; this protester is just an anonymous person to him.  Third, Carlson assumes that leftists - and, most likely, leftists of color in particular - are inferior to him because he believes all left-leaning people reduce their opponents to politics.  It's as if he thinks his privileged upbringing makes him morally superior to this Antifa protester, yet Carlson is so elitist, he doesn't see how expecting black or brown men to fight like animals without rules makes him inferior to . . . well, anyone with a brain.  Or a heart.  Or courage.  Carlson sounds like someone who needs to see the Wizard of Oz for all three of those things.

Carlson allowed himself to become a white supremacist as well as an arrogant elitist who believes his upbringing and his conservatism make himself morally superior to anyone else.  His remorse didn't come from any sense of humanity.  It came from his view of himself as an intellectually and morally superior person - with his intellect and his superiority he believed to be birthrights of his whiteness and maleness.

Although Carlson was eleven years old when the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back premiered, I doubt he saw it, as he obviously never learned the moral of that movie when he started out to pursue fame and fortune by indulging in his worst prejudices.  And so, once he started down that dark path, forever did it dominate his destiny.    

Tuckered Out

Tucker Carlson, a stepson of the heir to the Swanson TV dinner fortune who appeals to the common man (common woman? highly implausible), will now get to live like the common man.  He just got fired from Fox News with no foreseeable job prospects in the future.  Which means he'll be filing for unemployment and  sustaining himself on TV dinners,  realizing how you can be fired without warning, just like many of his viewers who on a Friday worked at the steel mill or auto factory and was out of work by Monday. 

As Carlson has promoted the replacement theory of whites being replaced by people of color, it appears that this theory has come true in a way for himself.  Now he's the one due to be replaced in his time slot! 

Carlson, 53, was a key figure in spreading conspiracy theories that tarnished Fox News' already blemished reputation, and he's being forced out in the wake of the Dominion voting-machine suit.  In the investigation for the suit, Carlson was revealed to have said that what he said about the election being stolen was jive and professed to "hate" Donald Trump, which probably didn't sit well with Fox News viewers.  But his harassment of women on the set of his program - which has brought about a lawsuit from a former Fox News producer - and his attempts to have reporters fired for telling the truth about the big election lie likely didn't sit well with Rupert Murdoch, whose daughter Elisabeth likely has more smarts than her brother Lachlan and James put together.

Having already been on CNN and MSNBC, Carlson has no place to go except possibly for Newsmax (and maybe not even there, given the revelation of what he really thought ot Trump).  If he does move to a smaller right-wing channel, he'll have to take a big pay cut.  Or, he'll  disappear and be forgotten by historians of American media, just as Father Charles Coughlin and Walter Winchell were similarly forgotten.

Either way, Carlson's going to have to eat a lot of them TV dinners. 

Settle For This

Everyone was looking forward to the civil trial brought about by the lawsuit of Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for lying about the ballot services firm and especially looking forward to seeing not just Rupert Murdoch by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham having to take the witness stand.  Instead, he settled out of court and the trial of this still-young century never happened.

Fox News' critics say that Rupert Murdoch was the big loser because Dominion was able to prove before the trial that he knew that everything said about the 2020 presidential election on Fox was a lie, and that everyone from Murdoch on down - even Tucker Carlson - was eager to get Donald Trump behind them, and Murdoch was forced to pay Dominion $787.5 million in damages.  But the truth of the matter is that Murdoch bought himself a settlement that, had the suit gone forward and been ruled in Dominion's favor, would have been twice as expensive, as Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion.  Such a payout might have devastated the company and destroyed the already tattered reputations of their on-air pseudo-personalities, who know don't have to take the witness stand and admit having lied to their viewers under cross-examination.   

And on top of it all, Fox News never has to admit on the air to its own viewers that the network lied abut the 2020 presidential election being stolen. 

Murdoch gets to put the matter behind him at a discount and continue to run Fox News as he always has.  Fox News isn't going to reform itself and concentrate more on the truth going forward.  The network is still going to slant and bend the truth - and sometimes disregard it - in its never-ending quest for ratings.   

And we can expect more lies from Tucker Carlson that threaten to destroy the country.

Tucker and Suckers

Bowing to pressure from his far-right flank, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy turned over forty thousand hours of January 6 security tapes to Fox's Tucker Carlson, one of the very few media personalities to have been an employee at all three cable news channels.  Carlson wanted to prove that January 6 was a peaceful demonstration with a few bad apples that got all of the attention from the media, who in turn blew the January 6 riot out of proportion and claimed it was an "insurrection" rather than the peaceful protest that Carlson says it was.  

The footage showed that indeed, there were peaceful moments during the break-in of the protestors who tried to stop the certification of Joe Biden's win of the 2020 presidential election - demonstrators quietly milling about, police officers showing deference to the QAnon shaman character, and the like.  But, just as Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Peter Jackson proved with the film footage of the Beatles' Get Back sessions, you can construct two entirely different narratives from the same reality.  And the January 6 narrative Carlson presented was so obviously flawed, marshaling evidence selectively and out of context while glossing over the more unpleasant parts.  One clip apparently showed the late Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick walking through the Capitol Rotunda and apparently looking "healthy and vigorous" after having been attacked, which would suggested, as Carlson claimed, that Sicknick's death "was not the result of violence he suffered" at the Capitol. In fact, no one can tell if it the police officer in the video is Sicknick or not, and even if it is Sicknick after he's just been attacked, the effects of the attack may not have been immediate. Even victims of serious head injuries have a "lucid interval" before the effects of the injury manifest themselves. 

Needless to say, numerous members of Congress are furious at Carlson's claims that January 6 was no big deal, and many of them are Republicans.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said that Carlson depicted the riot "in a way completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol" described, referring to Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, while North Carolina Republican senator Thom Tillis called the Fox preseation BS.  Tillis was especially emphatic on Carlson's mischaracterization of the riot as a tourist outing.

What's more, in addition to the fact that Rupert Murdoch more or less agrees with folks like McConnell and Tillis, we now know, thanks to the ongoing court case from Dominion Voting Systems against Fox for defamation, that Carlson himself was sick and tired of having to lie for Donald Trump, adding that he hated him with a passion.

Don't expect any mea culpas from Fox "News," as most of their viewers wouldn't believe it anyway.  The truth is, Carlson will continue to keep lying to help Fox "News" remain America's most-watched news channel!

No evidence showing that January 6 was indeed an insurrection is going to sway Fox "News" viewers, just as no lack of evidence of an ancient Nephite civilization in the Americas can sway Mormons that their sacred book is a true historical record.  The Mormons are entitled to their religious beliefs, though, because unlike empirically verified events, religious beliefs rely on faith alone.      

Faux News

I suppose it makes sense that in a county where rap is accepted as music and in which comic-book movies are accepted as cinematic masterpieces,  the Fox News Channel would be accepted as a news channel.  In fact, the Republican-propaganda channel, despite having some excellent reporters like Jacqui Heinrich (more about whom soon), has so stained the word "news" that it's no wonder that MSNBC goes by now-meaningless initials and CNN, which used to stand for Cable News Network, doesn't stand for anything anymore.   

The extent to which Fox News is a propaganda machine centered on profit came to the fore in recent days when text messages between Fox executives and on-air hosts revealed that, despite telling viewers that the 2020 election was in fact stolen from Donald Trump and that Joe Biden's election to the Presidency was illegitimate, they never believed a word of it.  This revelations were made thanks to court filings from Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox News for defamation of the voting-machine company's reputation for falsely implicating that it allowed the software in its voting machines to flip pro-Trump votes to Biden.  Text messages between Fox News bigwigs revealed that they thought that Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, Trump's two top point people on the election fraud charges, were blooming idiots and incredibly insane.

Rupert Murdoch and the unholy trinity of Fox News's prime-time op-ed lineup - Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson - at first resisted the urge to go along with Trump, but when it became apparent that Trump was encouraging his supporters to change the channel to Newsmax, which is more conservative than Fox in the same matter that the Omicron COVID strain is more dangerous than the original Wuhan strain, Murdoch & Co. went along with the lies in public.

Except for Fox News' actual reporters, who subscribed to the idea that, in journalism, facts matter.  Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich (below) fact-checked a Trump tweet asserting electoral fraud and tweeted herself that the Trump tweet itself was a fraud.  According to the briefs filed in the Dominion lawsuit, Tucker Carlson, already committed to the scam, blew a gasket.    

"Please get her fired. Seriously . . ..  What the fuck?" Carlson wrote in a text to Hannity and others, according to the filing. "I'm actually shocked. . ..  It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke."

The fact that Carlson - at Fox News only because he'd already bombed out at CNN and MSNBC - was concerned about the company's stock price makes it clear once and for all that the channel is more interested in making money than in practicing honorable journalism.  Texts released due to the lawsuit show Fox News employees referring to their viewers as "good people," but they went ahead and spread the lies about the 2020 election to draw more eyeballs and, thus, more advertisers.And more money.   And the good people who trusted Fox News to tell them the truth believed the lies so much it led to an insurrection.  (For the record, Heinrich deleted her tweet before security could show her the door.)

The story of Fox News knowing that Trump's election-fraud claims were lies is getting reported throughout the media.  But one news outlet isn't reporting anything about it - no prizes for guessing which one.

Of course, even if Fox News viewers did learn about how much their favorite and most trusted news personalities lied to them, they would insist that the texts were taken out of context (meaning that viewers would have a pretext) and say that the private comments of Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson were exaggerated and slanted in a way to make them look bad.  I don't see how you could take such evidence of journalistic malfeasance and not make Fox News commentators look bad, but that's just the point.  Fox News viewers are so sure that their version of events is the truth that no amount of evidence to the contrary can persuade them otherwise.

Thus, while it may be so that Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch are the emperors who have no clothes, nudity has become quite acceptable among a large number of Americans.      

Crazy Like a Fox

The revelatory news about material then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, now being held by the House of Representatives in contempt, gave to the House select committee investigating the pro-Trump Capitol insurrection, which showed that Meadows most certainly did help Donald Trump trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election long before January 6, almost (almost) got overshadowed by what the clown car full of primetime hosts over at the Fox News Channel said in texts to Meadows about Trump needing to do something about the insurrection as it was taking place.

(Fox News primetime commentators carpooling on their way to work.)

Like this text from Laura Ingraham: "Mark, the President needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home.  This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy."

(Noted bottle-blonde Laura Ingraham putting on her makeup before going on the air.)

Or how about this text from Sean Hannity?

"Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?"

(A headshot of Sean Hannity.)

And then there's text from Brian Kilmeade! 

"Please, get him [Trump] on TV,” he texted. “He's [d]estroying everything you have accomplished."

All of that is in great contradiction to what these hosts were saying about the insurrection after the fact, talking about how it was "not that bad" and that it was a mostly "peaceful" demonstration, and how the violence might have been a left-wing plot instigated by Antifa at the demonstration to make Trump supporters look bad.   These Fox News commentators only make themselves look worse with these texts than any left-wing group seeking to sabotage a peaceful conservative demonstration (which could never happen because conservative demonstrators aren't peaceful - remember the may 1970 Hard Hat Riot in Manhattan?) could ever do.

Oh yeah, Fox News commentators started defending the January 6 insurrectionists on . . . the night of January 6.

The fact that these texts have revealed Hannity, Kilmeade and their evil den mother Ingraham as complete hypocrites and liars are, alas, likely n t have a detrimental effect on their of Fox News' popularity.  The Big Lie about the 2020 election - that the Democrats stole it - is only going to grow until something even worse happens. 

Factored Out

We have O'Reilly on our radar.

Bill O'Reilly, the abrasive and rather nasty Fox News commentator, was forced off the conservative news channel when it turned out he had been accused of sexual harassment by seven women and that he and Fox had paid out more than $13 million to settle lawsuits from five of them. 

Among the more nauseating details of his harassment history . . . he called a black female intern "Hot Chocolate."

And of course, these allegations must be true, because why would Fox pay so much money to keep things nice and quiet?  

Liberals are applauding this move, as they should, and some of them think this marks the end of the dominance of right-wing news commentary, as O'Reilly's show "The O'Reilly Factor" was the highest-rated show on the highly-rated Fox News Channel.  Indeed, it's being called a turning point in how harassment is being dealt with.  Well, let me dispel all that by pointing out a couple of things . . .

Tucker Carlson replaced Bill O'Reilly is his old time slot and delivered ratings numbers just as high as Bill's.

O'Reilly is getting a golden parachute of $25 million - a payout almost twice that of the sum paid out to those previously mentioned five women.  When a black man like Bill Cosby sexually harasses - nay, rapes - women, he is deservedly made to pay for it.  O'Reilly should also be made to suffer, so why is getting twenty-five million bucks for bad behavior?

And if the popularity of right-wing commentary is fading, why is Sean Hannity - who makes O'Reilly look like Eric Sevareid  by comparison - still on the air?

O'Reilly's departure from the TV airwaves treated a symptom of the disease plaguing American civilization.  The disease itself goes merrily on.    

The Kelly Files

When I make a mistake, it's a beaut.  And here's the beaut.  Not a beauty, but a beaut.

It was announced this past week that Megyn Kelly, the Fox News Channel's biggest star, was leaving that right-wing network for NBC News, for which she will likely be doing coverage of political stories, hosting a Sunday night news program (opposite "60 Minutes?"), and hosting a new daytime program to replace the third hour of the "Today" show.  (Because of contractual issues with Fox News, she may have to wait awhile before she gets on NBC's airwaves; her last appearance on Fox was on January 6.)

Megyn Kelly on NBC News . . . sounds pretty good right?  Now Kelly can get on a real network news team that deals in facts and show what an accomplished newswoman she really is.

Not so fast.  A week and change ago,  I wrote that Kelly "has proven to be formidable newswoman, the one good thing to come out of [the Roger Ailes sex] scandal."  I based this on the fact that Kelly has grilled some Republican politicians about their positions and put them to shame by trying to get the truth of the matter.  But the truth of the matter is that, despite all that, Kelly is one of those straight white people whose takes on the issues are so reactionary and lunkheaded that she makes straight white people look even dumber.  It's not just her onetime insistence that Santa Claus, a fictional character, is white, which she made in response to the equally stupid suggestion from a black female journalist that Santa Claus be replaced with a race-neutral Christmas penguin.  It's little tidbits that Matthew Ingram of Fortune magazine recently cited, such as her fear-mongering accusation that the Obama administration was forcing racial diversity on white neighborhoods (it wasn't) and her dismissal of the Black Lives Matter movement by doubting that the recent rash of police shootings had anything to do with race.

And then there's this bombshell about the bombshell that Ingram pointed out: "Kelly has also made critical comments about gay and transgender issues on a number of occasions, according to the left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters, and has repeatedly hosted anti-gay groups such as the Family Research Council, which believes that homosexuality is a sin and that gay men routinely recruit children to be homosexual."

Dear Matthew Ingram:  Thanks for setting me straight (no pun intended) about Megyn Kelly.  I appreciate it.

It's not that Megyn Kelly is changing or moderating her views.  It's that NBC News - which runs MSNBC also - is looking for a more conservative bent.  Because that's where the money is, and also because the Fairness Doctrine that guarantees diversity of thought in news reporting was done away with years ago. 

By the way, Kelly may even replace the likable Savannah Guthrie on "Today."

Bastards!    

And oh yes, I retract my earlier statement about Kelly's "formidable" journalistic chops.

Is she the only odious ex-Fox News personality to join the NBC family?  No - Greta Van Sustren is joining MSNBC.

Bearing all this in mind, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Joy Reid should be getting pinks slips with their pay checks very soon.  Personal note to Rachel, Chris and Joy:  You're f--ked. 

Although I suspect that Joy Reid may resign from MSNBC in protest of these two NBC News hires before MSNBC boss Phil Griffin even gets the chance to sack her . . . 

Fox On the Run

Now we're getting somewhere. The news media have ratcheted up their coverage of Rupert Murdoch and the ongoing scandal in the United Kingdom that has reverberated throughout the landscape in the mother country. The withdrawn BSkyB deal has become a big story since I posted here last, and Murdoch is becoming increasingly isolated.

Now comes the story that brings it all back home: News Of the World reporters in Britain have reportedly tried to hack the phones of 9/11 victims and their families here in the United States. An investigation into Murdoch's News Corporation and its practices has been called for by various Democratic senators such as Barbara Boxer of California and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, but also by Representative Peter King, a New York Republican.

"It is revolting to imagine that members of the media would seek to compromise the integrity of a public official for financial gain in the pursuit of yellow journalism," King said in a statement. "The 9/11 families have suffered egregiously, but unfortunately they remain vulnerable against such unjustifiable parasitic strains."

Dude, when even Peter King is calling for your head, the jig is up.

But this jig dance can be expected to go on for awhile. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now looking into the matter. At issue was whether the New York-based News Corporation, which owns Fox Broadcasting, HarperCollins, and several newspapers in addition to and Fox Broadcasting and Fox News, bribed foreign officials in London in violation of U.S. law.

This story has a lot further to go. No congressional investigations or hearings have been called for in Washington - and with Republicans in control of the House, it's not likely that they will be - but if this scandal gets any bigger, we might get a serious look into Fox News's business practices. We might not like what we find. Especially those of us who are Republicans.

A Treated Symptom

The flip side to reporter Michael Aron and news anchor Jim Hooker losing their jobs at NJN in a real-life imitation of the last episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" is the fact that Glenn Beck signed off at Fox News for the long-awaited last time on the same day, June 30. (Like Aron and Hooker, Beck didn't get to finish the week. But no one could take one more day of Beck. I couldn't even take one more minute.)

Beck's departure was due to the fact that liberal activist groups banded together against his racist, McCarthyistic, ultra-paranoid banter and got over three hundred advertisers to drop him. He proved to be too much of a financial liability to Fox News to stay on the air.

Beck was a symptom, though. The disease goes merrily on. Sean Hannity, the noted Long Island Irish Nazi, will continue to denigrate liberals and question their patriotism, while rhymes-with-glass-poles like Eric Bolling go on dismissing President Obama in racial terms. Though, to be fair, I haven't heard anyone on Fox call Obama a dick yet, as happened on MSNBC when Mark Halperin assessed the President's performance in his most recent news conference (more on that later).

No matter. Because as long as Fox News is on the air, it will remain a broadcaster of hate and divisiveness, and a voice for the rich and powerful.

We have to keep calling them out. Jon Stewart is only one man. He can't do it alone.

Beck-Ola

Fox News made a lot of liberals happy for a change this week. The so-called "fair and balanced news" channel announced that Glenn Beck's show, on at 5 PM Eastern, will end later this year.

I'm not happy. I'm very upset . . . about having to wait so long before it ends!

The Beckster, as Ed Schultz likes to call him, has the third highest-rated show on cable news, but Beck's ratings have been plummeting recently as Beck himself has gotten weirder. He's suggested, among other things, that both George Walker Bush and Barack Obama have been helping to bring about a new pan-Islamic caliphate in the Middle East by refusing to bomb the ruins of ancient Babylon during the Iraq War. Seems Beck thinks the caliphate's capital is to be established there.

Some of Beck's recent theories of world domination by enemies of America sound like they came right out of James Bond movies or Saturday morning television cartoons, but Beck has been under protest from liberal activists virtually since his Fox show began in January 2009. Remember that Beck - on another Fox show - declared in July of that year that President Obama had a "deep-seated hatred for white people," and in August 2010 Beck famously told people who were dropped from unemployment benefits after 99 weeks to work at McDonald's if they had to, even though the fast-food chain had more job applicants than jobs. His Austin Powers-redolent world government theories were only part of his problem.

Anyway, enough advertisers pulled their TV commercials from the Beckster's show to encourage Fox to drop him, although Beck and the network will (reportedly) continue to work together to develop new programming. Beck is going behind the scenes, where he likely won't be heard from again, and he's treating this career change like a promotion.

It's a Pyrrhic victory in one respect. Beck goes against noted MSNBC wild man Chris Matthews, who answers Beck's wild theories on a regular basis, in the same 5 PM Eastern time slot, and even today he trounces Matthews's "Hardball" show in the ratings. So even as Matthews rants against Beck, Beck still gets more viewers. I suppose more people found out the truth about Beck by seeing the rerun of "Hardball" at 7 PM Eastern, or maybe people suddenly started to find Beck moronic on their own and stopped watching. But mostly, it was likely the petitioning against Beck's advertisers that did him in. That's the same reason Beck's radio show has been dropped from so many stations.

Beck's impending departure from Fox and his diminished presence on radio comprise a blow against the right's toxic gibberish, and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post suggests that Beck's raging paranoia against the system is less of a factor in the body politic now that the economy is slowly recovering. However, the campaign against Beck only treated a symptom. The disease, in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and that Long Island Irish Nazi Sean Hannity - all of whom can be as loony as Beck and also are just as mean-spirited - goes merrily on. Right-wing talk shows will never die. Remember, this is America.

Beck Outfoxed

Late word is that Fox News will not, in fact, air Glenn Beck's Lincoln Memorial rally live tomorrow, and is instead planning to cover it briefly as a "news event." Well, it's nice to see that Fox has some integrity. I only wish they'd discovered fairness and balance before its parent company donated money to the Republican Governors' Association.

Bad, bad, very bad. . . .

A Teachable Moment

I was really ticked off with the PBS NewsHour's regular Friday night political analysis from Mark Shields and David Brooks last night. After spending so much oxygen on Democratic party ennui and other Washington insider stuff, they addressed the Shirley Sherrod controversy - for ten seconds!

This was the biggest story of the week, and quite possibly a turning point for a presidential administration that may have finally learned it has to fight back harder against their conservative enemies in the media. It exposed right-wing newscasting as a fraud. Yet Shields, Brooks and Jim Lehrer reduced it to sound-bite analysis. In those ten seconds, Shields and Brooks agreed that President Obama showed poor loyalty in allowing Sherrod's dismissal, as if he were the only one fooled by the nonstory of her nonracism. Though Fox News was the biggest villain in this defamation of a capable and devoted public servant, the words "fox" and "news" never passed Shields's or Brooks's lips.

The PBS NewsHour brags that it doesn't entertain, it informs. What I found entertaining was how little attention PBS even chose to bother paying to a story that calls an entire cable news channel's being into question. Because PBS isn't driven by ratings as much as Fox News's Roger Ailes is ("Ratings! Ratings!" was an answer he gave to explain his programming on Fox News), I expected more from public television.

But then, maybe I shouldn't have. After all, PBS is beholden to corporate interests who "fund" them and who would just as soon see a thoughtful discussion on race and journalistic integrity not happen.

Coincidentally, journalism icon Daniel Schorr died yesterday at 93.

Shirley They Can't Be Serious!

They are serious. And don't call her Shirley. That's Ms. Sherrod, dig?

The big storm in Washington this week involves a clip of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod, who is black, giving a speech in which she admitted to giving white farmers in Georgia less of an effort to help save their farms than to black farmers. This is a nasty, vicious, racist comment and is mean in spirit. The Agriculture Department was right to fire such a woman and the NAACP was correct to condemn Ms. Sherrod's cold remarks.

Except for one thing. The tape - discovered by right-wing stooge Andrew Breitbart and broadcast by Fox News - was edited and doctored to make it look like that's all that Ms. Sherrod said. She actually went on to say that dealing with white farmers allowed her to see beyond race and give her all into helping them, and she counts many of the white families she's assisted among her friends. That part didn't make it into Fox's broadcast, and everyone from the Obama administration to the NAACP reacted before Ms. Sherrod had the opportunity to explain the tape and Fox had the opportunity to be revealed as a bunch of lying bastards who put out misleading news reports like soft ice cream.

Fox has been pulling stunts like this since virtually the day President Obama assumed office, trying every trick in the book to discredit and in some cases destroy anyone who champions an environmentalist economy (Van Jones) to people helping the poor and the lower middle class (ACORN) to minority empowerment (Shirley Sherrod), lest they get in the way of thwarting their mean-spirited anti-poor, anti-minority, anti-progressive agenda. The American right enjoys a position of privilege and power after thirty years of supply-side economics, and they're not going to give it up without a fight.

What's disconcerting about this is that the Obama administration (and most Washington Democrats)let Van Jones and ACORN's Bertha Lewis hang out to dry and distanced themselves from them. (Jones, as you recall, unwittingly signed an anti-Bush petition blaming the forty-third President for being behind 9/11; Lewis's ACORN was caught in an Abscam-style sting operation by a conservative blogger posing as a pimp trying to get ACORN money to start a brothel.) White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was visibly embarrassed, as was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Both apologized to Ms, Sherrod, and Vilsack offered her a better job; she's "considering" it.

And she's in a very good position to get a raise for this one.

Having been burned thrice by such dirty tricks, pundits insist that Obama won't be so quick to cave to Fox News anymore. So, this would be a "turning point." Right, this White House has had more turning points than the war in Afghanistan. But if the administration is wise enough to call out Fox and take them on next time something like this happens (and it will, possibly next week), that can only be a good thing.

Three Stooges

Two stories from the news this Veterans' Day require me to write a pair of open letters to three conservative morons - I mean, icons:

Dear Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK): Don't go around waving the flag and touting the wonderful job the nation's veterans have done in service to their country and then block a bill that would expand health care to those same veterans, especially when 2266 veterans died last year for lack of health insurance and veterans account for one third of all homeless men.

Dear Sean Hannity: If you want to help the Fox News Channel, for whom you work (or something like it), preserve what little credibility it has as a source of journalism, don't run footage from your coworker Glenn Beck's September 12 rally and claim it was from the much more sparsely attended "press conference" (actually a rally, called a press conference by Republican congressmen so they could play for it with taxpayers' money) staged last Thursday to oppose the health care bill in the House. First you showed video from the "press conference," with leaves in the background changing color and trees partly bare, then you showed video of a rally with full, green-leafed trees in the background. Come on, even Fox News viewers aren't that dumb! Even Glenn Beck isn't that dumb!

Dear Glenn Beck: You are one big twit.

Fox Attacks

President Obama has come under fire from some political commentators for attacking Fox News. I'm not talking about commentators on Fox News. I'm talking about a few commentators on MSNBC, and even Mark Shields took the White House to task on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." The argument has been the Obama cheapens himself by going after one cable news channel and singling them out as the enemy. They're not alone. When Obama tried to exclude Fox reporters from a White House event, other reporters protested and said the Fox reporters should be allowed to cover it as well. Even someone as wise and learned as Shields defended Fox for its reporting, and he said the White House should recognize the difference between Fox reporters and Fox commentators.

Let's put aside the insistence that Fox does any actual reporting, let alone fair and balanced reporting. Such an idea is too silly for me to dignify with a comment. Fox spends so much time bashing Obama, what is the President supposed to do - sit back and take it? Turning the other cheek only works for so long. Sometimes you have to fight back. President Obama is trying to change the trajectory of the nation and get it away from supply-side economics and wedge-issue politics, and the beneficiaries of these things - the right - know it. That's why Fox, an arm of the Republican party and the conservative movement, is so eager to destroy him. True, President Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with right-wing opposition, and he even had to deal with right-wing talk radio in the form of Father Charles Coughlin, but this was the days before cable television (or any television) and the Internet. FDR never had to put up with attacks 24/7. Roosevelt also never had to consider the idea of 24/7. He never even heard the phrase 24/7 (unless he heard Winston Churchill use it to mean July 24).

Scary Tea Partiers

Today, April 15, is the last day Americans have to file their income taxes, and a bunch of conservative activist groups, tired with all the money going to federal bailouts and economic stimulus programs, today held one of the most asinine anti-tax protests in recent memory . . . and that's saying something. People all over America gathered in cities and towns holding "tea parties," referring to the infamous Boston Tea Party protest of 1773 against the high British tax on tea. It was on a cold night that December in which colonists raided a merchant ship in Boston Harbor carrying tea, dumped its contents into the water, and in so doing invented iced tea and turned America into a land of coffee drinkers.

Many of the conservative activists holding such protests today sent teabags to Democrats in Washington for raising taxes and spending it on corporate bailout and government programs - the kind meant to stabilize the economy and save jobs - and vowed to make sure these dastardly Democrats voted out of office. Though the protesters claimed to being holding up the ideals of the intrepid colonists who protested the tea tax of 1773, they forgot one thing - those Bostonians of long ago were protesting taxation without representation. We have taxation with representation, and our representatives voted for these programs because we the people voted to send them to Washington and fix the economy.

CNN covered one "tea party" protest in Chicago that bordered on the scary. The reliably unflappable CNN reporter Susan Roesgen waded into the ugly, vicious demonstration and found one protester carrying a picture depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler and decrying him as a fascist. Roesgen asked him why the President was a fascist, and the protester could do no more than say it was because, well, he was a fascist. Unable to get a more detailed explanation, Roesgen asked another protester to explain why he would be against his taxes going to help stimulate the economy, from which his (and the President's) home state of Illinois would benefit so tremendously - $50 billion, according at one estimate. The protester cited how Illinois's own Abraham Lincoln stood for equality and liberty, and how such taxes would be an affront to him - conveniently forgetting that Lincoln instituted the first federal income tax to pay for the Civil War.

This same protester held his two-year-old son in his arms and got him involved by having him hold a sign about how the increased spending would affect him, as it would raise the debt and make today's toddlers pay it off years from now as adults. I get the point, but how could Republicans who stand for family values condone the cynical use of a child to make a political statement?

One other thing I noticed was the absence of black people in the demonstration. These teabag demonstrations were supposed to be grass-roots protests representing all the people, so how come this Chicago protest had no brothers in it? Are you telling me they couldn't find one black person, or Latino or Asian-American for that matter, in Chicago to demonstrate against high taxes, if only for the sake of appearances? As for women, there was only one woman I noticed at this protest . . . Susan Roesgen.

I admire Roesgen greatly for putting herself into this mean-spirited protest and escaping with her dignity unharmed. She's my new heroine now.

While CNN and MSNBC gave the "tea parties" adequate coverage, Fox News covered it around the clock, in just about every part of America. Fox defended their reporting of the events, insisting that when Louis Farrakhan held the Million Man March in Washington, they gave similar coverage to that protest even though it was spearheaded by the left.

Nice rhetoric, but it's not true. It couldn't be. Leaving aside from the fact that no one who knows anything about the Nation of Islam's beliefs - the sect decries welfare as a paternalistic form of dependency - would call Farrakhan a leftist, the Million Man March was held about a year before Fox News even went on the air.

Who is Fox News kidding with their biased coverage and their naked agenda? Apparently, a lot of us: Recent reports have indicated that Fox News, after a ratings slump during 2008, is once again America's most watched cable news channel by a wide margin, thanks largely to the successful bluster of noted schizophrenic, egocentric, paranoiac prima donna Glenn Beck.

As for the original Boston Tea Party, I remember how George Banks recalled the colonists' behavior in Mary Poppins. "They were very rude," he said, "even for Americans."

Some things never change. :-p