May 18th
2:43 PM

6 notes

Zombie climate sceptic theories survive only in newspapers and on TV

Graham Readfearn | Guardian »

Study finds overwhelming scientific consensus that humans have caused global warming, but media still hasn’t caught up

… after giving up on the peer-reviewed literature, the climate science contrarians – often bolstered by support from the fossil fuel industry and free-market idealogues - took their talking points somewhere else.

That is, out into the public domain, the mainstream media and the blogosphere and far away from the less forgiving operating theatre of peer-reviewed science journals.

To this day, these dead theories hang around like slack-jawed zombies in the graveyards of global media outlets… >continue<

March 8th
1:33 AM

1 note

Today North Korea, in response to a new sanctions regimen, threatened a preemptive nuclear strike against the US.

On Fox News the primary emphasis was on Obama “jumping the shark” by negating White House tours under the terms of sequester. All the energy of solemn “analysis”, Gods help us. The redolent absurdity of prodigious psychological projection, all the ad hoc opportunism - the infinity of Reason turned and contorted into the service of sham and satisfaction, seemingly far beyond any fear of being seen as a comical transgression.

Interesting times

November 4th
12:26 PM

1 note

"When it comes to cable news assholes, however, we need not bother to attempt evenhandedness between left and right. The right-leaning version of being “fair and balanced” — that is, Fox News — is our gold standard. It pioneered the genre; it dominates in viewers, ratings, and profits; and it leads the way in innovation of the new asshole styles."

—

Aaron James, excerpted from “Assholes, a Theory”

Reflexively, however, we shouldn’t miss the wrinkles of the sphincter here. Namely, that “fair and balanced” with its conceits about the cogency of “left and right” is itself an asshole posit, and intimately associated with the background odor of the genre itself.

December 15th
11:48 PM

1 note

Great moments in unexpected iconoclasm

Hannity presses Ron Paul in post debate interview, saying Iran has “clearly said they want to wipe Israel off the map” and Paul challenges to Sean to check his interpretation of the Farsi! Sean can only try and interrupt to throw him off track.

October 26th
11:40 AM

129 notes

Via

"You’re blowing it with Fox News. The axis today is not liberal and conservative. The axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful."

—

Steve Jobs to Rupert Murdoch over dinner in June 2010.

Yes, the question of the axis - as portrayed by Fox. This point is often missed even by Fox’s harshest critics, who reflexively buy into a frame teased out and stroked by Fox’s marketing department. Jobs’ remark cuts to the core.

October 5th
12:39 PM

5 notes

Fox Reporter runs into some grade A intensity at Occupy Wall Street

September 12th
12:05 PM

2 notes

"Guiding lights in the storm, standing tall in the faith that speaking the truth is the heart of great journalism."

—

Juan Williams, from the dedication to his new book “Muzzled” referring to Fox News & and others.

When I run into Fox News, I gotta tell you, if I see people in Journalistic garb, and think - you know - they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Journalists, I get worried. I get nervous.

August 23rd
2:05 PM

45 notes

Source

Via

MEDIAITE: Fox "News" tries to make the (almost) fall of Tripoli into a Barack Obama version of George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished"

inothernews:

Fox “News” scumbags are bags of scum.

Hard not to assent to the tautology. But really, this is a fascinating example of something that should be more evident. Namely, that having undergone the horrors and moronism of the 43 Bush League - seething for 8 years while all people not bereft of cognition looked upon him and his cohort as - well to put it charitably - the most catastrophic manifestation of the Peter Priniciple imaginable, the Republican base finds itself in an embarrassing form of sophomoric contortionism: essentially saying, “look we can make ‘your guy’ look bad too”.

Yeah, half the time it’s ‘your boy’.

“Na Na Nana Na! See, we can deploy infinite argumentative vectors for the sake of framing this scene”. You can hear this sophistic wavelength, for example, exuding from every orafice of Laura Ingraham’s snarky, loaded questioning of Charley Rangel.

It’s a high-school mentality still steaming over its team being wronged, whipping itself into an eye for eye style automatic gainsay of dishing back the hurt. Now it’s their turn. But it only projects this trauma with the awkward scent of teen spirit in an indirect admission.

July 18th
12:04 PM

10 notes

Fox Black Ops? 2008 news clip

Dan Cooper, who was fired from the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel shortly after its 1996 launch, has an ax the size of Paul Bunyan’s to grind. And grind it he does in a blog post…

Potentially the most explosive among Cooper’s many lurid claims, assuming anyone believes them, arises from his account of how his agent, Richard Leibner, dropped him as a client. Leibner did so, asserts Cooper, under pressure from Ailes, who had discovered that Cooper was an anonymous source for a New York magazine story about him, written by ex-Republican David Brock.

And how did Ailes learn that?

Certainly Brock didn’t tell him. Of course. Fox News had gotten Brock’s telephone records from the phone company, and my phone number was on the list. Deep in the bowels of 1211 Avenue of the Americas, News Corporation’s New York headquarters, was what Roger called The Brain Room. Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News. But unlike virtually everybody else, because I had to design and build the Brain Room, I knew it also housed a counterintelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie. >continue<

July 16th
11:22 AM

10 notes

Interviewing Rupert Murdoch, Stewart Varney doesn’t even get to finish his question before tucking his tail. This is back in 2009 when rumours about phone hacking first began to surface.

Nowadays witness the scene where even Hustler’s Larry Flynt denounces Murdoch’s sleaze.

July 14th
6:47 PM

16 notes

Via

braiker:

My latest Adweek offering on the Murdoch mishegoss:

The Murdoch Maelstrom Comes West

Editors at the New York Post pulled junior staffers into two closed-door meetings on Tuesday and told them, “We have to be on our P’s and Q’s and not engage in any kind of obvious, unethical journalistic things,” according to a source close to the Post.

Which is perhaps to be expected. As the British phone hacking scandal that has brought Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to its knees continues to engulf the embattled mogul and his UK company, one question is riveting American media watchers and lawmakers: What, exactly, went down in Murdoch’s U.S. newsrooms?

For its part, the FBI is launching an investigation into allegations that the News of the World hacked into 9/11 victims’ phones, the AP reports. According to sources who have worked at the Post, such an investigation may not reveal News of the World-style hacking by News Corp’s U.S. properties, but would expose a pattern of unethical practices and methods. “Everything else,” says this source, would come out. “It’s hardly below the surface.”

Click to read more: Taking cops to strip clubs! Hacking Facebook accts of sex assault victims! Dressing as doctors to sneak into hospitals! Oh my.

Murdoch Maelstrom… perfect. Sounds like a dark, malevolent force that physics has only recently disclosed.

July 11th
1:45 PM

16 notes

Source

Part of a history quiz imagined by Roger Ailes from a 1971 thesis entitled “Candidate + Money + Media = Votes” from a dump of Nixon era documents unveiled by Gawker in Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News. Just before this, we have Ailes explaining:

The biggest problem today, I believe, is communication on all levels. Before print and before radio and television there was some excuse for this failure. Today there is none. And the self-perpetuating symptom of this disease is a completely negative attitude about ourselves and our system. America has a cancer. Cancer is usually fatal, but it doesn’t have to be if it is discovered and treated in time. Well gentlemen, we as a nation have it, we have positively identified it. There may be time, but our national life depends on our ability to use our technical knowledge to cure the ills of the country and upon our refusal to be caught up in this negative attitude about our system. In other words it must exhibit and communicate an unbending will to live. Without these things America will be nothing more than a history lesson in a student-run college of the twenty-first century.

Emphasis mine. If the constellation of evidence pointing to Fox news as a vanguard of GOP propaganda isn’t already clear, these early remarks appear to demonstrate a near evangelical verve “to translate the ideals” in combat with, as Agnew put it, the “nattering nabobs of negativism” and the “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals”. The only thing that separates Ailes from the Diana Christensen in Network is that he believes in something. - CZ

June 21st
4:09 PM

5 notes

"

Here’s the trick Roger Ailes rides to the ratings bonanza, the talisman swinging left and right, hypnotizing friend and foe alike. “Fair and balanced” may be Orwellian but it’s also ingenious. If you’re styling an advertising vehicle to the tastes of people desperate for validation and simple formulas, what better way to reduce annoying complexities and stroke an audience with the illusion that their “values” represent a whole half of the spectrum? If there’s only two sides, and one of those sides “hasn’t been given its due”, then a news operation that corrects the “imbalance” will appear to a cultivated audience as more trustworthy. Then, one can sell this to the advertisers.

…Unbelievably, somnambulant critics focus on the foreground, attacking “fair and balanced” as if its fraudulence were a matter of execution.

"

— XHerakleitos ~ Automatic For The People: Colbert, Stewart and the spacing of absurdity

12:37 PM

2 notes

Source

Just need a fuse

“We tell the other side of the story”, says Chris Wallace at least three times in his interview with Jon Stewart on Fox News Sunday. There is “no single marching order, not some kind of command”, he says again later. But it’s already shown itself - at least three times.

…It’s right there. It’s everywhere. It’s the idea that there are two sides of the story, literally and only two sides. It’s not just Fox News marching to this order. The conjuring trick elevates cliché and anecdote to an unassailable mindwrap, a suffocating transparency where the dubious refracts into the obvious, and we buy into this fate by reflex. Locked in the punch of an absurd spacing, we’ve bought this meta frame where there’s only two sides, Fox exuding the conceit, all pumped with an heroic harrumph, of a tenacity in representing half of what is.

Maybe, early in the interview, there was something in that cup. You want to think a properly caffeinated Stewart would have lanced this boil. And in doing so, he’d have shown the difference between artist and hack in one gesture.

We need art to somehow pinch the scene and make this frame flutter evanescently, perhaps bringing it into view even if by analogy with the simple, dorky irreverence of lighting a fart. >continue<

June 4th
5:55 PM

24 notes

Source

Jon Stewart’s Ratings Are Now Higher Than All Of Fox News

According to the May Nielson ratings, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart beat the entire Fox News network in terms of total viewers. Stewart averaged 2.3 million viewers, while the Fox News prime time and day time line up averaged 1.85 million viewers. >continue<