Tag: Media Watch

Guess Which Cable News Pundits Liked Obama’s Support of ‘Ground Zero’ Islamic Center – Hint: Their Network’s 4th Largest Investor Is a Muslim

Jon Ponder

Prince Alwaleed, Fox News' fourth-largest investor
Prince Alwaleed, Fox News' fourth-largest investor
At the White House Iftar dinner on Friday night, Pres. Obama expressed his support for Muslims’ right to build the (not at) “Ground Zero” (not a) mosque:

OBAMA: Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.

Given the hyper-partisan tenor of our times, you might assume that the right-wing Obama haters at Fox News would seize on this statement as proof that the president is the Muslim, socialist Nazi they have long claimed him to be.

But in this particular case, the world has turned upside down. Here’s CNN pundit Erick Erickson, on his own blog, suggesting that because the president supports the rights of Muslims to build an Islamic center on private property, he therefore also endorses human sacrifice:

[What] about the Greater First Church of Satan wanting to do human sacrifice of a willing victim? I guess our founding principles demand the president support that too. After all, it is a religious belief and only willing participants.

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Olbermann Schools the White House on the Difference Between Liberals and Republicans

Jon Ponder

In the segment before this commentary on MSNBC’s “Countdown” last night, Keith Olbermann made a point of saying that he personally likes Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman and that he believe Gibbs does a good job, so his commentary here is not meant as a personal retaliation against Gibbs’ senseless and badly timed attack on the “professional left” yesterday.

Instead, what Olbermann delivers here is a thoughtful, measured rebuttal to the idea that left-wing media — like the opinion shows on MSNBC and liberal radio talk shows and websites — is just an analog to Fox News and right-wing radio and blogs.

Transcript:

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FoxNews.com Is Dead Last Among News Websites

Jon Ponder

screencap-foxnews.comMediaWeek:

Foxnews.com averages around 12 million or 13 million monthly unique users, according to Nielsen Online, rarely approaching the 35 million to 40 million uniques that leaders Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN regularly deliver in aggregate. Some of that disparity can be explained away, as both Yahoo and MSNBC draw heavy traffic from their portal counterparts, and CNN benefits from traffic driven by CNNMoney.com and Sports Illustrated’s site.

But even on its own, CNN.com consistently beats Foxnews.com by 7 million or 8 million unique users. Per comScore, the gap is even larger: 43.4 million uniques for CNN.com in June vs. 11.4 million for Foxnews.com. Plus, CNN.com regularly bests Foxnews.com in measures like page views, time spent and video streams—and it has opened an early lead in mobile (14 million uniques vs. 9 million in May for Fox, per Nielsen).

This reinforces my theory that liberal radio and television shows lag in ratings because, unlike right wingers, liberals can read. But seriously, while a lot of folks over 65 are online, it’s fair to say that they are more educated, and thus more liberal, than Fox’s audience, for which the average age was 65 in 2009.

Tea Baggers Exposed Gaming the Digg System

Trish

digg

Here’s a story we doubt you’ll see reported on FOX News. AlterNet recently completed a year-long investigation into so-called “gaming the system” at the content aggregator, Digg. A Yahoo group calling itself the Digg Patriots (whose site has since been taken down) figured out how to rig Digg’s voting. If you don’t know, at Digg and many similar sites, you can vote for the stories you want to see featured prominently, or in this case, those you want “buried.” As AlterNet reported:

It’s easier to tell you what the group is against than what it’s for: Obama, progressives, diplomacy, health care reform, immigrants, science, the separation of church and state, acknowledgment of human-induced climate change, the government, pro-choice protections, public schools, and higher education. They also claim to believe Obama is a Muslim and a socialist, and that he was born in Kenya.

Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content).

The immensity of the impact is commensurate with the reach of Digg. Again, according to Alternet:

It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site…Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

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O’Reilly on Defense: Denies Race-Baiting on Fox – Maddow Rolls Tape, Proves He’s Wrong

Jon Ponder

If it’s true that, according to the Rove-Breitbart playbook, when your side is on defense you are losing, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly is losing the debate with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about his network’s use of racism to inflame and agitate its predominantly elderly white Republican viewers.

According to Bill O’Reilly, highly rated shows can’t possibly be racist.

Maddow apparently got under O’Reilly’s skin last week when she did a story about race baiting on Fox that documented the network’s on-air personalities’ lies about Van Jones, ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, the New Black Panthers Party, illegal immigration and other racially charged stories.

The next night O’Reilly took to the airways in defense of his network. He rebutted the video evidence of his colleagues’ racially inflammatory comments with a succinct, “Nuh-UHH” — Fox can’t be racist, he suggested, because his ratings were higher than MSNBC’s, and everybody knows that highly rated shows can’t possibly feature racism.

This defense was the subject of much well-deserved derision the next day, which prompted O’Reilly to return to the air and resort to name-calling — Maddow is a “far left loon,” he said. He then repeated the much-derided defense that his network’s high ratings are irrefutably prima facie evidence that Fox is free of racism.

Maddow responded last night by noting that sharks must be more even less racist than Fox because “Shark Week” beat Fox in the ratings last week.

She followed up with a video retrospective of O’Reilly’s own on-air racist comments — which she offered as irrefutable proof that race baiting is what Fox does.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here’s a rough transcript of Maddow’s report — this was provided by MSNBC:

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Dean Goes on Fox to Attack Network’s Race Baiting

Jon Ponder

Huffington Post:

Former Vermont governor and chair of the Democratic National Committee HOWARD DEAN: The Tea Party called out their racist fringe and I think the Republican Party’s got to stop appealing to its racist fringe. And Fox News is what did that. You put that on. Continuing to cater to this theme of minority racism and stressing comments like this — some of which are taken out of context — does not help the country knit itself together…

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Nonpartisan Spin Referee PolitiFact Gives Liz Cheney a Pass Even After Proving She Lied

Jon Ponder

With the Republicans’ propaganda mills working at full speed, churning out lies, half-truths and disinformation morning, noon and night, there are only a handful of sources that can be relied upon to sort their truths from the lies.

There are at least two excellent liberal sites with the mission of debunking right-wing lies, Media Matters, which was founded by David Brock, a one-time right-wing propagandist who saw the light, and News Hounds, which has the great tagline, “We watch Fox so you don’t have to” — thanks again, guys, for that not-so-small mercy.

Until now, however, there were primarily just two nonpartisan arbiters of spin: Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning unit of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida.

But now, PolitiFact has embarrassed itself by mishandling an incident in June on ABC’s Sunday morning political chat show in which Arianna Huffington challenged a patently false statement by Liz Cheney:

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Scarborough’s Twitter Snit Revives His Own 2001 Dead-Intern Scandal – Ignored by Media Then And Forgotten Until Now

Jon Ponder

Moulitsas, left, and Scarborough
Moulitsas, left, and Scarborough
Remember the scandal from the summer of 2001 about the congressman and the dead female staffer? No, not the Chandra Levy murder, the other one — the one involving Lori Klausutis, the young woman who was found dead in the district office of Joe Scarborough, then a Republican congressman from Florida, now MSNBC’s token right-wing host, the star of “Morning Joe,” an unwatchable live show that airs at the crack of dawn on the East Coast.

Klausutis’ death was largely ignored at the time and has been all but forgotten since, and it is in Scarborough’s interest to keep it that way. Unfortunately for him, however, the incident is back in the news, and Scarborough only has himself to blame.

It started when DailyKos founder, Markos Moulitsas, made a reference to the incident on Twitter. Scarborough could not let it pass and reacted negatively. Now the death of Lori Klausutis is back in the news.

More about the Moulitsas-Scarborough Twitter war below, but first, in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a recap of the two scandals from the summer of 2001.

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Huffington Post Buys Pollster.com

Jon Ponder

NYT’s Media Decoder:

The Huffington Post is venturing into the wonky but increasingly popular territory of opinion poll analysis, purchasing Pollster.com, a widely respected aggregator of poll data that has been a major draw for the Web site of The National Journal.

The purchase is something of a coup for The Huffington Post, which has been making a more aggressive push into political journalism ahead of the midterm elections in November.

“It’s going to beef up our political coverage,” said Arianna Huffington, the Web site’s editor in chief and founder. “Polling, whether we like it or not, is a big part of how we communicate about politics. And with this, we’ll be able to do it in a deeper way. We’ll be able to both aggregate polls, point out the limitations of them and demand more transparency.”

Exciting news for poll geeks.

Limbaugh Vents Racism at Oprah – Attributes Her Success Solely to White Guilt

Jon Ponder

See minute 04:00 for Limbaugh’s quote on Oprah

ESPN Fired Limbaugh in 2003 Because of Similar Racist Comments

Nastiness spews out of Rush Limbaugh like oil gushing out of the hole in the bottom of the Gulf:

[Rush] Limbaugh suggested Tuesday that Winfrey and other African-Americans owe their success to their skin color.

“If Obama weren’t black, he’d be a tour guide in Honolulu or he’d be teaching Saul Alinsky Constitutional law or lecturing on it in Chicago,” Limbaugh announced.

“He wouldn’t have been voted president if he weren’t black. Somebody asked me over the — oh, I need to remember. Somebody asked me over the weekend, why does somebody earn a lot of money, have a lot of money. I said it`s because he’s black,” he continued.

Limbaugh then went on to attack Winfrey. “It was Oprah. No, it can’t be. Yes, it is. There’s a lot of guilt out there. To show we’re not racist, we’ll make this person wealthy and big and famous and so forth,” said Limbaugh.

The paradox here is that, by every metric imaginable, Oprah Winfrey is more talented and successful than Rush Limbaugh will ever be.

Unlike Oprah, who earned her success by having a broad appeal and the substance to back it up, Limbaugh has a very limited appeal. As was noted here last year, “the average age of right-wing radio listeners is 67. It’s also truly not shocking that this demographic is also predominantly male. According to a Pew study in February, 72 percent of Limbaugh’s elderly listeners are men…”

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