Tag: Media Watch

Too Soon? Obama Comes Out Swinging After Midterm Elections

Trish

SwingingHow “not mopey” is Pres. Obama? Not mopey enough to send an email blast less than a week after the 2014 midterm elections that leads respondents to the screen shot shown.

Hertzberg: ‘Elections are decided by low-information voters, people who cannot be troubled to figure out whether they are Democrats or Republicans’

Republicans were already complaining that Obama wasn’t contrite enough about the recent Democratic election losses. They, of course, took the results as a mandate for their issues, like repealing the Affordable Care Act, building more fences along the border with Mexico, and keeping women from carrying out their reproductive lives in private.

Obama heard a different signal.

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What is FOX?

Jon Ponder

FOX News is indisputably the most popular cable news channel. And yet in 13 years, Fox has never broken a story. That’s okay, because it is not in the news business. It is in the news-shaping business. Its programming is an admixture of right-wing propaganda and fear-porn for feeble-minded paranoiacs, served up by spokesmodels who have no clue what they are reading.

– Pensito Review quoted from 2009 in answer to the question “What is FOX?” in “Understanding The History And Purpose Of Fox News,” at Addicting Info.

In Which Jon Stewart Discovers That the Koch Brothers Have Taken Out Ads on His Show

Jon Ponder

screenshot-stewart-koch-industries

The billionaire Koch brothers have been running feel-good, folksy image ads about their company, Koch Industries, the nation’s second largest privately held corporation, on liberal outlets, particularly MSNBC and now on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” on Comedy Central.

Stewart fired back with a parody of the brothers’ ad on his show this week. “Clearly,” Stewart said, “the Koch brothers are trying to say to our audience of not yet dying-off voters: ‘Even though you may have heard certain things about the Koch brothers, how bad could they be? I mean, if they were evil, would a baby agree to appear in one of their advertisements?’”

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You’re Paying 89 Cents a Month on Your Cable Bill for Fox News, Whether You Want It or Not

Jon Ponder

89 Cents

The amount Fox News requires cable subscribers to pay for its service every month whether they want it or not, according to Pew Research. Fox “now claims one of the highest average rates per subscriber. Only six non-premium cable channels command higher fees than Fox. CNN, by contrast, is estimated to average 57 cents per subscriber per month and MSNBC, 18 cents,” according to Pew.

Pew Study Confirms That Fox Is Dominant Source of ‘News’ on the Right – Liberals Rely on Many Sources

Jon Ponder

graph-pew-differences-in-liberal-conservative-news-sourcesThe PewResearch Journalism Project has released a study that confirms what is already clear: The American right gets most of its information about politics from Fox News, while the left relies on multiple sources, including CNN, NPR, MSNBC and the New York Times.

According to the study, consistent conservatives:

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You Think Ebola Is Scary? Check Out How Many People Die from Plain Old Flu Every Year

Jon Ponder

Be afraid: The influenza virus kills thousands of Americans each year
Be afraid: The influenza virus kills thousands of Americans each year
Five cases of Ebola have been treated in the United States so far this year. Three were contracted in Africa. Two of these victims were Americans who were flown home for treatment. The other was the Liberian national, Thomas Duncan, who developed symptoms after he arrived in Texas from Africa. The last two were healthcare workers who treated Duncan in Dallas. Of the five, only one patient has died — Thomas Duncan.

Tragic as these cases are, the hysteria they have unleashed in the media and among Republican politicians is beyond over the top. The Ebola “crisis” has topped the hour on cable news channels for days. The lowest point, so far, was when news choppers tracked an ambulance for an hour or so one early evening last week as it transported one of the nurses to a hospital, bringing to mind the infamous “slow speed chase” on L.A. freeways that kicked off the O.J. Simpson murder scandal in 1994.

Meanwhile, with the midterm elections a few weeks away, Republicans have worked nonstop to blame the Ebola outbreak on Pres. Obama and, by extension, the Democrats. They have also incorporated the outbreak into their get-out-the-vote strategy by fanning the flames of fear to get their easily terrorized followers to the polls. Their unified message on Ebola — a call to ban flights into the United States from the affected areas in Africa — is typically anti-scientific and counterfactual. Experts say such a ban would likely create a bona fide crisis here, and there is the embarrassing fact that there are no direct flights into the United States from the affected countries.

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On Fox: Republican v Republican on Marriage Equality

Jon Ponder

On Fox News Sunday, Ted Olson, the Republican on the legal team that argued for marriage equality in California’s Prop 8 case — but who led the witness-bribing, anti-Clinton “Arkansas Project” in the 1990s, and who represented Bush/Cheney in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case in which Republicans on the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush as president — debated Tony Perkins, one of the grand wizards of the anti-gay hate movement. Transcript follows:

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Not Sold on Hillary? It Wouldn’t Be the First Time

Trish

The air of inevitability surrounding Hillary Clinton is unlike anything we’ve ever seen – since 2008, that is — when she was also considered inevitable. Then a first-term Senator from Illinois came along, and we know how that story ended.

— Gwen Ifill, anchor on the PBS Newshour, in a blog post titled, “Beware The Clickbait (Or Why There’s Always More To The Story), which is pretty self-explanatory.

U.S. Ranks Behind Romania in Press Freedom Index

Buck Banks

46th

The United States’ ranking out of 180 nations in the 2014 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index.
Conor Friedersdorf: “Countries that scored better include Romania, South Africa, Ghana, Cyprus, and Botswana. And 40 others. Put simply, it’s an embarrassing result for the country that conceived the First Amendment almost 240 years ago.”