Tag: Media Watch

Owner of Hollywood Trade Magazine ‘Variety’ Exits Right-Wing Push Group ALEC

Jon Ponder

Now ten companies have left:

Reed Elsevier — a personal information provider (of services such as Lexis-Nexis) — and American Traffic Solutions — a provider of traffic technology solutions — have become the 9th and 10th companies to drop ALEC.

Reed Elsevier stated that the campaign to highlight ALEC’s promotion of measures that disempower and disenfranchise minorities played a role in its decision. “We made the decision after considering the broad range of criticism being leveled at ALEC,” said a Reed Elsevier spokesman.

American Traffic Solutions spokesman Charles Territo said his group’s decision not to renew its membership with ALEC “was based on how best to allocate our resources.”

To recap, here is the list of companies that have dropped ALEC so far:

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Caught on Video: Sean Hannity’s Five-Second Flip-Flop on Teleprompter Use

Jon Ponder
Click the screenshot to see the video at Gawker.com
Click the screenshot to see the video at Gawker.com

Before his identity was uncovered and Fox News fired him, the “Fox Mole” provided a video to Gawker of an off-air, sotto voce pre-interview conversation between Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity in which they both criticized Pres. Obama’s use of teleprompters and then, literally within seconds, reversed themselves on the subject, with Hannity even agreeing that Romney’s dependence on teleprompters is “smart.”

In the video, Romney, a world-class champion flip-flopper, executes his 180-degree flip on teleprompters in a heart-stopping one-half of a second. It takes Hannity, the slow poke, just five seconds to completely reverse his opinion from being against teleprompters when the president uses them to being for them when Romney, the official presidential candidate of Fox News does — and 22 seconds after dissing the president, Hannity even tells Romney he is “smart” to use teleprompters because “they’re out to just eviscerate anybody who makes a mistake.” (The Gawker video is unembedable, but you can watch it by clicking here or the screenshot at the top.)

Here’s the transcript, which picks up at about 28 seconds into the video:

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Fox News Host: If You Want to Kill Medicare, Vote Republican

Jon Ponder

[The federal budget plan associated with GOP House Budget Chair Paul Ryan that House Republicans passed last week] really is kind of a campaign document because it draws a bright line between what the Republicans stand for and what the Democrats stand for. If you want big government, then the Democrats are your party. Whereas, if you want a party that’s making some hard choices, vote Republican.

– Steve Doocy, host of “Fox and Friends,” easily the worst morning news/chat show in history, dropping all pretense that the network he works for is anything but the in-house propaganda organ for the Republican Party. Among the “hard choices” in the Ryan budget: ending Medicare (but keeping the name) and replacing it with a voucher program, more tax cuts for the uber-wealthy and increasing the deficit by additional $3.1 trillion over ten years.

Current TV Adds New Shows from Bill Press and Stephanie Miller to Morning Line-up

Jon Ponder
Bill Press and Stephanie Miller, now on Current TV in the morning
Bill Press and Stephanie Miller, now on Current TV in the morning

If you’re up early and want political news and discussion on the teevee, but you can’t stomach MSNBC’s Fox News-lite Joe Scarborough show and you find C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to be just too dry, there is a new alternative.

Current TV has begun running televised simulcasts of long-running radio chat shows hosted by Bill Press, weekday mornings at 6 a.m. Eastern/3 a.m. Pacific, and Stephanie Miller, from 9 a.m. Eastern/6 a.m. Pacific.

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Republican TV Host Joe Scarborough Outraged over Mitt Romney’s ‘Lie’

Jon Ponder

Mitt Romney, the GOP frontrunner, has never let the fact that he is really bad at lying slow him down one bit. But Romney told such a bald-faced lie at a campaign stop in Ohio on Monday that it sent Joe Scarborough, the stalwart Republican host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, into paroxysms of apoplexy during Tuesday morning’s show.

The controversy arose after Buzzfeed writer Andrew Kaczynski uncovered an op-ed last week that was written by Romney and published in USA Today in July 2009, during the debate over health-insurance reform. In the article, Romney urged Pres. Obama to adopt the individual mandate — the system developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation that Romney had deployed when he was governor of Massachusetts — as the central cost-saving mechanism in the federal health-insurance reform plan:

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Rush Limbaugh Is Employed by a Subsidiary of Romney’s Bain Capital

Jon Ponder

logo-bain-clear-channelThe chances that Rush Limbaugh will be fired for disparaging women whose insurance covers their contraceptives as “sluts” last week have always fallen safely within the range of slim to none. Limbaugh is, hands down, his employer’s biggest revenue producer, and even if he were caught with the proverbial live boy or dead girl, his bosses at Clear Channel Communications, a multi billion-dollar right-wing radio network based in Texas, would be hard-pressed to send him packing.

But as the controversy over his lies and smears has played out, a key factor related to the politics behind the scandal has generally been overlooked. Clear Channel is a subsidiary of Bain Capital, the firm founded by GOP presidential frontrunner, Mitt Romney in 1984. And although Romney officially resigned from Bain in 1999,he left the company with a deal in place that continues to add millions in income to Romney’s fortune every year. (These millions in revenue were the subject of a campaign controversy earlier this year when Romney was forced to admit he only pays around 15 percent in taxes on his income from Bain.)

In 2008, Bain bought Clear Channel, whose on-air roster includes such heavyweights in right-wing broadcasting as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and, the heaviest weight of them all, Rush Limbaugh.

Earlier this year, allegations surfaced on the far right that Clear Channel’s influential on-air personalities, including Limbaugh, were in the bag for Romney and so were marginalizing fringe candidates like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul:

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Even (Neo) Conservatives are Tired of Low-Information Republicans

Trish

Conservative columnist and neocon Bush II speechwriter David Frum wrote recently that he is tired of being surrounded by dumb people. At least, that was basically the point of his article, “When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?” in the November New York magazine.

On a recent CNN appearance, Frum tried to expand on the harmful affect of FOX News on American discourse although CNN’s Howard Kurtz seemed determine to err on the side of championing FOX.

Note: We wrote last year about the example Frum cites, a story that first surfaced broadly on the Drudge Report web site and was then taken up with fervor by FOX.