CNN’s Firing Rick Sanchez Is More Proof That Fox Is Not a Legitimate News Organization

Within 24 hours after the radio interview during which CNN anchor Rick Sanchez called Jon Stewart a bigot and complained that Jews run the media, CNN fired him. Contrast that with the fact that it has been 14 months since Glenn Beck called the president of the United States a racist. Nearly 300 advertisers have boycotted his show as a result, but Fox did not even consider firing him. What does that say about Fox?

On Oct. 1, CNN fired its afternoon host Rick Sanchez after he castigated Jews the day before during a radio interview:

Discussing Stewart with radio host Pete Dominick, Sanchez said that the “Daily Show” host has a limited worldview, and called him a “bigot.”

The conversation began with Sanchez decrying “elite, Northeast establishment liberals” who “deep down, when they look at a guy like me, they see a guy automatically who belongs in the second tier, and not the top tier.

“I think to some extent Jon Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert are the same way. I think Jon Stewart’s a bigot,” he said. “I think he looks at the world through, his mom, who was a school teacher, and his dad, who was a physicist or something like that. Great, I’m so happy that he grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine.”

And then, he delivered the coup de grace to his own career:

SANCHEZ: Very powerless people… He’s such a minority, I mean, you know … Please, what are you kidding? … I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

So that was Sept. 30, 2010. Let’s climb into the Way-Back Machine and travel back to July 28, 2009 — to the set of “Fox & Friends,” hands down the worst show on television — on the morning when the show’s three simpleton hosts were visited by their network’s newest phenom, Glenn Beck, who said this:

“This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture….I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

(Beck was, of course, projecting. It is he who is a racist — see here, here and here, for starters.)

So what did Fox do? Issue a stern reprimand? Call him into the office for a frank discussion? No. They issued a statement, which basically said, “Attaboy“:

“During Fox & Friends” [Tuesday] morning, Glenn Beck expressed a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel,” Bill Shine, senior vice president of programming for Fox News said in a statement. “And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions.”

Really? Even if those opinions are anti-factual and slanderous? How would Fox handle it if, for example, Beck were to say that Rupert Murdoch was a racist? Would he still be “given the freedom to express his opinions” on Murdoch’s air after that? Not likely.

And remember, Sanchez was not speaking on CNN, and certainly no one thought he was speaking on behalf of his network — and yet he was fired within 24 hours or so. He was let go because, as a legitimate news organization, CNN’s core asset is its credibility. Sanchez permanently damaged his ability to be seen as a credible journalist.

At Fox, credibility is merely a fig leaf meant to cover the network’s real objective of delivering Republican spin and disinformation to its viewers. It does not matter how many times Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity lie about and smear liberals, as long as the lies and smears bolster the prime directive of electing and unwaveringly supporting Republicans.

For example, during the eight years of his presidency, no one on Fox criticized George Bush, despite his many failures — taking the country to war on false pretexts and/or flawed intelligence (take your pick), losing the city of New Orleans to a natural disaster and crashing the world economy on his way out the door, to name a few.

Conversely, on any given night tune into MSNBC, which is popularly offered as Fox’s liberal analog, the opposite side of the same coin, and you will hear, intermixed with their liberal slant on the news, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell criticizing both Republicans and Democrats. This is never done on Fox — the criticism only goes one way: to the left.

More evidence: A poll during the debate on health-care reform last spring found that about three-quarters of Fox viewers believed the lies Republicans were circulating about the reform bill: 72 percent of Fox viewers falsely believed the law would cover undocumented aliens, 79 percent believed the market-based system that was based on a plan put out by the right-wing Heritage Foundation would somehow lead to a government takeover, 69 percent believed abortions would be covered and 75 percent believed there would be death panels. None of that was true.

Seventy-five percent is an incredibly high result in political polling. What these results indicated, if not proved, was that Fox had deliberately deceived its viewers. At a legitimate news organization, these results would have been devastating. Heads would have rolled from the top of the organization on down. Predictably, of course, Fox took no notice of the poll — acknowledging it would have risked revealing their true purpose, which was to help Republicans kill the reform and prop up the health insurance mega-corps and the billions in profits they make off of the American middle class.

Most recently, Fox unmasked itself as an adjunct to the GOP (or, rather, vice versa) when Murdoch gave $1 million each to the Republican Governor’s Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican lobbying group. These donations came less than six months after Rupert Murdoch denied that his network had promoted the tea party mob phenomenon saying, “No. I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party.” (Emphasis added.)

But the most damning evidence that Fox is not legit is it’s flagrant race-baiting to inflame racist outrage among its 98 percent white and mostly elderly viewers. Over the past year or so Fox ran deceptively edited clips — including the James O’Keefe “pimp” videos that took down ACORN and the clip designed to make civil rights activist Shirley Sherrod appear to be anti-white, both of which were provided by the Los Angeles-based racist provocateur Andrew Breitbart, as well as a clip of a member of the New Black Panthers appearing to menace voters outside a polling station, even though no voters complained about being intimidated by him into not voting. And yet no one at Fox was fired or even reprimanded, and the network never retracted the stories or apologized for deceiving its viewers.

The good news is that people are starting to catch on that that Fox is just a Republican Party propaganda outlet. The political class certainly seems to have gotten it — the Obama White House went after the GOP spin on the network last year and Democratic politicians routinely discount information reported on Fox as nothing more than GOP spin.

There’s even some indication that viewers are catching on. The network’s ratings were down 21 percent overall last month compared with ratings from the same period in 2009.

The one group of stakeholders who stubbornly refuse to recognize Fox as a GOP agitprop organization is, paradoxically, the legitimate news media itself. Case in point, when Helen Thomas was fired over a anti-Jewish comment in August, the White House Correspondents’ Association awarded her front row seat in the White House briefing room to Fox, the race-baiting propaganda organ.

In the 14 months or so since Glenn Beck declared the United States’ first African-American president to be a racist, nearly 300 national advertisers have joined the boycott of his show. And here, at the bottom line, is the ultimate proof that Fox is a sham political operation. The fact that Beck’s show gets high ratings but makes no money for the network leaves no doubt that, for Murdoch and the other Fox executives, making a profit is secondary to Fox’s real mission of disseminating Republican Party propaganda.

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