Does Fox News need credibility? In one sense, no — no more than Pravda needed credibility when it was the Communist Party’s main propaganda outlet in the Soviet days.
On the other hand, Fox’s audience is shrinking. It lost 21 percent of all viewers and 26 percent of younger viewers in the year ending last September.
There’s evidence that a corollary loss in credibility may be driving the shrinkage. A poll from PPP released last week found that Fox’s rating on trustworthiness dropped 16 percentage points in the past 12 months.
Another factor: Fox viewers have a median age of 65. Its audience is literally dying off.
Frances Fox PivenThe Center for Constitutional Rights has sent a letter to Fox president, Roger Ailes, warning him that Republican propagandist Glenn Beck’s on-going, libelous criticism of Dr. Frances Fox Piven has generated threats of violence against the 78 year old professor:
the CCR asks that Ailes distinguish between First Amendment rights, of which they are “vigorous defenders” and an “intentional repetition of provocative, incendiary, emotional misinformation and falsehoods [that place that person] in actual physical danger of a violent response.”
Beginning in September of 2010, Glenn Beck started branding Piven, a distinguished professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as an “enemy of the Constitution.” Piven, well known for advocating for the organizational rights of the poor and encouraging voter registration, has since received threatening phone calls and letters, and has become the subject of many death threats left open to the public on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze.”
Sarah Palin needs help – I don’t mean psychological help. (She probably needs that, too, but I am apathetic about her personal or psychological well-being.) The professional help she needs is political.
Oddly, and Fox Kremlin watchers take note, she didn’t include Glenn Beck among the victims, perhaps a sign that she is distancing herself from him because other crazed would-be assassins have cited Beck by name as the inspiration for their violence.
As I wrote last week, she has surrounded herself with political neophytes whom she can dominate, rather than experienced professionals, whom she can’t, and the neophytes are enabling her self-destruction.
In the early hours after the gun attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Jan. 8, experienced aides — or, really, anyone with common sense — would have advised Palin to, pardon the war metaphors, hold fire, keep her powder dry and not go off half-cocked before details about the tragedy were confirmed.
Instead, her team of know-nothings panicked, apparently in reaction to an early erroneous report on Fox that Giffords had died. They were desperate because they knew that sooner or later the folks at MSNBC would re-broadcast an interview with the late Rep. Giffords from March in which Giffords herself laid blame at Palin’s feet:
Someone’s finally sorting out the mess that is Jared Loughner’s mind and discovering what most of us have suspected all along. Loughner has much more in common with rightwing extremists than with the political left. Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones explains what Loughner’s obsession with grammar means to people in the “sovereign citizen” movement, which among many other things, maps out strategies to avoid paying taxes.
Glenn Beck would no doubt be envious of the hairpin logic used by the “sovereign citizens”
Many of his seemingly random statements—on “grammar,” “the ratifications,” “the new currency,” and more—echo the teachings of the “sovereign citizen” movement, a right-wing school of thought alleging that Americans have been surreptitiously stripped of their God-given rights.
These are not random parallels, as I discovered in reviewing Loughner’s YouTube videos. In multiple instances, he uses the precise talking points sovereign-citizen theorists teach via a thriving cottage industry of books, websites, bogus legal companies, and seminars; one popular theorist, David Wynn Miller, told the New York Times that Loughner has “probably been on my website.”
It is fair to say that, upon learning about the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday, most regular Americans assumed that a deranged tea partier had been pushed over the edge by one anti-government, anti-Democratic Party dog whistle too many from the GOP’s Fox channel personalities and hate radio propagandists.
That’s certainly what people close to Giffords assumed. On Saturday, as he rushed to his daughter’s side at the hospital, Spencer Giffords, 75, was asked if Gabrielle had any enemies. “Yeah,” he replied, “the whole tea party.”
Over the ensuing three days, it has become clear that the alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, suffered from delusions, at least, and, at worst, was in throes of mental illness that was untreated, perhaps even undiagnosed.
It is equally clear that Loughner planned the attack and specifically targeted Rep. Giffords, a Democrat, because she was a member of Congress. When police searched Loughner’s home, they found an envelope on which he had written, “I planned ahead,” and “My assassination” and the name “Giffords.”
And witnesses say Loughner ran through the crowd at the congresswoman’s event in Tucson and opened fire when he spotted her talking with constituents.
What is still murky, however, is whether or to what extent the toxic political environment, which is especially acute in Arizona, home to nationally known Republican hatemongers Sen. John McCain and Gov. Jan Brewer, played a role in his rampage.
For those of us following the coverage of the mass shooting aimed at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords who are sick of the false equivalency arguments (“But what about Daily Kos?”), the bending over backward denials (“They were surveyors marks, not gun scope sights”), and pleas by the right not to rush to judgment (like they do with every ginned up news cycle concerning the NPRs and Van Joneses of the world), The Rude Pundit offers some relief. He is calling out the same folks as the sheriff of Pima County did — those who earn a living inflaming the American people.
Rude Pundit: ‘Gosh, it’s just wrong to lump you all together, to stereotype you all as criminals in waiting. Like, you know, you have done with Muslims since September 11, 2001’
He goes one further, though, by including the viewers and listeners and readers who indulge those leaders, who drive up their ratings, and who ultimately pay their salaries. And if you are among them, The Rude Pundit leaves you nowhere to hide.
Following are excerpts from what could have been called, “Dear Right-Wingers: We Reject Your Every Attempt to Evade Blame” but which is, instead, the much better titled, “Dear Right-Wingers: You Are All Muslims Now.”
How you must have heaved in relief when you saw that it would be quite easy to portray Jared Lee Loughner as a raving psychopath, an effort that’s helped a great deal by the apparent truth, which is that Jared Lee Loughner is a raving psychopath…
Now, ah, yes, now, lovely right-wingers, you could defend yourself. You could work yourselves into a huff about how unjustly you were accused of driving this obviously disturbed individual into an act of calculated, cold-blooded violence. But that’s because you’re sitting there in your shit-filled underpants, thinking, “I don’t believe in violence. I don’t approve this. I hope the government doesn’t try to crack down on us.”
So, welcome, assholes, because you are Muslim now.
When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry…People tend to “pooh-pooh” this business about all this vitriol we hear enflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.
Pima County, Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, answering the question he was asked repeatedly in the wake of the terrorist attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Az.) that claimed six lives. The question was, “Why did it happen?”
In case you missed it in the pre-holiday bustle last week, the University of Maryland has released results of a study that found the Republican Party’s Fox propaganda channel deliberately deceives its viewers by presenting disinformation as “news.”
Even if you heard about the survey, what you may have missed is that, given an opportunity to debunk the findings, to provide a point by point refutation of the results, Fox’s point person chose instead to attack the University of Maryland as a “party school.”
First, here are the findings from the survey showing for each assertion both the anti-factual information Fox viewers believe to be true (with the share of Fox viewers versus non-viewers shown in parentheses) along with the reality-based fact:
Amount invested in General Motors by Muslim billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, as reported by the Wall St. Journal. The Muslim prince also owns “at least a 7 percent, $2.3 billion stake in Fox’s parent company News Corp.,” according to the right-wing extremist propaganda website World Net Daily. Other sources say Alawaleed is the fourth largest investor in News Corp., along with Australia native Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch family. News Corp. owns both the Wall St. Journal and the GOP-operated Fox “News” channel. What makes the purchase of 1 percent of GM by this foreign owner of Republican Party media outlets is the fact that GOP propagandists used his media empire to rail against the Obama administration’s bailout of GM, sneering at it as “Government Motors” and loudly, repeatedly — and wrongly — predicting it would fail.
In the diplomatic ranks, trained professionals toil,
To keep the peace and tamp down foreign turmoil.
But for Greek ambassador,
Trump picked an artful dodger —
The grifting, drunken blackmailer Kimberly Guilfoyle.
A record number of women are running for state legislative seats this November, more than two-thirds of whom are Democrats, reports Florida Phoenix. Across the 46 states with legislative seats on the ballot, a total of 3,824 women are running — up from 2022’s previous record of 3,621 women candidates, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Women make up 35.5% of all state legislative candidates this cycle. Currently, women hold about one-third of state legislative seats across the country — a record level of representation but nowhere near parity.
“Prediction markets about the 2026 midterm elections have surpassed $1.4 billion in trading volume as Election Day fast approaches,” CNN reports. “This year has seen massive growth in the prediction industry, where people can bet on real-world events like sports, entertainment and the weather. While small-scale election markets have been around for a while, they gained traction before the 2024 presidential election and have seen huge numbers for the 2026 midterms.”
G. Elliot Morris: “Low-knowledge 2024 voters say they backed Trump by 8 points, according to our poll. Today they give him a net job approval of ?27, a 35-point shift. Compare that to Trump’s approval rating among voters who got both questions right: These voters backed Harris by 1 point and now give Trump a net ?24 approval, a 23-point shift. … Low-information voters have moved against Trump at a higher rate than high-information voters, by 12 points.”
President Donald ?Trump’s approval rating fell to a record low as Americans worried about high gasoline prices and appeared ready to punish his Republican Party in the November 3 congressional elections, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Monday. Some 31% of Americans approve of Trump’s ?performance in office, down a percentage point from two weeks earlier and the lowest level in ?either of his presidential terms, the four-day poll showed.
KFF Poll: “With the 2026 midterm campaigns in full swing and early voting about to begin, there is a wide enthusiasm gap between partisan voters, with Democratic voters 25 percentage points more likely than Republican voters to say they are ‘more motivated’ than usual to vote (63% vs. 38%).”
Does Fox News need credibility? In one sense, no — no more than Pravda needed credibility when it was the Communist Party’s main propaganda outlet in the Soviet days. 
