One of the interesting things about the mainstream media’s wars on Fox is just how hypocritical the Fox News haters are.
As an example, Geraldine Ferraro passed away. Fox News spent the day honoring the first woman to truly break the ceiling in the modern political era. And although a famous liberal, Ferraro was a Fox News contributor. Because Fox News actually is fair and balanced. Roger Ailes personally honored Geraldine Ferraro as a woman who “made deep contributions on a number of significant issues.” Which is to say that Fox News shows a degree of class that is entirely lacking in the media dominated by the unbalanced and hysterical left.
When the mainstream media outlets hires Sarah Palin as a highly-respected contributor, come back and see me.
If you watch leftwing liberal hatchet organizations such as Media Matters, and then watch the mainstream news coverage, it is remarkable how often talking points that started with the KoolAid-drinking Media Matters end up on the “respected” mainstream media coverage.
It’s amazing how you hear a leftwing narrative, and then the rest of the mainstream media start screeching that same narrative like parrots.
And then, unlike Fox News – which frequently features liberals such as Kirsten Powers, Bob Beckell, Geraldine Ferarro, Geraldo Rivera, Wesley Clark, Judith Miller, Mara Liasson, Harold Ford, Jr. Juan Williams, Al Sharpton, Ed Rendell, and many others – there are no conservative voices to rebut the Media Matters-mainstream media talking points that invariably and regularly appear on the other channels.
Media Matters says it. The mainstream media outlets pick it up and report it much the way they pick up and report other ideological leftist sources such as the New York Times, and it is spat out as “fact.”
Meanwhile, the Democrats made fellow KoolAid organization the Daily Kos a host of one of their presidential debates, the founder of that organization went to another mainstream media organization (Newsweek), and Arianna Huffington’s ideological liberalism went even MORE mainstream with her going into AOL News. And then there’s George Soros, the far-leftist money man for Media Matters, also giving $1.8 million to “objective” NPR to hire reporters so they can cover the news more “fairly.”
Hopefully, this will make that hypocritical and intellectually bankrupt pseudo-journalist propaganda a little bit tougher. But I doubt it.
Media Matters’ war against Fox
By: Ben Smith
March 26, 2011 07:23 AM EDTThe liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.
The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the “nerve center” of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement, as well as the loathing it inspires among liberals — not least among the donors who fund Media Matters’ staff of about 90, who are arrayed in neat rows in a giant war room above Massachusetts Avenue.
“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.
The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.”
In an interview and a 2010 planning memo shared with POLITICO, Brock listed the fronts on which Media Matters — which he said is operating on a $10 million-plus annual budget — is working to chip away at Fox and its parent company, News Corp. They include its bread-and-butter distribution of embarrassing clips and attempts to rebut Fox points, as well as a series of under-the-radar tactics.
Media Matters, Brock said, is assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials. It has hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show. The group is assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes. And it has hired two experienced reporters, Joe Strupp and Alexander Zaitchik, to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012 from Vintage/Anchor. (In the interest of full disclosure, Media Matters last month also issued a report criticizing “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy’s criticism of this reporter’s blog.)
Brock said Media Matters also plans to run a broad campaign against Fox’s parent company, News Corp., an effort which most likely will involve opening a United Kingdom arm in London to attack the company’s interests there. The group hired an executive from MoveOn.org to work on developing campaigns among News Corp. shareholders and also is looking for ways to turn regulators in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere against the network.
The group will “focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests — whether that be here or looking at what’s going on in London right now,” Brock said, referring to News Corp.’s — apparently successful — move to take a majority stake in the satellite broadcaster BSkyB.
A spokeswoman for Fox News, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Media Matters’ efforts, but the group draws regular barbs from Fox hosts Beck and Bill O’Reilly.
“Tonight is not an episode you casually watch and take out of context like Media Matters does,” Beck remarked last month.
A more extended attack came in February on the freewheeling late night show Red Eye, which conducted a mock interview with a purported Media Matters employee.
“It’s horrible. All we do is sit and watch Fox News and make up stuff about Fox News. It is the saddest place I have ever seen in my life. I think about it, and I want to throw up,” the mock employee said. “I get to work and I take off my clothes, and they strap me into a chair in front of a TV with [Fox News Channel] on. They keep my eyelids propped open like in “Clockwork Orange,” and I sit and type all day.
“If there was no Beck, George Soros would come down and demand we make it up,” the “interviewee” continued. “I would watch the “Flintstones” and transcribe Fred Flintstone’s words and attribute them to Beck. It was the only way to get Soros to stop hitting me.”
(A Soros associate said the financier, who gave Media Matters $1 million last year, did not earmark it for the Fox campaign. Soros suggested in a recent CNN interview that the Fox depictions of him as a sinister media manipulator would better be applied to Murdoch.)
In some views, the war between Media Matters and Fox is not, necessarily, bad for either side. Media Matters has transformed itself into a pillar of the progressive movement with its aggressive new brand of media campaigning. And the attacks cement Fox’s status on the right.
“Fox is happy about it — and it makes their position more vivid among their supporters,” said Paul Levinson, a media studies professor at Fordham University. “One way of keeping your core supporters happy is to be attacked by people your core supporters don’t like.”
But Media Matters says its digging has begun to pay off. The group has trickled out a series of emails from Washington Bureau Chief Bill Sammon, leaks from inside the network, which show him, for instance, circulating a memo on “Obama’s references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists.”
The leaks are part of a broader project to take advantage of internal dissent, Media Matters Executive Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt said.
“We made a list of every single person who works for Fox and tried to figure out who might be disgruntled and why, and we went out to try to meet them,” he said. “Clearly, somebody in that organization is giving us primary source documents.”
Media Matters, he said, is also conducting “opposition research” on a dozen or so “mid- and senior-level execs and producers,” a campaign style move that he and Brock said would simply involve recording their public appearances and digging into public records associated with them.
And Brock’s 2010 planning memo offers a glimpse at Media Matters’ shift from media critic to a new species of political animal.
“Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press,” its memo says. “Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.”
The tactics that Media Matters are using – “sabotage” even on their own acknowledgment – ought to show any decent person that the mainstream media has truly been infiltrated by fascist, Soviet-style thugs.
I mean, think about it: “guerrilla warfare and sabotage”? This is done by people and organizations who have “Little Red Books” or “Mein Kampfs” to accompany their tactics. Fox News isn’t out there using “guerrilla warfare and sabotage”; it’s the people who say Fox News is evil who then use the most profoundly un-American tactics. That should be very informative to non-moral idiots.
Sadly, while conservatives rose up in 2010, it seems that the long-term trend is that there are fewer and fewer decent people who are willing to do less and less. And all the while the hateful left are busy working like ants stripping the dying carcass of America.
Bad people not only lie; they believe lies. That’s why we’re seeing more and more lies today. And it’s why the left can justify openly using “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” that would have been condemned by better people.
Jesus talked about the last days. He said a lot of terrifying things would happen. There would be worldwide economic collapses, wars and rumors of wars, many earthquakes and great signs in the oceans in many diverse places, and famines; all anticipating a coming antichrist (“the beast”) who would promise a Utopia but who would ultimately deliver hell on earth.
And it’s all coming while we watch NBC smuggle in Media Matters’ talking points in the guise of “news.”
Obama and his White House has tried to ban Fox News – one of the big four of the media – from being able to cover the news. Obama’s White House has repeatedly launched flat-out propaganda campaigns against Fox news. The news media – realizing how outrageous it would be if a conservative president did this same thing to one of them – erupted in outrage against Obama for his blatant attempt to control the media like a fascist dictator. When Obama tried to freeze out Fox News even though Fox News had been a member of the pool consisting of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox News since 1997, the ALL refused to send reporters until Obama backed down. But Obama is STILL doing it as recently as yesterday. At his heart, he is a fascist. He demands that he be able to control the media and control the message.
The other day the Obama White House demonstrated this instinct toward fascistic control again: they literally shut a reporter in a cramped closet and kept demanding that he stay in there.
You can bet that the antichrist, the beast, will have control over the media and the message.
And sadddest of all, what Jesus said would precede all of this horror and misery as the leftwing socialist big government beast was the final apathetic and self-absorbed era of the Laodicean church.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer – who gave his own life in his stand against Adolf Hitler – said a few things that truly apply to us as we sit idly by watching our boob tubes while bad people with a bad agenda take the world away from us:
“When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.”
“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Stop letting these people “frame the news” while you watch like a slack-jawed drooling imbecile. If you’re going to sit there, at least muster the moral outrage to change the channel.
Start Thinking Right 