More Self-Referentially Absurd Claims Of Fox News Bias

The accusations of Fox News’ bias continue to prove that the real bias is coming from all the other media outlets.

Barack Obama’s Communications Director Anita Dunn came out and demagogued Fox News for not rendering the proper Nazi salute for Obama and the Democrat agenda.  During the course of her spiel, she said:

“They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

It should be pointed out that CNN had actually just FACT CHECKED a Saturday Night Live sketch critical of Barack Obama.  Somehow, the weekly SNL lampooning of Sarah Palin which went on for four months never bothered CNN.

If that demonstration of leftwing bias wasn’t pathetic enough, CNN – the very next day following Anita Dunn’s holding them up as the paradigm of journalistic virtue – attacked conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh with fraudulent quotes as part of a massive liberal slander campaign.  Which somehow they didn’t feel the need to bother to fact check.

In a different forum, Anita Dunn said the following about how the Obama campaign team handled the media [Youtube]:

“But we, um, increasingly by the general election, very rarely, did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control.”

You can frankly only imagine what a snit such people could get in trying to deal with a media outlet that refused to allow itself to be controlled.

A discussion between George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” and Obama senior adviser David Axelrod from yesterday, October 18, continues the trend of the Obama White House demonizing Fox News on other media outlets — no matter how hypocritical it looks:

RUPERT MURDOCH, NEWSCORP: There were some strong remarks coming out of the White House about one or two of the commentators on Fox News.  And all I can tell you is it has tremendously increased their ratings.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: That does seem to be true. Are you worried that your strategy is fortifying your enemy?

AXELROD: Well, I don’t — you know, I’m not concerned. Mr. Murdoch has a — has a talent for making money, and I understand that their programming is geared toward making money. All — the only argument Anita was making is that they’re not really a news station, if you watch — even — it’s not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view.

And the bigger thing is that other news organizations, like yours, ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way. We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.

Am I the only one who remembers that George Stephanopoulos was Bill Clinton’s press secretary and spin doctor before suddenly transforming into someone who was incapable of “pushing one point of view.”

By contrast, Chris Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday” – Fox News’ counterpart to ABC’s “This Week” – is a career journalist who came to Fox News after a long stint at ABC.

Moral of the story: the only way for a broadcast media station to NOT “push a point of view” is to hire career Democrat political operatives.

Let us please face a basic fact: the media is absolutely ridden with liberals.  Career MSNBC and CBS journalist Mika Brzezinski had some amazing declarations about the extent to which liberals dominated the networks she worked for.

As yet another illustration of the double-speak dishonesty of the Obama administration, the White House was saying that they were going to start playing nice with Fox News on the very same day that David Axelrod was out further demonizing them.

Even the left is now realizing that Barack Obama is a spoiled brat and a “whiner-in-chief” who has become downright Nixonian in his endless inability to handle any kind of media criticism.

Fox News is actually quite accurate, indeed, according to numerous major independent media studies.

Here’s a recent Newsmax article regarding a recent survey from Sacred Heart University that begins, “Fox News has supplanted CNN as the ‘most trusted’ news source for Americans, a new nationwide poll finds.” Which is another way of saying most Americans completely disagree with you.

That survey reveals how insane the Obama White House is; they are directly attacking and demonizing the news network that Americans trust more than any other.

A study done jointly by the University of Chicago and Stanford University found Fox News to be more accurate than most other news outlets, in addition to finding a dramatic leftist bias in the news media overall.

In addition to that finding, a UCLA study concludes, “almost all major media outlets tilt to the left,” noting that “Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center.”   But apparently many liberals believe that a university located in liberal California in ultra-liberal Los Angeles is somehow a conservative bastion loaded with rightwing bias.

The media was actually so blatantly biased throughout its 2008 election coverage that it is completely accurate to say that we are now in a propaganda state. There is no possible way that Republicans can win in this media climate: whether you look at the Media Research Center, or at the Project for Excellence in Journalism (or again at their more recent study), or at the University of Wisconsin’s Wisconsin Advertising Project, there is widespread agreement with one longtime ABC journalist that the media is dangerously biased.  Pew Research discovered that Americans believe by a 70% to 9% margin that the media is biased in favor of Obama and against McCain. The media now represents a fifth column of government – a propaganda wing – that routinely attacks conservatives and celebrates and defends Democrats and their leftwing ideology.  Democracy itself is going extinct in the country that founded democracy, because no free society can survive such a climate of propaganda.

Just how blatantly biased are journalists?

From Media Research:

89 percent of Washington-based reporters said they voted for Bill Clinton in 1992.  Only seven percent voted for George Bush, with two percent choosing Ross Perot. […]

Based on the 139 Washington bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents who returned the Freedom Forum questionnaire, the Washington-based reporters — by an incredible margin of nine-to-one — overwhelmingly cast their presidential ballots in 1992 for Democrat Bill Clinton over Republican incumbent George Bush.

There is overwhelming historic evidence of hardcore leftwing bias throughout our mainstream media, but we’re somehow supposed to ignore the giant logs of bias located in both the mainstream media’s eyes and instead concentrate on the speck of bias at Fox News.

Major studies and surveys of media accuracy have for several years routinely discovered that the media is overwhelmingly tilted to the left. Fox News looks so “Republican” to many only because so much of the media is so utterly and completely “Democrat.”

White House Ignores War In Afghanistan To Pursue New War On Fox News

Up until the exaltation of The One – may socialist Scandinavians place golden medallions around his neck forever – the Democrats’ spiel on Afghanistan was that it was the right war, the top priority war, the just war, the necessary war, but that the devil Bush ignored Afghanistan while he focused on Iraq.

Iraq, of course, was the unwinnable war (even after Bush won it), and the surge strategy was bound to be a costly failure (even after it worked).

Well, now that Obama – in the words of a leftist “journalist” – “stands above the country” and “above the world” as “sort of God,” well, the “change” the left kept blathering about resulted in a change of focus:

Afghanistan is no longer the “war of necessity,” or the “top priority,” or the “cause that could not be more just.”  Nope.  That war morphed into the war that the White House has declared on Fox News.

White House communications director, Anita Dunn:

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director.

And:

“The reality of it is that Fox often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

And:

“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Mind you, every major totalitarian dictator in the world is more “legitimate” than Fox News, as far as the White House is concerned:

White House communications director Anita Dunn also said this:

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Yes, that’s right.  Dunn is referring to CNN — the same CNN that demonstrated that it is so completely in the tank for the Obama agenda that it actually “FACT-CHECKED” a Saturday Night Live skit.

That’s the criteria for “a news network”: complete ideological loyalty.

Obama pretty much pointed that out himself when he addressed White House correspondents:

“Most of you covered me; all of you voted for me.  Apologies to the Fox table.”

Unlike all the other media, Fox correspondents didn’t vote for Obama.  And that’s enough to declare war.  For all must love The One.  No dissension can be tolerated.

Mind you, while the White House asserts that Fox News is evil because it – alone by itself – is not in the tank with Obama, it’s interesting to see that Obama himself is in the tank for SEIU and the hard-core union agenda as he vows to “paint the nation purple.”

We’ve seen this reaction to media criticism by a president before – from the darkest and most evil days of Richard Nixon.  It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t end well.

Is Fox the media arm of the Republican Party?  Viewers who are flocking to Fox News in droves don’t seem to think so:

Fox News Channel was the 2nd highest rated cable channel on all of television during the first quarter of 2009 in prime time Total Viewers. CNN was 17th and MSNBC 24th for the first three months of the year. FNC beat CNN and MSNBC combined and gained the most compared to the first quarter of 2008, up 24%. 2009’s first quarter was FNC’s 3rd highest rated quarter in prime time in the network’s history — just behind Q4 ’08 and Q3 ’05. In prime time, ages 25-54 demo, and in total day in both categories, FNC grew more year-to-year than CNN and MSNBC combined. FNC had nine of the top 10 programs on cable news in Total Viewers.

The hardly right-wing UCLA seems to find plenty of bias from all of those journalists that Obama boasted voted for him, rather than Fox:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

To the extent that Fox News is biased to the right, every single other news outlet is biased toward the left.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs’ study concluded that Fox News was in fact the most fair and balanced network, concluding:

Fox News Channel’s coverage was more balanced toward both parties than the broadcast networks were. On FOX, evaluations of all Democratic candidates combined were split almost evenly — 51% positive vs. 49% negative, as were all evaluations of GOP candidates — 49% positive vs. 51% negative, producing a perfectly balanced 50-50 split for all candidates of both parties.

Sacred Heart University’s media study discovered that Fox News was the most trusted in the nation:

Researchers were asked which national television news organization they trusted most for accurate reporting. Fox News was named by 30.0% of all respondents – up from 19.5% in 2003 and 27.0% in 2007.

Those named most frequently as the television news organization most trusted for accurate reporting in 2009 included: Fox News (30.0%), CNN (19.5%), NBC News (7.5%) and ABC News (7.5%). Fox News was also the television news organization trusted least. Just over one-quarter, 26.2%, named Fox News, followed by NBC News (9.9%), MSNBC (9.4%), CNN (8.5%), CBS News (5.3%) and ABC News (3.7%).

In fact, it didn’t come all that far from being TWICE as trusted as the runner-up, CNN (the network that fact-checks SNL sketches that are negative to Obama).

So this war – that again seems to be replacing the “just war of necessity” that Afghanistan was SUPPOSED to be is just ridiculous.

It merely shows just how dramatically ideological this administration truly is.

It also explains why former longtime ABC correspondent Chris Wallace said of the Obama administration:

“They are the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

Let’s just take a second to consider what Obama seems to think about the media, as evidenced by his selection of Mark Lloyd to be his FCC Diversity Czar.  Remember that cartoon of dictators that Obama has met with?  Obama’s FCC Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd admiringly said this of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez:

“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution – a democratic revolution.  To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela….The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled – worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government – worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”

Just as Obama is now taking Fox News seriously in this country.

But how did Hugo Chavez “take very seriously the media”?

Newsbusters answers that by simply pointing to the facts in Venezuela:

NGOs Warn of Restrictions in Pending Venezuela Law

Associated Press – May 7, 2009

Prominent Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations warned Thursday that a bill being drafted by lawmakers loyal to President Hugo Chavez could be used to financially strangle groups that criticize the government.

Chavez clamps down on broadcast media

Irish Examiner – Friday, July 10, 2009

President Hugo Chavez’s government is imposing tough new regulations on Venezuela’s cable television while revoking the licenses of more than 200 radio stations.

Report: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez aggressively seizing control of media

Miami Herald – August 14, 2009

An unclassified report lists examples of Venezuelan government efforts to crack down on or seize control of media outlets to stifle criticism.

How’s that for a chronology of authoritarian censorship?

And Obama’s choice for FCC Diversity Czar also had this to say:

[From a 2005 Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice]: “Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions.  And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem.

We’re in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.”

It’s nice of Mark Lloyd to acknowledge that there are “good white people” around – just before he announces the need to have a purge of white people from the media.  But Mark Lloyd is a racist who has also said:

“There are few things I think more frightening in the American mind than dark skinned black men. Here I am.”

And Barack Obama also showed what he thought about free speech rights when his selection for FCC Diversity Czar said:

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

“[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.”

So we pretty much know where the Obama White House is coming from: the media should be the exclusive tool of leftist propaganda to advance the Obama agenda.  Only Obama voters need apply to be considered as “journalists.”  Free speech is a terribly overrated thing, which needs to be “reinterpreted” to exclude ANYONE who has ANYTHING but a far-leftist revolutionary agenda.  And Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has provided the American left with the model as to how to proceed in that direction.

Obama is dithering around in Afghanistan while our soldiers languish and die for lack of support.  But he seems all to willing to pursue his war on Fox News with a gusto.

In both the war in Afghanistan and the war on Fox News, the threat is to freedom itself.