Media Matters for America - Columns by Eric Boehlert

Palin's book and Obama's bow: a media week to forget

Eric Boehlert — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:43:48 EST

Ugh, what a gruesome week it was for news consumers as the "serious" press showered time and attention on two GOP-friendly stories that defined "trivial pursuits": a book release and a bow. Sadly, this is what the Beltway press corps now voluntarily -- eagerly -- reduces itself to: chasing pointless, vacuous "news" stories that are literally of no consequence.

Why? Because the book and bow represented the easy, lazy, and safe thing to do last week. And among media elites, those remain three irresistible forces. (Raise your hand if you heard even one insightful comment about Sarah Palin amidst the TV cacophony last week.) That, along with the media's tradition of acquiescing to whatever production/distraction the GOP Noise Machine is cooking up, ensured the book and bow were elevated to breaking news status. Meaning, if it's a big deal to Drudge and Limbaugh and Beck and Malkin -- if they're all cheering it (Palin's book) or if they're all screaming about it (President Obama's bow) -- it must be news. In reality, of course, that's an awful way to run a newsroom assignment desk. But more and more producers and editors are gladly abdicating their responsibilities.

Not that long ago, serious journalists routinely ignored the noisemakers on the fringe, confident in their own ability to identify the news. Now, many inside the Beltway not only refuse to ignore the right-wing fringe, they look to it expectantly for "news" leads and soon find themselves filing pointless stories about whether the president's bow to the Japanese emperor was too deep. Or inappropriate. Or whatever the haters were carping about. (Of course, in news accounts, the unhinged haters are dressed up as Obama "critics.")

Not only did we see monumentally misguided decisions in obsessing over Palin's book release and even acknowledging the manufactured controversy of Obama's bow, but lots of the actual coverage was just atrocious. ABC News, in particular, seemed to embarrass itself in this regard.

Sitting down for a softball session with Palin, ABC's Barbara Walters asked her if it was Obama who lied about the health reform "death panels." Of course, as the whole world (minus Walters) knows, it was Palin who manufactured the universally debunked "death panel" smear this summer. But on ABC, Walters wanted to know if Obama was lying when he claimed death panels did not exist. Walters then allowed Palin to claim Obama had been "disingenuous" about the whole thing. (Welcome to Bizarro World.)

Meanwhile, for the utterly pointless tale of Obama's bow, ABC's Jake Tapper published an anonymous email from a "friend" (I kid you not) who claimed to be an expert on the Japanese Empire, and who mocked the president's bend-at-the-waist greeting. And yes, that represented the entirety of Tapper's "reporting" on the topic for that post. (BTW, Tapper's friend was dead wrong in his analysis, according to lots of named experts in Japanese culture and protocol.)

So yes, it was a media week to forget as the press covered the wrong stories, poorly.

My favorite headline from Palin Week, and the one that perfectly captured the absurdity of the media's purposeful overkill, came courtesy of Talking Points Memo, as it recapped the latest batch of (dismal) public polling data about the former Alaska governor:

Poll: Even Conservatives Don't Want Palin Running For President

What we learned from the pointless orgy of Palin news coverage last week is that the D.C. press corps has a very firm grasp on the obvious. Yes, Palin is a polarizing figure and yes, she might run for president in 2012. But honestly, did the cable channels and networks really have to mention "Palin" more than 1,700 times last week to make that blindingly obvious point. (That's the tally, according to TVeyes.) The news media's response to Palin's book was, of course, comically disproportionate to the supposed news surrounding it, or even surrounding her political status for that matter.

Based solely on her standing in the polls, Palin is the Dan Quayle of 2009. (She's the proud owner of a 23 percent favorable rating -- 23 percent.) So why do the media treat her as a rising superstar? Why, for instance, did The Washington Post insist on publishing dueling Going Rogue book reviews, an absurd editorial decision since the book itself was the definition of lightweight. ("It's definitely not a policy book and it's not going to change minds about her." And that was from a fan.)

The Palin book release story itself was built on empty, useless calories. Two or three weeks from now, nobody is going to remember (or need to remember) anything that transpired during Palin Week, because virtually nothing noteworthy happened. But journalists sure did their best to justify the madness.

The Washington Post's Michael Shear claimed that "there seems to be an insatiable demand from our audience -- liberals and conservatives -- and at the end of the day we have to, and should, respond to that." At Politico, Ben Smith explained Palin drives traffic and besides, "she's a great story and a pretty important political figure." And writing on The New York Times' Op-Ed page, a local Alaska journalist, Michael Carey, claimed, "The nation made [Palin] a celebrity."

The nation? Really? I'd say the press has made Palin a celebrity, while for the last year the nation has shrugged its collective shoulders.

Is there any evidence that since last November a large numbers of Americans who are not white evangelicals (Palin's most supportive base) and are not professional journalists (Palin's second-most supportive base), really care about what Sarah Palin thinks or says? I certainly haven't seen any proof to support that media's working assumption of Palin "mania." Yes, I understand she's selling lots of books this week. But thanks to the avalanche of free publicity, it would be shocking if she didn't move hundreds of thousands of units. (It's almost impossible to calculate how much free publicity the press generated for Palin's book with its blanketed, mass media coverage, but if pressed I'd guess the news media delivered at least $30 million worth of free marketing for HarperCollins.) But is there any larger proof that Palin, who remains perennially unpopular across the country, is in any way a political force?

I'll bet five bucks that when the Pew Research numbers come out this week we'll see a massive disconnect in terms of the amount of time journalists dedicated (i.e. wasted) to the Palin story, and the microscopic percentage of news consumers who listed the Palin book launch as the story they paid the most attention to last week. Instead, once again it will be the economy or health care that top the list because (surprise!) that's what matters to people. Beltway parlor games, and especially pointless ones involving Palin, are of no interest to most news consumers.

Speaking of disconnect, we saw it on full display with regards to the non-story of Obama's bow in Japan. And what we learned from the bow kerfuffle is that the press is still unwilling to ignore the trumped-up charges that the GOP Noise Machine concocts everyday in its incessant, hateful campaign against the president. (For the media, right-wing anger = news.) I had hoped journalists learned a valuable lesson in September, when mainstream outlets took seriously, and even eagerly hyped, the far-right's pre-emptive, hysterical claim that Obama was going to indoctrinate American students into his socialist agenda when he spoke to them via satellite. In the end, though, the press looked just as foolish as the Obama haters when the president delivered his speech and simply urged students to excel in class and stay in school.

Unfortunately, the bow charade proved once again the press still cannot resist the right-wing's siren song. The press cannot turn away from the loud, fringe shouts, even when those shouts revolve around utter trivia, and when those knee-jerk shouts are about a story that can easily be answered with the question, "Who cares?" As in, who cares if some people online didn't like the angle of Obama's greeting?

The sad truth is that the press is still way too impressed with the right-wing shouts and still capitulates to them, and then dutifully translates those shouts into "news" with coverage that seems purposefully dumbed down in order to avoid bringing news consumers to the obvious conclusion that the Obama-hating allegation being "debated" that day is absurd. Or, to avoid bringing news consumers to the equally obvious conclusion that the allegation being "debated" raised more questions about critics making it (i.e. what is wrong with these people?), than it did their target.

And, oh yeah, the disconnect: A sweeping majority of Americans approved of Obama's bow. And even a majority of Republicans thought it was the right thing to do.

The press should have ignored the bow nonsense and left it to the Obama haters. Just like the press should have put an early cap on its Palin coverage. When is that liberal media going to learn?

Why is Rupert Murdoch so clueless about Fox News?

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:57:09 EST

Did you know that Sean Hannity is "an academic"? That Obama administration officials love Fox News' White House reporters? That CNN refuses to have Republicans on its program? That Glenn Beck is "purely Libertarian"? Or that there's no bias -- none -- in Fox's presentation of the news?

At least that's the gospel according to Rupert Murdoch this month.

In truth, thanks to Murdoch's recent laundry list of public falsehoods, we now know that Fox News' misinformation culture starts at the very top, inside the corner office of Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp., Fox News' parent company. It turns out Murdoch functions as his own one-man misinformation machine. Who knew?

Of course, the Murdoch falsehood that recently generated the biggest headlines last week came when, sitting for a television interview with Sky News Australia, he agreed with the claim made by Glenn Beck that President Obama (aka "this guy") was a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people." Defending Beck, Murdoch stressed that Obama himself had made a "very racist comment" (which apparently only Rupert Murdoch heard), and that Beck was "right" to point out Obama's racist ways.

Murdoch's claim was so bizarre (and false) that soon his corporate flak was forced into damage control mode and issued a non-apology apology in an effort to smooth over Murdoch's smear against Obama. But with his "racist" claim, as well as a collection of other recent falsehoods regarding Fox News, a rather obvious question has been raised: How come Murdoch remains systematically uninformed about his controversial cable channel?

The sad truth is Murdoch either has no idea what kind of programming Fox News now produces, or he's too embarrassed to watch and acknowledge it. Neither scenario is particularly flattering for the aging CEO.

Murdoch's Sky News interview in particular proved to be a treasure trove of misinformation. (See below.) But as I watched Murdoch casually toss out falsehood after falsehood about Fox News, I wondered if Murdoch was trying to fool viewers or if he was really trying to fool himself. Was Murdoch completely whitewashing the hate and unethical behavior that Fox News routinely traffics in because Murdoch himself doesn't want to be forced to honestly defend it? My hunch is that the answer is yes.

Murdoch wants to pretend (at least to himself) that ratings are up because of the sterling and insightful news reports and opinion programs Fox News is producing. He doesn't want to sully his reputation by acknowledging the hate speech and faux journalism he profits off of because Murdoch, no doubt, wants very much to maintain his charter membership in the very clubby social circles that he's traveled in for years between Washington, D.C., and New York City (i.e. Murdoch likes being invited back to Charlie Rose's round table). It's where the very serious gather to discuss the very serious topics of the day. But, of course, Fox News today is a purposefully un-serious operation (i.e. Obama is nothing more than a lowly racist/communist/Nazi/fascist), which, if Murdoch publicly acknowledged, would reflect poorly on him.

So, instead, he opts for the charade and he creates his own idea of what Fox News is today -- an idea that does not match reality.

In truth, Murdoch's outlandish claim about Obama's fictional "racist comment" is just one of many falsehoods the CEO has recently made, either during that Australian television interview or on a conference call with U.S. shareholders earlier this month.

Check out these recent greatest hits in which Murdoch:

falsely characterized Sean Hannity as being an "academic";

falsely characterized Glenn Beck as being "purely Libertarian";

falsely claimed nobody on Fox News had ever compared Obama to Stalin (i.e. "No, no, no, not Stalin");

falsely suggested Fox News' ratings shot up after its public dispute with the Obama administration began last month;

falsely claimed that administration officials agree that Fox News has been "absolutely fair" in its White House reporting;

falsely claimed the White House just doesn't like "two of our [Fox News] commentators";

falsely claimed Fox News' television competitors "only have Democrats" on to debate the issues;

falsely claimed Obama had made a "very racist comment"; and

falsely implied that The O'Reilly Factor, Your World With Neil Cavuto, and Fox & Friends, among others, are not "commentary" shows.

Where do you even start? Sean Hannity, the hyper-partisan and paranoid shouter/whiner who's built a career off being allergic to facts (and professional ethics), is an academic? Good Lord, I doubt even Hannity could keep a straight face hearing that whopper.

Meanwhile, Fox News' competitors ban Republicans from the airwaves? On what planet does that booking policy exist? Fox News' ratings spiked after its dispute with the White House went public? That's just plain false. No Obama/Stalin comparison? False. And Murdoch's cable channel only hosts two programs that traffic in partisan opinion? That's odd, because many of the channel's overt bouts of partisan misinformation appear outside the confines of Hannity and Glenn Beck:

Timeline of a [madrassa] smear

After teasing story by saying "Obama makes a little girl cry," Fox News' Kelly acknowledged it was not true

Fox News airs altered photos of NY Times reporters

Fox passes off GOP press release as its own research -- typo and all

REPORT: "Fair and balanced" Fox News aggressively promotes "tea party" protests

EXCLUSIVE: Fox News seeks to confirm wildly inaccurate reporting that it's already aired on Jennings controversy; former student seeks Fox News correction

Would a real news organization help GOP PACs raise money?

Fox's news programs echo its "opinion" shows: Smears, doctored videos, GOP talking points

Murdoch's robust bouts of misinformation in recent weeks have been impressive in their totality. But it was Murdoch's answer to the question about Beck's "racist" attack on the president that was disconcerting in so many ways; ways in which you rarely see the CEOs of media companies behave in public.

The obvious tact for a person in Murdoch's position when asked to defend the avalanche of Beck's odious and paranoid rhetoric would have been to stress that Beck's views were his own, and note that the cable channel's a defender of the First Amendment. Murdoch could have simply pointed out that while he himself would never use that kind of incendiary rhetoric, he respects Beck's right to do so. (i.e. Yada, yada, yada.)

And it's not like Murdoch doesn't have practice cleaning up after his outlets' tasteless Obama attacks. Last spring, when his money-hemorrhaging New York Post published a cartoon that seemed to liken Obama to a bullet-ridden chimp shot dead on the sidewalks of NYC, Murdoch released this statement:

Last week, we made a mistake. We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.

Instead of taking that approach when pressed about Beck, though, Murdoch gamely defended the host by agreeing with him that Obama was a racist. Specifically, the CEO claimed Obama had made a "very racist comment" [emphasis added]:

MURDOCH: On the racist thing, that caused a [unintelligible]. But he [Obama] did make a very racist comment about, you know, blacks and whites and so on, and which he said in his campaign he would be completely above. And, you know, that was something which, perhaps, shouldn't have been said about the president, but if you actually assess what he [Beck] was talking about, he was right.

This was the context of the "racist" nonsense, which is key to understanding just how blatant Murdoch's misinformation was. Beck's "racist" attack was made in the wake of last July's controversy involving professor Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer, Sgt. James Crowley. After Obama made news with his comments about the issue during a July 22 press conference, Beck called Obama a "racist." Fast-forward to November, and Murdoch claimed that in that context, Obama made "a very racist comment."

That's pure fantasy. Obama did say that the Cambridge Police Department acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates in his own home; a comment Obama quickly walked back. But there's no way that was a "racist" comment. Murdoch's claim that the president made a "very racist comment" last summer was a pure fabrication.

Again, for the head of a media and "news" company to go on international television and peddle that kind of racially tinged misinformation about the president of the United States is really quite stunning. It's more akin to what Obama's partisan political enemies would do, not a businessman.

Question: Why won't Murdoch just stand up and proudly defend what Fox News has actually become? Instead of defending what Fox News really is, Murdoch goes on television and pretends it's something else entirely. Murdoch doesn't want to talk about what Fox News has transformed itself into. He doesn't want to talk about how it's become a hothouse for the most hateful and ill-informed elements in our society. Murdoch doesn't want to acknowledge what Fox News has become because the CEO thinks of himself as a serious man, and a very serious man would be embarrassed to be associated with today's Fox News.

And who knows? Maybe deep down, Rupert Murdoch is.

The GOP's looming (media) civil war

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:47:08 EST

It's not easy to flip a congressional district that's been Republican since the late 1800s, but after being willingly hijacked by the right-wing media -- after getting steamrolled by Fox News' embrace of third-party candidate Doug Hoffman -- Republicans managed to hand Upstate New York's 23rd District to Democrats last week. And they did it just in time for the newly elected Democrat to help (barely) push health care reform through the House of Representatives during Saturday night's historic vote.

Doug Hoffman was, first and foremost, a media candidate (a media creation), which means we are entering a very new and different realm in American politics. We're entering a sort of Fox News Era where media outlets -- where alleged news organizations -- essentially co-sponsor political campaigns. We've moved well beyond the time when Fox News, for instance, leaned right and gave conservative candidates more air-time and tossed them lots of softball questions. We're now watching unfold a political reality where Fox News literally selects candidates and then markets them through Election Day.

There's a reason Hoffman described Glenn Beck as his "mentor" and pledged his "sacred honor" to uphold the "9 Principles and 12 Values" of Beck's 9/12 Project. There's a reason Sean Hannity wanted to "declare" Hoffman the election winner, and why Fox News' on-screen graphic read "Conservative Revolution?" when Hoffman was being interviewed (i.e. prematurely crowned) by Hannity on the eve of Election Day.

Hoffman's outsider bid, originally opposed by the Republican Party, was a media production, plain and simple, which means his loss was a media loss, as well.

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich had it right when he told The Washington Times that Hoffman's rise as a third party candidate was the "result of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News." Gingrich, who originally opposed Hoffman's candidacy, added: "This was not an isolated amateur; this is an entire movement."

Indeed, it's a media movement that's doing it's best to obliterate the line between journalism and politics.

As I've been noting for some time, Fox News has transformed itself into the Opposition Party of the Obama White House. So it makes sense that, as a purely partisan player, Fox New would immerse itself in backroom horse-trading. It makes sense that rather than covering the campaigns and the candidates, Fox News would insert itself as a political player within Republican contests and throw its support behind a specific candidate, the way it did in NY-23.

The looming problem for the GOP, though, is that the right-wing media can't pick winners and stands poised to rip the Republican Party apart. (Did you notice how Limbaugh last week claimed "Newt" had "screwed the whole [NY-23] thing up"?)

It's yet more evidence that during President Bush's pro-war tenure, far-right radio and TV talkers, along with fringe bloggers, convinced themselves they represented the mainstream -- the majority -- of the GOP. But they don't. They represent the radical CPAC wing of the GOP, and it shows on Election Day. We saw that in 2008, when bloggers and talkers opposed Sen. John McCain in the GOP primaries yet were completely unable to sway Republican voters in the process. In the immortal words of Republican strategist Mike Murphy, "These radio guys can't deliver a pizza, let alone a nomination."

What's different now, though, is that the right-wing media have become even more powerful within conservative circles, while the Republican National Committee and traditional Republican leaders have receded even further into the background. (Does anyone really see Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the leader of anything?) That power vacuum means it's Fox News that sets the conservative agenda in America. It's at Fox News where partisan strategies are hatched, rallies are marketed, and smear campaigns are launched. And it's Republican politicians and traditional Beltway professionals who are forced to play catch-up to the conservative media.

In other words, in just the last 12 months, the balance of power within the conservative movement has completely swung in the direction of the right-wing press, which is stoking the flames of the GOP civil war. It's a partisan press corps that no longer documents internal Republican squabbling; it initiates the infighting.

National political parties go through all kinds of evolutions; all kinds of natural expansions and contractions over time. (Barry Goldwater, for instance, oversaw perhaps the GOP's most radical contraction in modern times.) It's quite rare, though, for the catalyst of that change to be external media forces. Sure, permanent Beltway insiders such as Bill Kristol have routinely hopped back and forth between "the role of Republican flack and alleged journalist without changing even a comma in his prose 'style'," as columnist Eric Alterman noted last week.

But what we're seeing unfold in 2009 is something entirely different. This isn't a few conservative pundits dipping their toes into Republican political waters during election cycles and trying to generate an electoral wave. And this isn't like 1994 when AM talk radio morphed into an RNC echo chamber and helped spread the Republicans' anti-Clinton message.

This is a case where huge swaths of the conservative media, including television, radio, and online, have shed any façade of being journalists and embraced their king-making role. Or, if savaging a GOP candidate is what's needed, as was the case in NY-23 and Dede Scozzafava, then they'll do that as well.

Looking forward, it's inevitable that during the 2012 GOP Republican primary season, there will be, for the lack of a better term, a Fox News candidate in the field. There will be a far-right darling of the Tea Party movement (cough, cough, Sarah Palin) who has both the official (Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin) and unofficial (Fox News) endorsement of the right-wing media.

But will that do any good in the real world? Ask Doug Hoffman.

Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and Malkin, among others, all put their reputations on the line in NY-23, touting the contest as a referendum on the anti-Obama, Tea Party movement in America. And they lost, big time. Not unlike the way the same right-wing media leaders put their reputations on the line in early 2008 and went all-in against McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary. (FYI, McCain wasn't sufficiently conservative.) Result? McCain won the SC contest in a walk.

See a pattern here? Me, too. The Republican Party is now attached to a political movement -- a media-led movement -- that cannot win elections. It's a movement that cannot even win elections in traditionally red districts (NY-23) or in very red states (SC). By refusing to separate itself from media players who claim the president of the United States is a racist and a Nazi, the GOP may be assigning itself a permanent minority status.

And I'm sorry, but belated and feeble attempts by Republican leaders such as Rep. Eric Cantor to create the slightest glimmer of daylight between the GOP and the right-wing media aren't going to do the trick. (For the record, comparing health care reform to the Holocaust was the line Limbaugh and company recently crossed, according to Cantor. Good to know.) Republican politicians in 2009 have made it blindingly obvious that they lack both the courage to consistently stand up to the far-right media's hate merchants and the resources. Meaning, without the energy of the fringe activists who insist Obama is destroying America on purpose, the Republican Party would be virtually kaput today.

Disillusioned "Right Wing" blogger Rick Moran, recently bemoaning what he sees as the rise of an "anti-reason" movement on the far right, may have put it best when he asked, "What is it that possesses certain conservatives to fool themselves so spectacularly into believing that they can create a majority out of a minority?"

His definition of "anti-reason" conservatives, who now anchor the right-wing media, seemed dead-on, as well: "[T]hose who reject reality in favor of persecution complexes, wildly exaggerated hyperbole, and a frightening need for vengeance against their imagined 'enemies.' "

Moran actually penned that lament before the votes were counted in the NY-23 congressional race. And incredibly, the "anti-reason" fanatics Moran described were encouraged by the results in Upstate New York, which, in a strange way, actually made sense. Of course anti-reason conservatives would celebrate as a victory the fact that a district that hadn't elected a Democrat to Congress in nearly 150 years did so last week. Of course they'd announce that it was good news that by backing a candidate who did not even live in the district and who, according to a local newspaper editorial board, was woefully ill-informed about local issues, the movement had helped toss a Republican seat to the Democrats.

Anti-reason conservatives watched Hoffman go down in defeat and immediately announced they were going to target more Republican candidates, which means the right-wing media stand poised to unleash even more wingnuttery on the GOP establishment.

Grab the popcorn. This is going to be fun to watch.

The myth of Fox News' ratings spike

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:32:58 EST

Fact: The breathless claim that Fox News' ratings recently spiked thanks to the White House's public critique is bogus hype -- hype that Fox News and the Beltway press have relentlessly pushed.

It's just not true.

No matter how many times reporters and pundits made the claim, a detailed analysis of Nielsen ratings numbers clearly indicates that in the two weeks after the White House in mid-October sparked a media controversy by claiming Rupert Murdoch's channel was not a legitimate news organization, Fox News' ratings did not soar or go "through the roof." In fact, not only did Fox News' overall ratings not soar, they experienced no significant increase at all. Instead, in the two weeks following the initial verbal jousts with the White House, Fox News' total day ratings virtually flatlined.

Think about it. The unfolding controversy, which gobbled up untold hours and pages of news coverage as the Beltway press treated the dispute like a major news event (even though news consumers couldn't care less), and the hubbub barely moved the ratings needle one inch in Fox News' favor.

Another example of the Beltway press not letting the facts get in the way of a good story? It sure looks that way. In this case, we saw nearly universal agreement among media elites that the White House decision to publicly call out Fox News was monumentally dumb, thin-skinned, short-sighted, and uncivil. (Paging the etiquette police!)

Everyone said so. Therefore pundits were certain that Fox News' ratings were way up and that Obama and his aides had made a huge tactical blunder. The ratings angle simply provided statistical ammunition for what the Beltway press corps already knew to be the truth: Fact-checking Fox News, in the immortal words of The Washington Post's CW-loving Sally Quinn, was "absolutely crazy."

Except it turns out none of that was true. There was no viewer stampede toward Fox News.

How did the story line about Fox News' (phantom) ratings surge morph into cemented fact? First, pundits simply announced the ratings bonanza was on the way. They knew it had to be the case, so they simply said so, over and over and over. (See below.) Then some misleading ratings reports began to surface that seemed to confirm the spike. For instance, on October 26, the Los Angeles Times, going with ratings data provided by Fox News, reported: "In the two weeks since aides to President Obama took after the [cable channel's] coverage, the audience has been 8% larger than the previous two weeks."

Not only did that report make a specific ratings claim, but it also set the parameters for measuring the supposed Fox News success -- its ratings for the two weeks prior to the eruption of the White House controversy, (i.e. September 28-October 11) compared to the two weeks that followed (i.e. October 12-25). Again and again we saw that model used to support the ratings "spike" claims.

On October 27, BusinessInsider.com used the same framework and posted this blaring headline: "Fox News Ratings Soar After Snub From Obama." Like the Los Angeles Times, Business Insider adopted the two-weeks-before-vs.-the-two-weeks-after model to conclude that in the two weeks prior, the cabler averaged 1.2 million viewers vs. 1.3 million in the two weeks after the political controversy erupted.

The Business Insider report was quickly trumpeted by right-wing blogger Allahpundit, who belittled the administration: "Good work, Barry."

From there, it's no exaggeration to suggest that virtually every high-traffic conservative blog on the Internet linked to the report and mocked the White House for helping spike Fox News' numbers. And like the bogus right-wing claim from last month that 2 million anti-Obama protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., on September 12 (the number was only off by 1.9 million), the dubious claim that Fox News' ratings had soared became the beloved gospel.

Late that same day on October 26, industry ratings site TVbytheNumbers.com also posted an item, which seemed to confirm the ratings spike: "Fox News Ratings Up During White House 'War.' " Like Business Insider, TVbytheNumbers, citing Nielsen data*, reported: "Fox News' total day adults 25-54 demo ratings and average viewership are up 14% and 9% respectively during the two weeks of 'war' vs. the previous two weeks of 'peace.' " And like Business Insider, TVbytheNumbers reported that prior to the controversy, Fox News averaged 1.2 million viewers; after the controversy, 1.3 million were tuning in.

The next day, the Chicago Tribune's political blog, The Swamp, parroted the same stat: "FOX viewership is up 9 percent and 14 percent among adults since the feud with the White House started."

Done deal, right? Wrong, because those numbers didn't add up. Or more specifically, those numbers did not reflect Fox News' ratings two weeks prior to the controversy and two weeks after. Instead, the numbers represented a cherry-picked attempt to create the illusion of a ratings spike for Fox News.

And here's how. As I mentioned, the two weeks prior to the White House dispute cover the dates from September 28-October 11. The two weeks after that cover the dates from October 12-October 25. But the tabulation used to come up with the 9 percent ratings gain (i.e. 1.2 million vs. 1.3 million) only measured Fox News' post-controversy ratings from October 12-October 23, which meant it was a 14-day comparison vs. a 12-day comparison. And which two days were left off the tabulation? Saturday, October 24 and Sunday, October 25. Traditionally, Saturday and Sunday, of course, are the two lowest-rated days of the cable news week.

What happened when you included October 24 and October 25 in the tabulation to make a true two-week-vs.-two-week comparison? Suddenly, that 9 percent gain in overall viewers evaporated into a barely-there 2 percent blip, while that 14 percent increase among viewers 25-54 shrunk to a much more modest 7 percent bump.

Behold the massive Fox News ratings "spike":

And by the way, in the world of cable news, a tiny 2 percent bump in viewership over a relatively short span of two weeks is utterly irrelevant and signifies nothing more than the normal up-and-down viewing patterns that are part of the business. For instance, on October 15, Fox News averaged 1.5 million viewers for the day. The next day, the total audience slipped to 1.3 million, a drop of more than 10 percent. Did that mean Fox News' ratings "plunged"? Hardly, which is why the channel's 2 percent gain in the two weeks following its battle with the White House didn't signify much of anything.

The same was true of the relatively modest 7 percent gain among the more targeted 25-54 demo. Because that audience group is much smaller (roughly 330,000 viewers each day as compared to the larger pool of 1.2 million), a 7 percent increase or decrease is unexceptional. Again, between October 1 and October 2, Fox News' total day 25-54 demo decreased from 415,000 to 320,000 viewers -- a drop of almost 25 percent. The smaller 25-54 demo often fluctuates like that.

And besides, if you listened to media elite pundits, Fox News ratings weren't inching up incrementally thanks to the White House. Pundits didn't cautiously claim that because of the White House critique, Fox News' ratings among the niche 25-54 demo were going to increase modestly.

Nope. The media chorus was unequivocal: Fox News' ratings were soaring [emphasis added]:

"I sent Barack Obama, President Obama a fruit basket for all that comments because our ratings are up 20% since he made it." [Fox News' Bill O'Reilly]

"[R]atings at Fox are through the roof." [Politico's Mike Allen]

"Every time the president or one of his spokespeople mentions [Glenn] Beck or [Rush] Limbaugh, the latter two enjoy increased ratings and bucks." [Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker]

"Beck and O'Reilly were nearly orgiastic. Every presidential harrumph sends their ratings through the roof." [*Newser's Michael Wolff]

"It's working. Their rating, their ratings are going through the roof." [PBS host Tavis Smiley, on NBC's Meet the Press; 10/25/09.]

"[A]ttacking Fox just drives the 'fair and balanced' news network's ratings through the roof." [The Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott]

"It serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings." [Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus]

"By raising the network's profile, Obama has all but guaranteed higher ratings for his nemesis." [Arizona Republic editorial]

"And the [Fox News] ratings will increase, and the White House will look petty in the short term." [CBN's David Brody]

"The more Obama goes after Fox, the better the ratings." [Denver Post columnist Mike Littwin]

"Fox will use this White House move to boost their ratings." [New York magazine's Daily Intel blog]

"It's going to spike Fox's ratings." [Pundit David Gergen]

"And the White House's public attack will no doubt give Fox 'stature' and boost its ratings." [Providence Journal's Edward Achorn]

This is what happens when claustrophobic uniformity takes over among the Beltway chattering class. This is what happened when the media elites agreed that it was nuts for the White House to fact-check Fox News, and they were sure that the administration's carping sent the cable channel's ratings "through the roof." With so little original thought involved in the robotic repetition of the anointed Beltway truth, nobody bothered to checks the facts.

The chattering class wanted to claim Fox News' ratings were going up, up, up. They wanted to suggest that the White House critique had massively backfired. But now we know that's fiction. So when are the pundits going to start posting their retractions?

We'll wait.

*For the record, the Nielsen ratings company never issued any findings regarding Fox News ratings in the wake of the White House dispute, according to company spokeswoman Alana Johnson, who responded to my email inquiry. Lots of third parties subscribe to the Nielsen data and can put together their own interpretations of the ratings and attribute that analysis to Nielsen numbers, which is what happened in this case. But in terms of Fox News, Nielsen itself never made any kind of official finding about the cable channel's recent ratings in regards to the public controversy.

*Michael Wolff writes from Newser, not TV Newser, as originally stated. I regret the error.

30 reasons why Fox News is not legit

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:26:26 EST

"Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information." -- Society of Professional Journalists

Why the Beltway press has invested so much time and energy in recent weeks defending Fox News, with one scribe even claiming that the White House's public critique of the network was "dangerous to press freedom," and why the press refuses to acknowledge what's so obvious about the cable channel's political pursuits, remains baffling.

The facts regarding Fox News' lack of professionalism seem rather obvious (as I detail below 30 different times). And that ought to be plain for Beltway journalists as well. But whether for reasons having to do with external professional, social, or political pressures, many journalists have opted to pretend that Fox News is a serious outlet, that it's just like its cable and network TV news competitors.

They insist that any suggestion that Rupert Murdoch's cable channel isn't legitimate is completely off-base and that the White House is not even allowed to have an opinion on the issue. Indeed, ABC News' Jake Tapper suggested it was not "appropriate" for the administration to tag the channel as illegitimate. (Tapper himself can't tell the difference between the programming that Fox News and ABC News produce.)

The rush to defend Fox News is an odd one, because I don't remember the same type of the circle-the-wagons defense when the previous Republican administration openly waged war on The New York Times and NBC, two news outlets whose standards far outshine the kind of pseudo-reporting Fox News produces on a daily basis. That Beltway media elites have decided to rally around Fox News of all entities remains as puzzling as it is short-sighted.

The truth is, journalism is not difficult to practice, nor is it tough to identify. Journalists aren't licensed, and anyone can try their hand at it, as the Internet has made clear. So there is no higher authority declaring what is and isn't journalism. But the craft, like obscenity, is instantly recognizable in its true form.

For generations in this country, there has been a sort of a gentleman's agreement in terms of what constituted professional behavior among journalists. And there has been a sense of shame when members crossed those lines into unprofessional behavior. Bosses chastened those employees, people were fired, and ethics panels were summarily convened to make certain the transgressions didn't happen again. Fox News, though, has walked away from all of that. And guess what? The rest of the press hasn't said boo.

That's been the sad case for years. (Playing dumb about Fox News' partisan pursuits now qualifies as a Beltway intramural sport.) Indeed, the loophole, or the caveat, to journalism's gentleman's agreement has always been that the guidelines were voluntary and self-policing. There was no governing body, either within journalism or without, that regulated the product. The only collective deterrent from producing bad journalism, aside from rather lax U.S. libel laws, is a collective sense of shame, a shared feeling that making a factual error -- or worse, purposefully pushing false information under the guise of journalism -- was both unprofessional and unacceptable.

But clearly, Fox News does not share that sense of shame, because it's not part of the larger journalism brotherhood. Fox News doesn't feel like rules such as fairness, accuracy, neutrality, and independence apply, which is obvious since Fox News breaks those rules with stunning regularity. In fact, its programming day seems designed to break the traditional rules ad nauseam. That's what it's built to do. And if nothing else, Fox News is ruthlessly efficient.

So, Fox News has altered the game by unchaining itself from the moral groundings of U.S. journalism. And guess what? There is no industry shame being rained down on the outlet. The rest of the press not only doesn't complain, it defends Fox News and even apologizes on its behalf, which is what we've seen unfold for the last two weeks.

If we're actually going to have this is-the-world-really-round "debate" about Fox News, then let's put it in perspective in terms of what constitutes a legitimate news organization.

Here's how the Society of Professional Journalists describes the craft:

Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility.

The organization's Code of Ethics declares "the Society's principles and standards of practice." In terms of a broad-based definition of what journalism ought to be, the Code of Ethics remains the industry standard. And as you'll see below, Fox News routinely, and blatantly, breaks the code to which ethical journalists are supposed to aspire. Fox News staffers (and not just the opinion show hosts) don't simply fail to live up to the industry's own ethical standards. They produce broadcasts that run directly counter to established values and rules. In other words, they obliterate the Code of Ethics on a regular basis, which to me signals that Fox News is not a legitimate source of journalism.

Below are some cornerstones to journalism's Code of Ethics, followed by clear-cut examples of how Fox News tramples that code:

--Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.

Timeline of a [madrassa] smear

--Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.

After teasing story by saying "Obama makes a little girl cry," Fox News' Kelly acknowledged it was not true

--Never distort the content of news photos or video. Image enhancement for technical clarity is always permissible. Label montages and photo illustrations.

Fox News airs altered photos of NY Times reporters

--Never plagiarize.

Fox passes off GOP press release as its own research -- typo and all

--Avoid stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance or social status.

Media adopt gender, racial stereotypes in characterizing Sotomayor's temperament, intellect

--Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.

REPORT: "Fair and balanced" Fox News aggressively promotes "tea party" protests

--Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.

Fox News, CBS air clips of peephole video of ESPN's Erin Andrews

--Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone's privacy.

O'Reilly Producer Stalks Amanda Terkel: THE VIDEO

--Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.

Foxy News breaks out the boudoir B-roll to cover "the great breast augmentation scandal"

--Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.

Would a real news organization help GOP PACs raise money?

--Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.

FLASHBACK: When Fox News boasted about its "unprecedented" access to the Bush White House

--Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.

After exclusive access, softball interviews during Bush admin, Fox News blasts ABC for White House exclusive

--Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.

EXCLUSIVE: Fox News seeks to confirm wildly inaccurate reporting that it's already aired on Jennings controversy; former student seeks Fox News correction

I normally wouldn't spend so much time with the chapter-and-verse examples to highlight the clear fact that Fox News is not a legitimate news organization. But since Beltway media elites continue to cling to the claim that it is, as well as peddle the bizarre, anti-free speech concept that the White House somehow ought to be forbidden to criticize the press, I'll continue with even more inescapable examples to back up the observation that Fox News is not a legitimate news outlet.

For instance, a legitimate news organization does not:

Source its research to "conservative blogs."
Purposefully present stories out of context.
Regularly declare "Victory!" when a White House initiative fails.
Ignore a breaking news story that embarrasses the Republican Party.
Invite fringe conspiracy theorists to appear on news shows.
Suggest during a news program that Democrats voted to "protect pedophiles, but not veterans."
Routinely accuse the president of the United States of being like Adolf Hitler.
Describe itself as the "voice of the opposition."
Air more than 100 commercials promoting partisan political rallies.
Show 22 clips of health care reform opponents who attended town hall forums, and none of health reform supporters.
Purchase full-page newspaper ads to spread falsehoods about the news competition.
Invade the privacy of second-grade students.
Promote violent political rhetoric.
Fail to fact-check a murder story before airing allegations about it.
Allow a news anchor to suggest a Supreme Court nominee is guilty of "reverse racism."

It certainly would be helpful if reporters and pundits who work for respected corporate news outlets and who today defend Fox News as a legitimate operation (or at least chastise the White House for raising doubts) examined the 30 examples I listed above and ask themselves this: If they committed just one of those newsroom transgressions, would they still have a job? Would bosses at ABC or The New York Times or The Washington Post or wherever be willing to have those journalists on staff if they bent, and then busted, journalism's Code of Ethics the way Fox News regularly does?

I suspect the obvious answer is no. And I suspect journalists understand that. So why the Beltway charade? Why refuse to acknowledge the self-evident truth that Fox is not a legitimate news organization?

(Additional research by Simon Maloy.)

Follow Eric Boehlert on Twitter.

Why the NFL and corporate America reject Limbaugh and Beck

Eric Boehlert — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:07:52 EST

So much for being "impotent and powerless."

That's how Rush Limbaugh taunted his critics early last week during an interview on NBC's Today. By the end of the week, after his attempt to purchase the NFL's St. Louis Rams had crashed and burned in spectacular fashion -- after Limbaugh had been thrown under the bus by his fellow investors -- the talker was railing that his critics, no longer so impotent, had morphed into all-powerful players who tricked the gullible NFL into opposing the talk show host's ownership bid.

Of course it wasn't liberals or Democrats or preachers who derailed Limbaugh. It was Limbaugh himself, and his well-documented history of divisive, hateful, and often race-baiting commentary. (e.g. "[I]n Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.")

Limbaugh last week learned the overdue lesson that there are real-world consequences for trafficking in hate speech. That there are free-market penalties, including the fact that the NFL decided for itself that it can't, and won't, be connected with Limbaugh.

It's the same lesson Glenn Beck learned this year when he discovered that his niche, on-air rants (Obama is a communist-racist-fascist-Nazi) don't speak to the masses. Instead, they freaked out nearly 100 former Glenn Beck advertisers who have gone on record as refusing to be associated with his show. These are blue-chip, small-"c" conservative advertisers who've dropped Beck quicker than a wobbly JaMarcus Russell pass.

For both Limbaugh and Beck, the awkward realization in recent weeks and months is that viewed outside of the dark, paranoid confines of right-wing talk, both men are seen as toxic by the business elite they likely admire the most. It's like at a teen party in the basement when the lights suddenly get turned back on. Nobody in corporate America, and certainly nobody within the mighty NFL, wants to be seen holding hands with Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.

Of course, a hysterical right-wing media treated the Limbaugh rejection as some kind of clarion call to action, trumpeting his failed NFL vanity deal as a turning point in American history and being "dangerous to the property and free speech rights of all Americans." Limbaugh, of course, was in heated agreement, exclaiming, "This is about the future of the United States of America and what kind of country we're going to have."

In truth, Limbaugh's humiliating face plant was entirely predictable, because every few years Rush Limbaugh tries to leave the protected bubble of right-wing radio and venture out into everyday American culture ("tiptoeing into the mainstream," Limbaugh calls it), and every few years the reaction is swift and unambiguous -- get lost!

A Wall Street Journal editorial last week whined that "the left" had tried "to drive Rush Limbaugh and others out of American political life." Not true. This was the NFL's doing, not "the left." The billion-dollar league couldn't care less about Limbaugh's role in America's "political life" and did nothing to try to impede it. All the NFL owners did (i.e. those super-exclusive Republican, country club multi-millionaires) was reject Limbaugh's attempted entry into their mainstream entertainment and pop culture pursuit. The NFL owners know branding better than perhaps any other group of sports professionals, and they knew instinctively that Limbaugh's presence would be poisonous for the sport and for their business.

Of course, this isn't the first time the NFL sent Limbaugh that message. The talker tried to sidle up to pro football as a pre-game analyst with ESPN in 2003. It took the talker just a few weeks before he said something insulting about black athletes (as well as the press) and was summarily fired.

The ESPN fiasco represented a classic case of Limbaugh trying to export his race-baiting commentary from the ugly confines of AM talk radio and dump it into the American mainstream; in this case into the sports world. To this day, I doubt Limbaugh thinks there was anything wrong with his claim that the press was giving Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb too much credit for the team's success simply because they wanted to see a black quarterback do well. Limbaugh thought it was a perfectly reasonable comment, and Dittoheads nationwide likely nodded their heads in agreement. (The liberal media love to root for blacks!) But the sports world's collective jaws hit the ground, and once again the gaping divide between the world of the radical right and the rest of us opened up for everyone to see.

Same with last week's humiliation, which represented a full-throated rejection of Limbaugh, his career, and the hate movement he leads. The NFL's unambiguous bottom line? Limbaugh's bad for business.

The fact that it was the NFL, the quintessential all-American, hard-hitting macho game, that summarily rejected Rush is what probably caused such an unhinged, foot-stomping response from the talker and his legion of Dittoheads. Being rejected by the urban-centered NBA could have easily been explained away by the right wing. But the heartland-loving NFL? Only losing out to NASCAR would have stung Limbaugh more.

His apostles just didn't want to believe that their radical hate politics was being rejected out of hand. They didn't want to believe that outside their cloistered world of partisan politics virtually nobody came to Limbaugh's side in the NFL debate.

Instead, the far right -- and certainly the GOP media -- remains under some grand illusion that they speak for the masses; that corporate America is quietly down with their all-consuming Obama Derangement Syndrome antics. The right-wing pretends the 1 percent of Americans who watch Fox News somehow reflect Main Street America. But the NFL fiasco and the sweeping Glenn Beck ad boycott tell us a very different story.

Why the disconnect? Because the far-right media and their partisan followers have a completely twisted sense of reality and their own self-importance. They think they have juice because they spend their days and nights locked inside a right-wing echo chamber listening to Limbaugh, watching Beck, and reading Michelle Malkin online. (They're the same people who saw 2 million people marching in the streets against Obama in Washington, D.C., on September 12, and were off by 1.9 million people.)

They're hermetically sealed. But when they're forced out into the daylight that is American society, the rest of us send them a pretty clear message: Go away!

For the NFL, the rejection of Limbaugh was a no-brainer. As former ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith noted while appearing on CNN last week:

And at the end of the day, the NFL is a multibillion dollar business. And [Limbaugh's] clearly a polarizing figure. And there's nothing broke about the NFL. They have replaced baseball as America's pasttime and you don't want to upset the apple cart and he was definitely going to do that.

The NFL leadership was keenly aware that the next time Limbaugh suggested that Americans were being encouraged to bend over and grab their ankles and root for Obama to succeed because his father was black (or something equally demented), that a few hundred, if not thousand, protesters would be marching outside the home of the Rams in St. Louis the next day. That was just a given. And there was simply no way that the controversy-adverse NFL suits, who pride themselves on longstanding commitments to the community, would want that kind of constant political firefight surrounding the team or the league. (Ironically, by turning his failed ownership bid into a partisan pie fight, Limbaugh precisely proved the point of owners who didn't want Limbaugh's incessant, and divisive, self-promotion around.)

From a pop culture marketing and public relations perspective, Limbaugh is positively toxic. Of course, Limbaugh's free to push his AM brand of loathing, and within that world he sells lots of ads. But why on earth would sane businessmen who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a mainstream entertainment franchise want to be associated with Limbaugh's paranoia and divisiveness? Guess what? They don't want anything to do with the guy.

The same is true with Beck, who unleashes his own type of hateful insanity on Fox News. Beck's show has become as unappealing as a virus, and more than 80 advertisers have fled since Beck called Obama a "racist."

The stunningly successful ad boycott, led by ColorofChange.org, is reportedly costing the Glenn Beck show $600,000 in lost revenue each week, as Madison Avenue's who's who of clients bolt the show: Applebee's, AT&T, Bank of America, Best Buy, Campbell's Soup, Capital One, ConAgra, Clorox, ConAgra, CVS, Ditech, Farmers Insurance Group, GEICO, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Lowe's, Men's Wearhouse, Mercedes-Benz, NutriSystem, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, RadioShack, Sprint, State Farm Insurance, Traveler's Insurance, Subaru, Toyota-Lexus ,Travelocity, The UPS Store, Travelers Insurance, Verizon Wireless, Verizon, Vonage, and Wal-Mart, among others.

And by the way, what does getting rejected from corporate America sound like? It sounds like this:

"We will not be airing on that show [Glenn Beck] any longer." [Subaru of America]

"Lexus ads are not appearing on the Glenn Beck show."

"You will not see our ads on the Glenn Beck TV program." [UPS Store]

"You will not see Flexitol commercials on the Glenn Beck show. Period."

"We hear your concerns and are no longer advertising on the Glenn Beck show." [Ditech]

"Ashley Furniture HomeStore pulled its advertising from Glenn Beck."

"We have taken steps to make sure that [Sprint] will not be advertising on the Glenn Beck show."

As part of his elaborate on-air pity party last week, Limbaugh whined that criticism of his NFL bid was "all about smearing mainstream, traditional conservatism." In truth, Limbaugh and Beck have done more to smear "mainstream, traditional conservatism" this year than any liberal ever could have dreamed of.

Both the NFL, which violently stiff-armed Limbaugh, and the nearly 100 big-time advertisers that have run away form Glenn Beck, helped illustrate that point.

Memo to the media: Fox News is now the Opposition Party

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:14:01 EST

Fox News has changed the rules. Now the press needs to change the way it covers Fox News.

Rupert Murdoch's cable cabal is now, first and foremost, a political entity. Fox News has transformed itself into the Opposition Party of the Obama White House, which, of course, is unprecedented for a media company in modern-day America. That partisan embrace means the news media have to expand beyond typing up Fox News-ratings-are-up and the White-House-is-angry stories, and it needs to start treating the cable channel for what it is: a partisan animal.

The press needs to drop its longstanding gentleman's agreement not to write about other news outlets as news players --not to get bogged down in criticizing the competition -- because those newsroom rules no longer apply. Fox News has exited the journalism community this year. It's a purely political player, and journalists ought to start covering it that way.

I understand Fox News still wants to enjoy the benefits of being seen as a news operation. It still wants the trappings and the professional protections that go with it. But it no longer functions as a news outlet, so why does the rest of the press naively treat it that way?

Fox News is now at the forefront of a political movement. As blogger Glenn Greenwald tweeted at the time of the Sept. 12 Washington, D.C., rally:

Seems like a fairly new phenomenon that we now have a political movement led by a TV "news" outlet -- that usually happens elsewhere.

In a follow-up email to me, Greenwald noted the similarities between Fox News' overt role in U.S. politics with places like Venezuela, where the opposition TV station led the failed 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez, as well as Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a media magnate, uses his TV ownership to agitate. "Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch are really using that model to organize and galvanize this protest movement," wrote Greenwald. "It's a totally Fox News-sponsored event."

Completely detached from traditional newsroom standards, Fox News has become a political institution, and the press needs to start treating it that way. The press needs to treat Fox News the same way it treats the Republican National Committee, even though, frankly, the RNC probably can't match the in-your-face partisanship that Fox News flaunts 24/7. Think about it: Murdoch's "news" channel now out-flanks the Republican Party when it comes to ceaseless partisan attacks on the White House.

Truth is, in recent years the RNC used to use Fox news to help amplify the partisan raids that national Republicans launched against Democrats. It was within the RNC that the partisan strategy was mapped out and initiated. (i.e. it was the RNC that first pushed the Al-Gore-invented-the-Internet smear). But it was on talk radio and Fox News where the partisan bombs got dropped. Today, that relationship has, for the most part, been inversed. Now it's within Fox News that the partisan witch hunts are plotted and launched, and it's the RNC that plays catch-up to Glenn Beck and company.

And I'm sorry, but the Fox News defense that it's a just a few on-air pundits who (relentlessly) attack the White House and that the news team still plays it straight is, at this point, a joke. What kind of "news" team, in the span of five days, airs 22 clips of health reform forums featuring only people who oppose reform? What kind of "news" team tries to pass off a GOP press release as its own research -- typo and all? What kind of "news" team promotes a partisan political rally? (Or did I miss the 100-plus free ads that CNN aired in 2003 promoting an anti-war rally?)

As Media Matters has meticulously documented this year, there is no real difference between Fox News' Obama-hating pundits and Fox News' Obama-hating news team. They have become a seamless operation at this point.

A few years ago, the dumbed-down debate surrounding Fox News was whether it truly was fair and balanced. (It wasn't.) Today, it's whether Fox News is truly a news organization. (It's not.) Yet journalists remain way too timid in spelling out the truth. Spooked by right-wing attacks about the so-called liberal media, Beltway media insiders, who certainly understand Fox News' brazen political maneuver in 2009, continue to play dumb on a massive scale and cover Fox News as a news media organization.

There are small signs that the Beltway press corps is catching on. "The United States has two parties now -- the Obama Party and the Fox Party," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter recently noted. And in the pages of The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg was quite precise in spelling out the extraordinary changes under way [emphasis added]:

This sort of lunatic paranoia -- touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism -- has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism's hands and feet, but its heart -- also, Heaven help us, its brain -- is a "conservative" media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones.

Too often, though, journalists have danced around the obvious. It's important that this trend now stop. The self-evident truth needs to be told, and news consumers need to understand the extraordinary forces that have been unleashed -- forces that dramatically altered the media landscape. News consumers also need to understand why it's becoming increasingly impossible to maintain any kind of public discourse regarding the issues of the day, especially health care reform, when a major so-called news organization is devoted to spreading as much misinformation as possible.

And succeeding:

In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.

Instead of telling the truth, too many journalists have ducked the issue of Fox News. That trend was especially rampant during this summer's health care mini-mobs, which were egged on by Murdoch's team. For instance, look at this passage from Newsweek, as the weekly tried to detail the anger behind the mini-mob madness while politely turning a blind eye to Fox News' central role in it:

In contrast, there is no shortage of groups, politicians, and just plain folks intent on proving that health-care reform will lead to, say, the rationing of medical treatments, and they all seem to have a Web site, blog, and/or Facebook page. Given that people who are sure that the U.S. government faked the moon landings (and that Obama was born in Kenya) can find support for their view online, how surprising is it that you can Google your way to "evidence" of all the evils of Obama-care?

See? According to Newsweek, people were going "online" and using "Google" to find proof that Obama's health care proposal was pure evil. Perhaps. But guess what? All Obama haters really had to do was flick on the TV, plop down on the couch, and watch America's most-watched cable "news" channel fear monger with dire warnings about health care. But Newsweek made no mention of Fox News.

Instead, it was simply "groups," "politicians," and "just plain folks" who were behind the wild anti-Obama rhetoric, according to Newsweek, which forgot to mention that the country's most-watched cable news channel was driving that bus.

Indeed, this summer, Fox News was the (literal) elephant in the room. The press kept trying to explain who or what was the behind the health care mini-mobs craze; who or what was whipping people into such an unhinged, anti-Obama frenzy just seven months after the mainstream Democrat was sworn into office. Yet time and again, refusing to acknowledge the cable channel's purely political play, journalists politely declined to point the finger at Fox News.

For example, The New York Times belatedly published a detailed look at how the death panel lie was spread into the mainstream press. The article was approximately 1,200 words long. Exactly seven of those 1,200 words were set aside to acknowledge Fox News' role. (And only Glenn Beck was singled out.) Again, I'm not overstating anything when I say if it weren't for Fox News there wouldn't have been a death panel "debate" this summer. Period. It was bought and paid for by Fox News, and the whole news crew; not just the nighttime hosts. But the Times only set aside a fragment of a single sentence to highlight the cable channel's irreplaceable role.

Time and again this year, the Beltway press has politely refused to call out Fox News' new political role. Look at this Politico passage, which was utterly typical of this year's fare:

By doing so much, so fast, Obama gave Republicans the chance to define large swaths of the debate. Conservatives successfully portrayed the stimulus bill as being full of pork for Democrats. Then Obama lost control of the health care debate by letting Republicans get away with their bogus claims about "death panels."

All the highlighted phrases, of course, are placeholders for "Fox News." But Politico politely declined to mention Fox News. Politico would never place Fox News front and center of a political movement, because it's just a media outlet. They don't do politics, right?

It's clear that in 2009, Fox News is no longer in the business of journalism. Fox News isn't trying to inform people, it's trying to misinform them. That's not journalism. It's propaganda. But as long as the press continues to hold up the façade of journalism, Fox News will try to hide behind it.

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The NY Times ' pointless pursuit of right-wing "buzz" stories

Eric Boehlert — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:55:27 EST

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was "slow off the mark," and blamed "insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio." She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.

-- New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, September 26 column [emphasis added]

Talk about great timing!

Just after The New York Times announced it would appoint somebody to monitor the partisan opinion media more closely, and right after editors were chastened for reacting too slowly to buzzworthy news scoops launched by the conservative media, the right-wing press went into overdrive last week.

Like a proud peacock showing off its feathers, the right-wing media was in full bloom, showing the Times all the tricks that have made the movement's trade so renowned. There was outright lying, lying by omission, attempted guilt-by-association, U.S.-bashing, hateful smear campaigns (lots of those), fearmongering, incompetence, and just batshit crazy stuff. (Did I mention the heavy dose of crazy?) All the key notes were hit -- and in just one epic week.

I hope the Times is enjoying its new-found, front-row seat to the right-wing media's slow-motion crack-up, where I doubt even the denizens can keep track of the avalanche of falsehoods, smears, and lies that now tumble out on a daily (hourly?) basis. The whole enterprise has come unglued by Obama's presidency. And where serial mendacity was once the rule, a whole new level of crazy has been achieved in 2009. Even conservative blogger Rick Moran last week called out the "lunacy" that fuels so much of the Obama hate; a hate that's stoked around the clock by conservative media.

And now the Times can chronicle it every day because editors there think they might uncover news leads.

Good luck with that. The truth is, the partisan right-wing press this year has morphed into a minefield of paranoia, distrust, and hate. But, hey, if The New York Times thinks it's going to mine some news nuggets in the fever swamps, be my guest. Whoever is tasked with tracking the right-wing media, though, ought to get combat pay because, trust me, monitoring the endless layers of misinformation and sheer lunacy that now power the conservative movement's media deadens the senses pretty quickly. It's a permanent port hole into the dark recesses of American hate politics.

Nonetheless, in honor of the Times' (highly questionable) decision to pay even more attention to the stories that are bubbling up on the far-right blogosphere, talk radio and Fox News -- to get hip to all that right-wing "buzz" -- let's examine what just a seven-day span looked like.

The right-wing media last week offered up a smorgasbord of delicious news treats, with the Beck/Drudge/Malkin brigade producing some Grade-A news leads. Indeed, the scoops last week practically came gift-wrapped, courtesy of the conservative media, which was en fuego.

Check that. The right-wing media's been en fuego for weeks now! Who can forget Michelle Malkin's big scoop on the day of the September 12 anti-Obama rally in Washington, D.C.? Two million protesters had taken to the streets, according to Malkin's "reporting." Buzz? That one was off the charts, with all the big-time bloggers and Fox News personalities helping to spread the blockbuster news. (Pajamas Media's Roger Simon: "[T]wo million people on the Washington Mall. Wow!")

OK, it's true that Malkin's estimate was off by, oh, 1.93 million people. But, still, that was a perfect example of how right-wing bloggers don't just sit around and wait for the news to happen. They get out there and make (up) their own. They create their own buzz, and the Times ought to respect that.

Let's take a look at what other right-wing "buzz" stories the Times was treated to last week.

There was the big Drudge Report scoop about how a Fox TV affiliate in Chicago was "ordered" to not air a report it had done highlighting the fact that not all Chicagoans were behind the city's push to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. The New York Times wants "buzz"? Drudge's breaking story got wall papered online, with Breitbart.tv, Townhall.com, Don Surber, Scared Monkeys, Gates of Vienna, Riehl World View, and Confederate Yankee all cheering it on. (i.e. "Silence! Do Not Speak Ill of Chicago!")

Were there some holes in that story? Sure. For instance, there was the screaming Drudge headline:

FOX-TV Chicago Ordered Not to Run Anti-Olympic Story

It turns out that according to Drudge's own "reporting," the innocuous 60-second news report had already aired, which, of course, meant the headline about the station being "ordered not to run" was completely misleading.

And Malkin also did her best to improve the sketchy tale, in which a news director at the station reportedly decided not to re-air the segment. Yet Malkin hyped the story to readers this way [emphasis added]:

Drudge reports that WFLD-TV has been ordered not to broadcast an anti-Olympics segment again.

That breathless phrasing, of course, made it sound like some nefarious outside source (the Obama White House?) dictated a nasty bout of censorship, when in fact the decision was (reportedly) made internally.

Meanwhile, if the Times was looking for buzz last week, did any story ring louder than the far right's campaign against Chicago's Olympic bid? The conservative media's Who's Who signed up to condemn Chicago as a hellhole and berated the Obama White House for even thinking about elevating the Second City to the international stage and to showcase the American city. Perhaps the only cries louder than the rhetorical brickbats hurled at Chicago were the subsequent shouts of joy when Chicago -- and America -- was denied the honor of hosting the Summer Games. Thank God!

And then there was the stellar work produced by Andrew Breitbart, the self-styled leader of today's conservative "journalism." His site last week claimed to have uncovered a video of community organizers praying to Obama. Talk about "buzz"! Obedient right-wing bloggers such as Malkin, Atlas Shrugs, RedState, Stop the ACLU, HotAirPundit, Sundries Shack, along with cable TV talkers Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, immediately piled on, openly mocking a group of mostly African-Americans activists as they gathered in prayer. (If second-graders aren't off-limits from being called "Obama-worshiping drones" by members of the right-wing media, why would people amidst prayer not be ridiculed, right?) One right-wing site accused the organizers of "blasphemy," and lots more shrieked as loud as they could about how the devastating video confirmed that loony liberals were falling for the Cult of Obama. RedState: "Speechless." Hot Air Pundit: "Difficult to watch." Stop the ACLU: "It's a cult." HotAirPundit: "Shocking Video."

Slight problem: When some sane people outside of Breitbart's (hate) circle actually watched the video, they realized that the community organizers who gathered weren't saying "Obama." They were saying "Oh God," which is typical when people are in prayer. So, yeah, that was a hiccup. Meaning, the only reason Breitbart posted the video was in order to smear liberal activists in prayer because he thought they were saying "Obama." That was the whole point of the video. But Breitbart bungled the audio, which meant the smear collapsed, even some right-wing bloggers, such as ... well, pretty much all them, never bothered to correct their original posts in which they called the organizers out as creepy cult members.

But Times editors please take note -- huge buzz!

And boy, did the conservative press think it hit the jackpot last week with its latest ACORN installment: Obama's right-hand political man inside the White House, Patrick Gaspard, used to be a big shot for ACORN. Connect the dots, people! Fox News, American Spectator, RedState, Jawa Report, and National Review Online all did.

Slight problem. The Gaspard claim wasn't true.

Meanwhile, led by Fox News, the right-wing media did their best to get fired an openly gay member of the Obama administration, Kevin Jennings, the director of the Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Fox News' Bill Hemmer reported that 21 years ago when Jennings was a school counselor and giving advice to a gay student, Jennings had known of a "statutory rape" case between the student and a grown man, but had "never reported it." Others at Fox accused Jennings of "covering up statutory rape." Also, Rush Limbaugh accused Jennings of encouraging a sexual relationship between the student and an adult. So did the Washington Times editorial page: Jennings "encourag[ed]" a relationship that amounted to "statutory rape." Fox News reported the boy in question was "15 years old." And The Washington Examiner even claimed there was a link between Jennings and the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

But yes, upon reflection the very buzz-y story had some holes in it. And yes, the over-heated exercise felt much more like a primal witch hunt that it did any sane attempt to gather facts. (RedState: Jennings is a "radical homosexual druggie.") The problems with the story? Not all the allegations lobbed against Jennings in regard to the incident 21 years held up. In fact, none of them did.

Period.

In light of last week's conservative media performance, where basically no buzzworthy story -- or even individual facts -- could be trusted, here's an idea for the Times and its self-proclaimed interest in right-wing opinion media: Maybe the newspaper ought to report truthfully about the nonstop cascade of lies and misinformation that emanates from the conservative media. Maybe instead of waiting around for the proverbial clock to be right twice a day, the Times shouldn't cherry pick the tiny number of "buzz" stories that stand up to outside scrutiny and create legitimate news. Instead, the Times ought to regularly highlight how so much of what passes for "news" within the right-wing echo chamber is just hateful -- and purposeful -- misinformation.

In other words, maybe the Times ought to practice some journalism.

Wash. Times and Fox News now unleashing mobs on private citizens (including kids)

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:23:33 EST

Last week, a Washington Times blogger posted a call to arms, beseeching readers to help the newspaper dig up more information regarding a long list of arts organization representatives who took part in a conference call with the White House on August 10. The call was part of a National Endowment for the Arts initiative, and it's a conference call that was secretly taped and has been wildly overhyped in conservative media circles as some sort of linchpin in a larger criminal enterprise being run out of the White House to politicize the arts. (There's no evidence the August 10 conference call broke any laws.)

Still, the Times was asking for help. It wanted readers to search through a spreadsheet it posted that included names of the arts representatives who participated in the NEA conference call. The Times wanted readers to snoop around online -- doing some crowdsourcing -- and find out everything they could about the arts reps.

In theory, of course, online dirt-digging and sleuthing makes perfect sense and represents a new era of participatory journalism embraced by the Internet. Josh Marshall and his reporting team at Talking Points Memo, for instance, famously used crowdsourcing to track policy positions of members of Congress during the debate over Social Security in 2005. Readers also chipped in and helped rifle through thousands of pages of memos that the Bush White House dumped at a time when the U.S. attorney scandal was widening. Thanks to Marshall's readers, TPM was able to tease out all sorts of interesting news leads.

Note, however, who the targets of TPM's crowdsourcing were: members of Congress and other major players in the federal government. Marshall urged his readers to monitor politicians and to read through government documents while focusing on people in power who are expected to be held publicly accountable.

But The Washington Times' disturbing call to arms? The paper wanted its readers to find out all they could about private citizens who work at little-known arts organizations and whose only connection to the spotlight was that they were invited to dial in to a conference call.

Times blogger Kerry Picket assured readers, "The people on the call didn't necessarily do anything controversial or wrong." Yet look at the kind of dirt Times readers were urged to dig up about the arts reps. Had they:

Been active in Democratic politics?

Made any campaign donations recently?

Blogged for The Huffington Post?

Believed in the 9-11 "Truther" conspiracy theory?

The obvious odor of Red Scare-era snitching that hung over the Times' wrongheaded project was too much to take even for some loyal conservative readers. Wrote one Times reader in the comments section:

As a Republican, this story makes me sick to my stomach. What is this? A witch hunt? McCarthy is back? As someone who lived through that, I am saddened to see the Washington Times engage in this type of behavior. STOP ACTING LIKE THIS. They are private citizens. I am a VERY proud Republican, but this is not who we are.

But increasingly, this is who conservatives have become. They've become a mindless mob, and the right-wing media, more and more often, are sending their overeager foot soldiers out on seek-and-destroy missions involving private citizens. They're even targeting innocent schoolchildren, like the group of second-graders in New Jersey that became a right-wing (mob) object of disgust last week after an old YouTube clip surfaced that showed the students singing a song in honor of the president of the United States. (You're supposed to recoil in horror at the mere suggestion of such a thing happening in America.)

The reason the Times' crowdsourcing bulletin was so misguided, and possibly even dangerous, was that the people the newspaper was urging to go digging for dirt were, by and large, the same type of people who are packing pistols at anti-Obama rallies, parading around with Hitler posters, and claiming the POTUS wasn't born in America. Meaning the right-wing mob, which suddenly decided last week that the NEA represented all that is evil in the world, is not all that stable and should not be setting its crooked sights on private citizens.

Again, original research and citizen journalism are both laudable pursuits. But in the hands of right-wing radicals who exhibit very little common sense and even less common decency, the witch hunts of peripheral players, including now-regular attempts to target children, no longer represent journalism in any recognizable sense. Instead, they're just unsettling -- and dangerous -- attempts at mob rule. They're a way to send a signal that anybody who is even marginally involved in public discourse can suddenly become a target of the mob. And then, all bets are off.

This trend of targeting private citizens is not new. But it has become more pronounced in recent weeks and months, as collective Obama hatred has pushed the GOP Noise Machine to ignore the boundaries of fair play. (Like posting the possibly stolen contents of somebody's Rolodex.)

The growing obsession with singling out children for mob ridicule is especially troubling. Recall in early August, it was an 11-year-old girl who became the object of right-wing taunts after she had the audacity to stand up at an Obama town hall and ask the president a question. Busted! The kid wasn't participating in public democracy. Instead, the mob called her out as a shifty, "in-the-tank questioner."

Fox News quickly channeled the blog attacks and posted this headline [emphasis added]:

White House Says Girl with Campaign Ties Chosen at 'Random' to Speak at Obama Town Hall

Campaign ties? The girl was in elementary school! How could she have had "campaign ties"? The only "tie" was that her mom was an Obama donor and supporter in 2008, a fact quickly discovered when right-wing bloggers began scouring Facebook photos and friends lists, as well as FEC filings, in search of info about the girl's mother, a "political hack." Why? To unmask the girl's "campaign ties," of course.

In other words, her mom did what a few million other Americans did last fall, yet in the eyes of Fox News, Michelle Malkin, and the mob leaders, that suddenly meant the woman's daughter had "campaign ties"? And for right-wing bloggers, that meant the kid was fair game for ridicule? That meant that, of course, she deserved to be mocked as a "leftist plant." (The caped crusaders online never unearthed a single fact suggesting that the young girl was coached on her question or that Obama knew what it would be before he called on her. By "plant," the mob simply meant the schoolgirl was the daughter of a Democrat, as if that were news or even relevant.)

The right wing's latest attack on children was even more astonishing. Fresh off her humiliating claim that 2 million people showed up at the September 12 anti-Obama rally in Washington, D.C., (she was only off by 1.9 million), Malkin urged readers to wallow in disgust over the fact that 18 New Jersey 7-year-olds sang a song in honor of the new president.

Directly and indirectly, the second-graders were attacked as being "creepy," "Obama-worshipping drones" and cultish members of the "Hitler Youth." Why? Because they sang a song during Black History Month that honored the accomplishments of America's first black president. The whole thing was "sick," the hate mob announced.

Why so sick? Because it was just like what Hitler did! (Again with the Hitler fetish from the far-right fever swamp?)

[W]hen those of us who study history see videos like the one below, it chills us to the bone. It is decidedly reminiscent of the indoctrination techniques that took place in 1930s Germany.

That's right: A massive, mandatory, state-run indoctrination initiative implemented by a fascist German dictator was just like when a single school teacher in New Jersey independently, without the slightest involvement from the government, decided to teach second-graders a song about Obama. The comparison is almost too dumb for words. And am I the only one who thought the story would have worked as a pseudo-scandal only if the kids were videotaped singing the praise of another country's president? But in the loopy world of right-wing media, it's disgusting and disgraceful and cultish when kids today sing the praises of the president of the United States.

Welcome to Bizarro World, where patriotic schoolkids are now the enemy.

The whole senseless attack was painfully dumb and misdirected and represented a shocking invasion of the schoolchildren's privacy. But the mob had selected its target, which meant that the conservative media had to play along and hype the tale as incredibly important and potentially dangerous. In a desperate attempt to attach some drama to the story about kids who sang nice things about the president, FoxNews.com posted this ominous headline and subhead:

Elementary School Students Reportedly Taught Songs Praising President Obama: Nearly 20 young children are captured in an online video as they sing songs that overflow with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," as they repeatedly chant the president's name and celebrate his accomplishments. [The original headline can be seen in the page's URL.]

"Captured." Like, the little elementary schoolkids were trying to pull a fast one, but the news hounds at Fox busted them good! The comedy was that by "captured," Fox meant some parent or teacher taped the kids and put it on YouTube, like four months ago. But in the hands of Fox, the kids had been captured.

Mob rules, indeed.

But whenever the right wing ignites the crazies, it's no laughing matter. And in the case of the "sick," "creepy" second-graders signing up for duty in the "Hitler Youth," predictably, after much breathless snooping, the name of the offending elementary school was indentified and its phone number was posted online. And just as predictably, threats of violence began to pour in.

According to a Fox News online report:

The tension at B. Bernice Young Elementary School escalated to such a degree Thursday that the school was placed temporarily on lockdown after its principal received death threats over a YouTube video that showed nearly 20 children being taught songs lauding the president, though back-to-school night events continuing as planned Thursday night at the school.

Ironically, the Fox report was quickly scrubbed, and any mention of looming right-wing mob violence was edited out of the news story. Editors at Fox News can erase all the unseemly mentions of death threats they want, but when right-wing mobs online are whipped into a frenzy and sent out to attack private citizens, they always leave a mark.

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How Fox's Chris Wallace became irrelevant

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:33:25 EST

You think the Obama White House hit a nerve over the weekend when it purposefully left Fox News Sunday off the president's generous list of Sunday talk-show appearances?

The subsequent whining and childish name-calling from Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace became incessant and, of course, revealed more about the bitter and bruised host than it did the White House. No doubt the pity party that the thin-skinned journalist threw for himself in the wake of the embarrassing snub was genuine. But it went on for so many days and became so consuming that it seemed there was more to it than Wallace being forced to watch the Obama newsmaking parade from the sidelines. I think the slow-motion temper tantrum perhaps reflected Wallace's larger realization that his days of being taken seriously as a journalist are fading and that he can no longer be associated with the collectively unhinged Fox News family and maintain any dignity in the process. (Wallace's Sunday program airs on Fox TV, the entertainment sister to Fox News.)

Wallace realizes his days of having it both ways -- of being able to cash Rupert Murdoch's annual seven-figure checks without being tarred by Fox News' unique brand of idiocy -- are over, that the jig is up. Not only does the White House not care about Wallace's perennially last-place Sunday show, which functions as an in-house RNC broadcast and is watched by about as many people, but there's little indication that Wallace is still viewed as an important player within the Beltway press crowd.

His nonentity status has been hastened by Fox TV's unprecedented decision this year to essentially ban the president of the United States from its prime-time broadcasting, to refuse to carry not only nighttime presidential press conferences, but even the president's recent address to a joint-session of Congress. (Question: Will Fox TV air next year's State of the Union address? I have my doubts.)

In the past, Wallace starred in those types of telecasts. But no more. With Fox TV's entire national "news" operation now consisting of a last-place, 60-minute Sunday morning talk show, Wallace has been relegated to the sidelines.

It's every celebrity journalist's worst nightmare, and it's come true for Chris Wallace: He's become irrelevant. And that's a nasty career tumble for somebody once pegged as a possible nightly news anchor.

Once upon a time, Wallace stood out as Rupert Murdoch's Serious Person. He was among the very few Fox stars who came over from a rival network news team. (Wallace spent time at ABC as well as NBC.) And Wallace was seen as the adult supervising the Fox News romper room. Remember in 2008 when Wallace, on the air, slapped the wrists of Fox & Friends hosts for their relentless bashing of Obama?

But no more. Wallace in 2009 has become just another willing cog in the Fox misinformation machine. Wallace, who has been telling fellow journalists for years that he's a "straight newsman," has ditched the outdated "fair and balanced" shtick and has given in to the Fox fever swamp.

To be realistic, it's not like Wallace had any kind of choice. Short of resigning, that is. Because of the radical changes that Fox News has embraced this year with the arrival of Glenn Beck and the unvarnished hate and paranoia he peddles, it's been impossible for Wallace to stick to his old above-it-all script from days gone by. There's no longer a middle ground for Wallace to occupy within the Fox family. You either drink the Kool-Aid there or you don't. And it's obvious that Wallace, especially with his comically distorted "death book for veterans" fiasco from a few weeks back, is willing to play along with whatever warped brand of so-called journalism Roger Ailes is now peddling.

Either Wallace is completely comfortable with the new Fox News -- where the president is attacked relentlessly around the clock via bogus "news reports," where guest rosters are routinely stacked in favor of conservatives, where the news organization sponsors purely political rallies, and where hosts routinely demonize the president of the United States as a racist Nazi -- or Wallace is uncomfortable with it.

The silence from Wallace so far this year has been deafening, which means he clearly supports what Fox News is doing.

And again, we know that in the past, Wallace wasn't shy about calling out what he considered to be egregious Obama-bashing by Fox News. We know that because in March 2008 (when the host was trolling around for a Fox News Sunday interview with Obama), Wallace appeared on Fox News and expressed his irritation after having listened to a morning full of nonstop attacks on the Democratic candidate. "I think you're somewhat distorting what Obama had to say," he told the Fox News hosts. "I didn't think it was fair," Wallace subsequently told The New York Observer. "I didn't think we were providing the full context of what [Obama] was saying."

Today, of course, Fox News bashes Obama hour after hour, week after week, and month after month. Today, Fox News unfairly rips quotes and facts out of context pretty much as the newsroom rule, yet it's crickets from Wallace, who sits quietly. Ever since Fox News' meal ticket Beck arrived, Wallace has had almost nothing to say about anchors and commentators who are not "fair" to Obama or who are "distorting what Obama had to say."

By contrast, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith had the courage and the decency earlier this year to call out the right-wing "crazies" on the fringe who targeted Obama and were feeding off incessant, conspiratorial hatred -- hate "that's not based in fact," as Smith stressed. (Naturally, right-wingers online immediately called for Smith's firing.) At least that Fox anchor expressed a commonsense concern about what that kind of raw, irrational hostility does to a democracy. But not Wallace. He knows to sit on his hands and to keep his mouth shut.

Except, of course, when he's not busy spreading nonsense like the charade about the "death book," an absolutely absurd conspiracy theory that Wallace must have known came without even the faintest hint of reality to it. (Here's the theory: In order to contain health care costs, the federal government under Obama is using a booklet on end-of-life counseling to urge U.S. veterans to kill themselves; it's trying to convince them that their lives aren't worth living.)

It was the type of patented foolery you'd expect a proud partisan like Sean Hannity to push. But it was Wallace who signed on as the smear's chief sponsor. It was Wallace who sat through two Fox News Sunday segments teasing out purposefully ignorant questions about how bureaucrats were trying to off veterans. Wallace played dumb like it was an Olympic sport. While the other Sunday shows were at least trying to engage in actual civic debate, Wallace spent his Sunday clowning on air.

And as a bonus, Wallace may have made the single dumbest statement uttered on a Sunday-morning talk show this year. Playing dumb, Wallace wanted to know why anyone would think about end-of-life counseling unless they're, you know, dying [emphasis added]:

Usually people don't even contemplate end of life until they're in an irreversible coma.

Flash to Wallace: When somebody slides into in "an irreversible coma," it's a little late for them to begin end-of-life counseling.

With the "death book" production, Wallace didn't merely engage in lazy journalism or allow his guest to sidestep important questions, he served as archetype -- as a co-sponsor -- of the debacle. He plucked the story (a smear campaign, really) from relative obscurity, and then he trampled the facts in hopes of launching the story nationally.

To me, the "death book" nonsense marked a new low for Wallace. And who knows? It may have marked the tipping point in terms of when the White House wrote off Fox News Sunday as a serious enterprise. The insult-to-injury part for Wallace professionally, though, was that the soggy "death book" plot went nowhere. The stupid conspiracy theory had a shelf life of about 36 hours, as not even the fact-free denizens of the GOP Noise Machine could hoist the lame story off the ground.

Honestly, though, I can see why Wallace was grasping at the "death book" straw: His Sunday morning ratings remain dismal, and if the phony controversy had taken flight, maybe he could have boosted his shaky viewership, which, over the summer, reached astonishing lows, even for Wallace. In fact, he hit the ratings basement just weeks before the "death book" nonsense aired, which makes me wonder if alarms had gone off inside the producers' offices at Fox News Sunday, and if perhaps that's why a desperate Wallace agreed to push the "death book" smear in a naked attempt to manufacture some (right-wing) buzz.

Why the panic? For its August 2 telecast, Wallace's show attracted just 924,000 viewers.

It's hard to explain just how difficult it is to air the same program for more than a decade on affiliated television stations all across the country, as Fox has with Fox News Sunday, and have that show fail to attract at least 1 million viewers in some weeks. With the dormant Fox News Sunday, Wallace has defied the television odds. (An often-forgotten fact: Wallace briefly hosted NBC's Meet the Press in the years before Tim Russert turned the Sunday program around and built it into a ratings powerhouse.)

In a business built on ratings and "gets" (i.e. landing the most newsworthy guests, such as Obama), Wallace has neither.

Of course, it's not the ratings woes that have done the most damage to Wallace's reputation this year. (He's been plagued by those for most of this decade.) It's Fox News' relentless campaigns of turbo-misinformation. And the fact that Wallace has loyally signed up for duty. That's why, as a newsman, he's become irrelevant.

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Michelle Malkin and the anatomy of the 2 million protester lie

Eric Boehlert — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:19:49 EST

Blame it on a tweet.

It turns out that's what kicked off the right-wing blogosphere's Twitter.

Why Glenn Beck, and Fox News, can't escape the "racist" trap

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:11:47 EST

Have so many blue-chip advertisers ever fled a program as quickly as the who's who of corporate America that's sprinted away from Glenn Beck in recent weeks? I certainly cannot recall ever seeing a mass exodus of this scale.

The A-list collection of disgruntled Beck advertisers is staggering: Applebee's, AT&T, Bank of America, Best Buy, Campbell Soup, Clorox, ConAgra, CVS, Ditech, Farmers Insurance Group, GEICO, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Lowe's, Nutrisystem, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, RadioShack, Sprint, State Farm Insurance, The UPS Store, Travelers Insurance, Verizon Wireless, Vonage, and Wal-Mart, among others.

If any television program had lost just three or four of those types of high-caliber advertisers, it would be seen as an extraordinary move in a media environment in which grassroots attempts to pressure advertisers have traditionally yielded modest returns. But at Fox News, Glenn Beck is rewriting television history right before our eyes: four dozen lost advertisers and counting. All of Beck's big-time advertisers have fled. All of them.

As momentum continues to gather behind the unprecedented boycott effort led by ColorofChange.org, Beck and Fox News executives seem to be flailing around as they frantically search for a way to stop the exodus.

Despite media reports to the contrary, Fox News executives explicitly refused to distance themselves from Beck's claim that President Obama is a "racist," let alone reprimand the host for the shockingly hateful comments. Fox News' initial knee-jerk response of failing to question any of the gutter rhetoric Beck dishes out, and the cable news giant's decision to treat the transgression as a nonstory unworthy of a serious response, of course, is what led to the boycott drive.

The fact that nobody anywhere inside Fox News had enough sense to hold Beck accountable or to even suggest that calling the president of the United States (aka "this guy") a "racist" on national television was well outside the bounds of professional broadcasting -- the fact that Fox News could not even for a moment publicly contemplate that Beck had stepped over a glaringly obvious line of common decency -- is why those same executives have been forced to watch as an avalanche of A-list advertisers go public with their plans to make sure they are no longer associated with Beck.

Looking back, it's hard to imagine how executives at Fox News could have handled Beck's "racist" smear any worse. And it's hard to imagine how Fox News could have inadvertently cultivated the ground any better for a sweepingly successful advertising boycott than the cavalier way they dealt with Beck's presidential race-baiting.

And if you don't think the snowballing ad boycott has left Fox News suits stunned and knocked back on their heels, then I don't think you understand the kind of arrogance that runs through the water supply over at its Manhattan headquarters on Sixth Avenue. Execs there this year no doubt have been congratulating themselves on their ratings success and patting each other on the back for having the brilliant insight to unleash a hatemonger like Glenn Beck on the airwaves.

But suddenly, uh-oh, there's a price to be paid for peddling hate? And worse, it's a free-market penalty where blue-chip advertisers -- those bastions of corporate America that Fox News idolizes -- are deciding for themselves that they cannot afford to be associated with Fox News' wonder boy? Corporate America is turning its back on the new face of Fox News?

If the boycott continues to gain momentum, Fox News won't be able to avoid writing down losses. Yes, the cabler claims it hasn't lost any money yet because nervous advertisers simply want off Glenn Beck, not off Fox News (i.e. advertisers are still spending money with the network). But the truth is, since Beck called Obama a racist, Beck's advertising base has been cut by 50 willing advertisers, and Fox News' need to find advertisers for the hour-long weekday show has not changed. And I'm guessing it's not having much luck drumming up new Glenn Beck business in this environment.

Honestly, if advertisers continue to abandon Glenn Beck, pretty soon the show's going to be forced to run more than the occasional free public-service announcement. Either that, or the advertisers willing to stick around are going to get some great deals or maybe even some free spots in order to make sure Fox News can fill the inventory.

Meanwhile, on air, the latest Fox News strategy for dealing with the never-ending "racist" controversy seems to revolve around amnesia. Seriously. It's like everyone at Fox News has been flashed by that light stick Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith used in Men in Black to erase the memories of unsuspecting UFO eyewitnesses. Suddenly at Fox News, nobody remembers that Beck called Obama a racist. Nobody remembers that that's what sparked the advertising boycott.

Despite the swirling controversy, and despite the fact that Beck is losing the type of advertisers that sales teams covet, the host's "racist" smear has become The Story That Cannot Be Mentioned By Name.

It's true. Last week, Beck appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show, and the two men bemoaned the attempts by nasty liberal "loons" to shut Beck up -- to snatch away his freedom of speech. What was odd was that while Beck and O'Reilly clearly made (indirect) references to the ad boycott campaign, they never explained to viewers what sparked the outrage. They never explained why. They never conceded the campaign was launched in direct response to the fact that Beck went on national television and called the president of the United States a "racist" and someone who flashed a "deep-seated hatred of white people."

At Fox News, that smear has been flushed down the memory hole, and all that's left to do is play victim. (Incredibly, O'Reilly and Beck appeared to be cribbing their amnesia shtick off The American Spectator. Never a good sign.)

But here's what I don't get: Why doesn't Beck go on TV every day and simply defend his "racist" claim? Why doesn't Beck stand up for the racist remark and stake his reputation on it? Because right now, the pathetic, squishy approach he's taking where he limply lashes back while pretending the ad boycott sprang from some mysterious place -- where Beck plays the victim and pretends he never made the "racist" smear -- is just too lame for words.

The host has never apologized, so it seems logical that he stands behind the claim. (And that's what he claimed one month ago.) And if he stands behind it, why doesn't he set aside a few minutes on each program to detail how Obama is a racist? Why doesn't he educate his viewers? In fact, I'm sure even folks who don't regularly tune into Beck would be fascinated to know how Obama, whose mother was white and who was raised by his white grandparents, suffers from an abiding hatred of white people and "white culture," as Beck claimed.

Hey, maybe if Beck does a good enough job, he'll even win back some of his lost advertisers. Maybe by talking the "racist" issue to death on Fox News every day, Beck can clear the air and the boycott will cease.

It's conceivable but unlikely. What's really going on here, of course, is that Beck has stepped so far in it with his "racist" crack that he can no longer see the tops of his shoes, and even his shins are starting to sink into the muck. The answer to Fox News' unraveling advertising problem is obvious. But neither Beck nor anybody else at the network has the decency to apologize, so they've decided to stitch together this fantasy about how the ad boycott was started because Beck said some nasty things about a ColorofChange.org ally, Van Jones.

Good luck with that. I'm sure that by playing dumb about the "racist" controversy, and by ignoring the comment while wallowing in a permanent state of victimhood, former blue-chip advertisers will soon come sprinting back onto Beck's show.

In the meantime, courage, Glenn Beck. Courage.

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Media: Angry right-wingers are important; angry libs are annoying

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:21:24 EST

I guess Howard Dean was just ahead of his time.

When the liberal anti-war candidate ran for the White House in 2003 and 2004, the Beltway press was uniformly clear that Dean had an "anger" issue. When Dean launched his campaign and gave voice to the hundreds of thousands of activists who had marched and protested against the Iraq war, the media elites did not approve.

As early as June 2003, The New York Times was fretting over whether Dean's "angry message" would be his downfall. "All the Rage," read a Newsweek headline on a Dean profile.

And in two features in the summer of 2003, The Washington Post described Dean as "abrasive," "flinty," "cranky," "arrogant," "disrespectful," "fiery," "red-faced," a "hothead," "testy," "short-fused," "angry," "worked up," and "fired up." And trust me, none of those adjectives was used in a complimentary way. In fact, the Post took pains to distinguish Dean's anger from that of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom the paper termed "brilliantly cranky."

Bad luck for Dean, because back during the Bush years, there was really no worse crime, at least in the eyes of the Beltway press, than being "angry." (Especially being an angry Democrat.) It was practically a deal breaker. Serious people simply didn't conduct themselves that way in American politics. They didn't let their runaway partisan emotions get the best of them.

But oh my, how times have changed! Suddenly this summer, as right-wing mini-mobs turn health care forums into free-for-alls, as unhinged political rage flows in the streets, and as the Nazi and Hitler rhetoric flies, anger is in. Suddenly anger is good. It's authentic. It's newsworthy. Reading and watching the mini-mob news coverage, the media message seems clear: Angry speaks to the masses.

Instead of being turned off by the displays of passion the way they had been when liberal protesters took to the streets prior to the Iraq war, media elites have been touting the mini-mob trend as a "phenomenon" (USA Today) staffed by a "citizen army" (Bloomberg News).

And make no mistake, the health care mini-mobs have been showered with a massive amount of media coverage. During the week of August 10-16, the topic of health care, and specifically the politics and the protests of health care, accounted for a staggering 62 percent of all cable news coverage, according to the Pew Research Center's weekly survey. My guess is that you would be hard-pressed to find a single week during the run-up to the Iraq war when liberal anti-war protests accounted for just 6 percent of the cable news coverage.

Why the gaping disparity? And how come Dean's anti-war anger was out of bounds, but mini-mob anger is perfectly acceptable? How come liberal anti-war protesters were shunned by the press, but the mini-mobs are showered with incessant coverage? It's because apparently when angry -- and overwhelmingly white -- conservatives protest, they come attached with a direct line to the American psyche. Liberals, though, most certainly do not.

Bottom line: Liberal protesters don't tell us anything about the mood of America. But angry right-wingers do, according to the press.

That glaring double standard is part of a long-running Beltway press trend in which media elites lash out at angry liberals, regardless of whether they're right or wrong. The trend was highlighted again just last week when news broke that former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge admitted that very senior players in the Bush White House urged him to raise the nation's terror alert system for purely political reasons. Writing at The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder defended journalists who scorned liberal Bush critics years ago when they made that exact same claim about the nation's terror warning system. Journalists were right to dismiss the allegation, wrote Ambinder, "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald quickly noted, "As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and 'journalist' scorns."

Please note Ambinder's emphasis on "gut hatred" of Bush (even if the writer did later retract the phrase). For elite journalists during the Bush administration, liberal hatred of Bush represented the most conspicuous red flag that signaled certain political players were not serious. Why? Because they were fueled by hatred. Serious people did not have hatred. They weren't driven by out-of-control passion.

Now, please compare that defining media elite principle from the Bush era to the mini-mobs and the ugly free-for-alls they unleashed this summer. Judging based on the insight into the Beltway media's mentality that Ambinder provided, the press dismissed Bush's liberal critics because they were too emotional, too full of "hatred," and not paying attention to the facts. You mean sort of like the anti-Obama mini-mob members who hang politicians in effigy, turn town hall forums into fact-free shriek-fests, arrive with loaded guns, wave swastika posters, and yell out "Heil Hitler"?

If ever there's ever been a political movement fueled by, and carefully constructed around, irrational "gut hatred," it's today's right-wing mini-mobs. But you don't hear much from Village pundits like Ambinder about the "gut hatred" of Obama, do you? That doesn't seem to turn off pundits, reporters, or producers.

In truth, right-wing "gut hatred" has become the news story of the summer. It's being celebrated and rebroadcast all season long. That deranged "gut hatred" of a new president barely halfway through his first year doesn't delegitimize the protesters in the eyes of the Beltway press in the way the same press corps seemed to write off anti-war protesters as being fringe radicals. (Too angry!) The "gut hatred" of Obama is what makes the mini-mob news.

As Media Matters senior fellow Duncan Black wrote last week at his blog, Eschaton, in relation to the Tom Ridge story:

Sometimes it's a bit hard to remember just how nutty the world was in those post-9/11 days. Suggesting that Bush was using the terror alert for political purposes would have made you a crazy person, the mere suggestion of it would've put you outside the bounds of acceptable discourse.

Sort of like suggesting today that the federal government might soon be in the business of selectively killing the elderly, right? Think again. High-profile conservatives who pushed the "death panel" nonsense, which fired up the mini-mobs, have not been shoved to the sidelines. Instead, they've been politely fact-checked on occasion.

Media to liberal war protesters: Go away!

And just so there's no doubt in people's mind, the blanket coverage the mini-mobs are lapping up (i.e. the mobs are hugely important!) stands in stark contrast to the way the press often did its best to ignore liberal protesters who spoke out against the war in Iraq.

For instance, in October 2002, when more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., to oppose the war, The Washington Post put the story not on the front page, but in the Metro section with, as the paper's ombudsman later lamented, "a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest's fringe elements."

For that same 2002 anti-war rally, The New York Times also bungled its reporting. The day after the event, the newspaper published a small article on Page 8, which was accompanied by a photo that was larger than the article itself. And in the article, the Times falsely reported that "fewer people attended than organizers had said they hoped for."

Let's watch and see how the Post deals with the mini-mob protest slated for September 12 in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks. If 100,000-200,000 people turn out, let's see whether the Post keeps that story off the front page. (Yeah, right.) And let's see if the Times runs a brief article on Page 8 and reports that "fewer people attended" than organizers had hoped.

And remember how some in the mainstream press in 2005 treated anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey had been killed while serving in Iraq? An op-ed writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution claimed that "Cindy Sheehan evidently thinks little of her deceased son." The piece also attacked her as being "disgraceful" and her actions as "near-treasonous."

On MSNBC, Norah O'Donnell asked a guest if Sheehan had become "a tool of the left," while pressing another guest on whether it was wise to be associated with the "anti-war extremists" camped out in Crawford, Texas, near President Bush's ranch. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank wondered if Sheehan would be remembered as a modern-day Lyndon LaRouche, the fringe political figure who's been accused of being a cult leader and fascist. Later that month, Milbank gave prominent display in the Post to a right-wing activist who accused Sheehan of being a communist.

On September 24, 2005, Sheehan helped lead a massive anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., which drew between 100,000 and 200,000 participants, making it the largest U.S. demonstration since the war began. As part of the protest weekend, Sheehan, along with about 370 anti-war protesters, got herself arrested outside the White House. That night, NBC's Nightly News completely ignored the arrests. (The Post gave the story 600 words on B1.) The evening newscasts on ABC and CBS mentioned the arrests only briefly, and CBS downplayed the numbers involved. It reported that Sheehan was arrested along with "dozens" of others. (What? As in 31 dozen?) And the next morning, ignoring the fact that nearly 400 people chose to be arrested in order to protest the war, CNN reported that "Sheehan and several others were arrested" [emphasis added].

If, come September 12, nearly 400 angry anti-Obama demonstrators decide to get arrested outside the White House, let's see if Nightly News boycotts the story. And let's see if CNN reports it was "several" protesters who got hauled away.

Let's see if the press continues to treat angry (unhinged) conservative protesters as inherently important and newsworthy after having spent years dismissing angry liberals as insignificant and out of the mainstream.

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Health care mobs = Swift Boat Vets. And the press plays dumb, again

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:50:37 EST

Here we go again.

During August's summer daze, right-wing mini-mobs (egged on by corporate interests) have run wild at town hall meetings, propagating all kinds of smears and misinformation in an effort to derail an important Democratic campaign. Yet the mini-mob members have been treated as deeply important newsmakers by the press during a slow summer news month.

Sound familiar? Recall August 2004, when the right-wing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (egged on by corporate interests) stole a month's worth of campaign headlines by propagating all kinds of smears and misinformation in an attempt to derail an important Democratic campaign. Yet they were treated as deeply important newsmakers by the press during a slow summer news month.

Honestly, the only thing missing this time around is a crackpot, best-selling book. In 2004, the Swifties used the release of Unfit for Command to launch their media-based smear campaign. This summer, it could have been something like ObamaScare: How Liberal Health Care Will Destroy America. (The Swifties' right-wing publisher must be kicking itself over the missed marketing opportunity.)

But what has been perfectly consistent is the way the press has, again, fallen for a right-wing smear campaign and dressed it up as news. Just as with the Swifties, the press has turned over its summer coverage to a band of agitators spreading misinformation. Five summers ago, the Swift Boat Vets helped hijack the election. They lied about documents, they lied about eyewitness, and they lied about their partisan affiliations and connections. For several crucial weeks during the campaign, journalists turned away from the pile-up of Swift Boat falsehoods and contradictions, rarely daring to call the Swift Boat attack out for what it really was -- a hoax. Too spooked by the GOP Noise Machine and its charge of liberal media bias, the press propped up the Vets as serious men and showered them with attention.

This year, the press has handed over untold hours of free airtime to mini-mob members whose sole purpose seems to be to spread as much fear as possible. (The ones who show up toting guns and Nazi posters make that point rather emphatically.)

Fringe players on the right are making wild accusations that cannot be backed up by fact. The mainstream media response? We must cover the phenomenon daily, even hourly!

So, day after August day, these vacuous health care "debates" are aired on cable television, just as news consumers suffered through night after night of vacuous Swift Boat "debates" five summers ago. In both cases, the press for the most part handed in its referee's whistle and focused its attention on simply reporting the fact-free claims and then getting the Democratic response. (i.e. he said/she said.) It turns out journalists are petrified of calling out right-wing activists as liars, and the other side knows it.

What's amazing is that even a conservative Republican congressman has conceded that the mini-mobs (this summer's news superstars) appear to be completely detached from reality. "You cannot build a movement on something that is not credible,'' Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina told the Los Angeles Times after being confronted by belligerent, fact-free protesters who were convinced that as part of health care reform, children would soon be forced to receive swine flu vaccinations. "At town meetings, the hostility went straight through to hysteria,'' said Inglis.

The "town hells" are really just mob rule masquerading as a health care debate, masquerading as direct democracy. Sadly, the news media are hyping both phony story lines. The press is taking the fringe players seriously, even the ones who spend their free time drawing up Obama-is-Hitler posters.

The Wall Street Journal, describing a New Hampshire protester:

[She] held a sign with Mr. Obama's face superimposed on a Nazi storm trooper, a sign, she said, that was made by her chronically ill mother.

[...]

"Adolf Hitler was for exterminating the weak, not just the Jews and stuff, and socialism -- that's what's going to happen."

I'm sorry, but since when are these types of crackpot protesters taken seriously by the American media? I guess I must have missed all the prewar coverage in 2003 when reporters from elite newspapers such as the Journal patiently interviewed radical protesters who showed up outside presidential events with posters featuring Bush's face superimposed over a Nazi storm trooper. I must have missed it when the Journal quoted people at length about how Bush wanted to start killing -- "exterminating" -- Americans.

In 2003, those fringe players (understandably) couldn't get arrested by the press. But the mini-mobs today have been ushered onto the national stage and urged to express their hatred incessantly and preferably in front of television cameras. It's just like when the press showered the lying Swifties with all kinds of attention despite the fact that they could barely keep track of their own laundry list of lies.

Today, the press, for the most part, won't call out the mini-mob supporters as liars or point out that, at times, they are blindingly ignorant about the facts in play. (OK, let's stipulate that many media outlets did debunk Sarah Palin's loony "death panel" claim. But does the press really deserve a pat on the back for completing that obvious task? Isn't that like congratulating your 12-year-old for not wetting the bed at night?) Apparently, journalists feel most comfortable reporting on what the mini-mobs are saying and how they're making life politically uncomfortable for Democrats.

And so now extremists are the news. And no, it doesn't really matter if what they're yelling about bears little resemblance to reality. For instance, here is a random collection of recent mini-mob quotes. I'm pretty sure every journalist covering the issue of health care understands the claims are obviously false. But good luck finding examples of fact-checking context:

"[T]he bill is socialistic. ... If this bill passed, would my wife be alive today?"

"They're going to cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars."

"This is the Soviet Union, this is Maoist China. The people in this room want their country back."

"The government wants to control my body, my health care decisions and the doctors I see."

"It doesn't say in the Constitution, give out free health care to people, bail out the auto companies. ... George Washington is rolling over in his grave right now. This is not what the Constitution wrote."

"They're going to take over everything. It's socialism. I don't want some bureaucrat making health decisions for me and my family."

"We are so far removed from the philosophy of the Founding Fathers that if they were here today, we would be talking about one thing: How to get the government out of health care."

And remember the man at Sen. Arlen Specter's televised town hall meeting last week who ignored the forum's protocol (the first 30 people admitted were allowed to ask questions) and screamed that Specter was "trampling on our Constitution" as the crowd erupted. After security guards moved in, the man kept shouting and yelling about how Specter's office had lied about being allowed to ask a question at the forum. "One day, God is going to stand before you and he's going to judge you!" the main announced before storming out of the room.

That confrontation was looped endlessly on television.

But seriously, what kind of voter gets in the face of a 79-year-old U.S. senator and starts pointing his finger and screaming about Judgment Day because the guy's upset about the Q&A format at a town hall meeting? How did any part of the man's pointless tirade qualify as news?

Simple. He yelled! Just look at The New York Times' headline on its blog post about the same Specter town hall forum: "Eruptions at Sen. Specter's Town-Hall Meeting."

There were eruptions, and "questioners did not hide their anger," which meant -- of course -- it was news. (And naturally the man should be invited to rant more on TV.) More important, there were conservative eruptions. Because as a general rule for Beltway newsrooms, when conservatives get angry about public policy, it's news. When liberals get angry (think anti-war), it's annoying. (The Times, by the way, never reported whether any of the town hall claims that day were accurate or not. The paper simply repeated the claims as news.)

Like the Swifties and their fictitious allegations, the fact-free claims of the mini-mobs have been instantly embraced as significant and game-changing events. But what exactly were those "eruptions" about? At the highlighted Specter event, it turns out the "eruptions" and "anger" had very little to do with health care reform.

Here were some crowd highlights:

"I did not want to pay on a health care plan that includes the right for a woman to kill her unborn baby."

"The illegals. They shouldn't even be here. I would ask Congress to do something to send them home, so we don't have to deal with that."

"I don't want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country."

"Senator, if you wish to be remembered in the Congress by the American people, when you get back there, sponsor legislation that requires every House and Senate bill to be written in a junior high school level."

"Would you go back to Washington and represent us first as an American and tell Mr. Obama he's an American, and if not, there's other countries."

"But what about this Guantánamo closure? I don't want these criminals to come over here into our area and then escape and we find that a bunch of innocent people have been murdered. And that's what's going to happen."

Reading those, I wonder if Democratic consultant James Carville was too polite when he told Good Morning America that the mini-mob members "don't even know what they're talking about."

But that didn't matter, because The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza announced that the Specter town hall event where the televised mini-mob fireworks exploded had become the iconic moment of the summer:

The back-and-forth between Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter and several attendees of a town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pa., this week may become the lasting political symbol of the summer of 2009: a politician and his constituents standing inches away from one another, angrily debating the merits (or lack thereof) of President Obama's health-care reform plan.

Debating the merits? Really? Because if somebody could point out to me in the transcript where any sustained, informed debate actually took place that day, I'd sure like to see it. To me, the event seemed more like a right-wing radio gabfest, with citizens spouting a collection of repetitive talking points.

It was just a tea party held indoors.

Did anything the Specter mini-mob said that day make sense? Was any of it connected to reality? The Post didn't care. It made great theater. It was news.

And like the 2004 Swift Boat offensive, the mini-mobs are just another right-wing hoax that's managed to fool the press.

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Limbaugh yells "Nazi" (and the press yawns)

Eric Boehlert — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:24:55 EST

The Houston Chronicle editorial page wanted to be absolutely clear: References to Adolf Hitler or Nazis in American politics had no place in the "discourse of the nation," and the crude analogies were "beyond the pale." The practice was "absurd and dangerous."

The editorial page was disgusted by the rhetoric and firmly believed that dredging up the Nazi comparisons desensitized people to the pain and violence that actual Nazis unleashed in the 20th century.

The condemnation was fitting, given the fact that the country's most-listened-to talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, last week unfurled shocking rhetoric in which he compared the Obama White House to a Nazi organization and even likened Obama to Hitler. ("Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate.") The outlandish attacks seemed to be a case of Limbaugh playing catch-up to Fox News' Glenn Beck (Limbaugh = Beck Lite?), who had been pounding the noxious Nazi angle for weeks.

Of course it's depressing to watch Limbaugh drive politics into the gutter, but at least watchdogs at big-city dailies like the Houston Chronicle are calling out the really reprehensible stuff, right?

I wish.

Because here's the catch: That Chronicle editorial I mentioned above wasn't in response to Limbaugh's latest misguided hate maneuver. The scathing editorial was published on January 7, 2004, and came in response to news that two videos submitted to a MoveOn.org advertisement contest had included Hitler imagery in their 30-second attacks on President Bush. (They were just two of the 1,500 clips submitted.) MoveOn never endorsed the efforts or promoted them; the clips simply appeared on MoveOn's crowded contest website. But when news spread about their mere existence, a controversy erupted, and the liberal netroots group quickly pulled the ads, apologized for their inclusion, and denounced the use of Nazi imagery.

Despite that swift action, the Hitler-MoveOn story, fueled by Fox News (see Glenn Greenwald), became a very big deal and gobbled up days' worth of news coverage, coverage that often stressed how unrestrained and irresponsible the liberal blogosphere was (Hitler?!), to the point where the Chronicle weighed in with a stand-alone editorial on the topic.

But fast-forward to today. As Limbaugh envelops himself in Nazi rhetoric, for some reason, the Houston Chronicle's editorial page, along with so many other corporate news outlets, remains silent about the offensive Hitler comparisons. Despite the fact that Limbaugh has not apologized for his comments -- unlike MoveOn in 2004 -- and is continuing to compare the Obama White House and the Democratic Party with Nazis, many in the media don't consider it newsworthy and haven't condemned it. And more important, journalists don't show any signs of believing that the episode tells us anything about the radically unhinged nature of the right-wing media in this country today. That story's just a non-starter. Period.

It's just Rush being Rush, right?

Over the weekend, some welcome media voices did rise up to denounce Limbaugh's rhetoric in no uncertain terms. (David Brooks: "What he's saying is insane.") But why did it take so long, and why isn't everyone making that blindingly obvious point? And why wasn't it considered big news that the de facto leader of the Republican Party went there (i.e. Nazi-ville)? He went to a place that previously was considered unconscionable and unpardonable by the press. Just ask MoveOn; it still has the scars to prove it.

Why isn't Limbaugh uniformly condemned for his words?

After all, if The New York Times is going to prop up Limbaugh as an all-powerful and deeply important figure in American politics, the way the newspaper did last summer with its worshipful Sunday magazine cover story, shouldn't it dutifully chronicle his radical and outrageous rhetoric, too?

Yet the Times in recent days has managed just a sentence or two about Limbaugh's embrace of Nazi analogies. Of course, the Times is not alone in completely downplaying the story. As of today, The Washington Post has not reported one word about Limbaugh's shocking comments. Then again, The Washington Post also gave Beck a pass when he announced that the president of the United States had a "deep-seated hatred of white people" and was a flat-out "racist." At the Post, which obsesses over the intersection of the media and politics, the jaw-dropping attack by Fox News' superstar host wasn't considered newsworthy.

That's correct: Two of the most popular and powerful conservative voices in America have recently called out Obama as a Nazi and a racist. But, sorry, at The Washington Post, that's just not news. Nothing to see here, people. Just keeping moving along.

If I could play assignment editor for a moment here: The political story of the year continues to be the unhinged radical-right response to Obama's inauguration and the naked attempt to dehumanize and delegitimize him through a nonstop smear campaign sponsored by the GOP Noise Machine. The misguided movement breaks all kinds of taboos in American politics, as well as in the press, and is redefining our political culture -- for the worse. Yet the press continues to play dumb.

So spooked are journalists by decades' worth of "liberal media bias" attacks that they refuse to connect the glaringly obvious dots on display. They refuse to drill down into the rancid undercurrent that's behind the Obama-is-a-Nazi dementia, the town hall mini-mobs that are wreaking havoc across the country, and the bizarre birther conspiracy theory. The three right-wing phenomena are all related, and they all revolve around a runaway hatred of Obama (as well as the federal government), and they're all being fueled by the Noise Machine, especially Fox News and Limbaugh, both of which no longer recognize common decency, let alone journalistic standards.

Yet instead of putting Limbaugh on the receiving end of well-deserved scrutiny and scorn, rather than turning his comments into a political firestorm, the press plays dumb and actually goes out of its way to legitimize the worst offenders of the GOP's hate brigade.

And so that's why we saw ABC invite mini-mob cheerleader Michelle Malkin onto its Sunday morning talk show and sit her across from Pulitzer Prize-winning writers. Because in the eyes of elites at ABC, Malkin, whose job is basically to blog any semi-coherent smear campaign she can cook up, and who told Fox News viewers last week that health care reform "puts a discount on the lives of elderly people," deserves a place at the mainstream table. She's a very serious and important person.

And instead of examining the obviously dangerous implications of somebody like Michael Savage attracting a large and loyal radio audience as he belches out his hatred for women, liberals, gays, Arabs and other minorities, the prestigious New Yorker recently published something of a Savage valentine, portraying him as "weird" and "fun" and just completely misunderstood by liberals who worry too much about Savage's "addictive," jazz-inspired riffs.

Of course, just days after the profile appeared on newsstands, Savage hosted an interview with a delusional leader of the birther movement, and together they hatched a plan to unleash even more mini-mobs to ransack town hall forums and drive the birther message, all in hopes of forcing the president out of office. (Was that the "fun" The New Yorker had in mind when it toasted Savage in its pages?)

Because the corporate press has ignored the simmering hate wave on the right and let pass almost without comment the kind of outbursts that, if ever were to appear on liberal websites, would be denounced around the clock by media elites, it's not surprising that Limbaugh pretty much gets a pass for his Nazi crusade. (Do I even have to mention that the conservative press has been almost comically hypocritical about the Nazi issue? In other words, Bush + Hitler = bad. Obama + Hitler = crickets.)

Want some concrete proof that the press has treated this media Nazi story differently than the Hitler-MoveOn kerfuffle in 2004? Consider the fact that The Indianapolis Star published letters to the editor about the Hitler-MoveOn story on January 7, 9, 10, 11, and 19 back in 2004. To date, however, not a single word has been published on that same Star page about Limbaugh's creeping Nazi obsession.

Here's a list of big-city newspapers that covered the story in January of 2004, according to Nexis (and the number of separate articles, columns, or letters that referenced the story):

Indianapolis Star (5)
The New York Sun (5)
The Washington Times (5)
The Kansas City Star (3)
The New York Times (3)
News & Record of Greensboro, North Carolina (3)
San Antonio Express-News (3)
Minneapolis Star Tribune (3)
The Boston Globe (2)
New York Daily News (2)
Houston Chronicle (2)
New York Post (2)
The Arizona Republic (1)
Boston Herald (1)
The Denver Post (1)
Hartford Courant (1)
Los Angeles Times (1)
The Modesto Bee (1)
San Francisco Chronicle (1)
The Seattle Times (1)
St. Petersburg Times (1)
Rocky Mountain News (1)
Cleveland Plain Dealer (1)
Washington Post (1)
Newsday (1)
Richmond Times Dispatch (1)
Atlantic Journal-Constitution (1)
Orange County Register (1 )

Total big-city newspaper mentions: 54.

To date, here's the complete list of big-city newspapers that have covered the Limbaugh-Nazi story:

The Boston Globe (1)
The New York Times (1)
New York Daily News (1)
Denver Post (1)
Las Vegas Review-Journal (1)
Boston Herald (1)

Total big-city newspaper mentions: 6.

Television? According to a transcript search of Nexis, in January 2005, CNN gave the Hitler-MoveOn story three times more attention than it has to the current Limbaugh-Nazi controversy.

Looking back, maybe MoveOn should have just done what Limbaugh did and refused to apologize, instead embracing the Nazi nonsense. Because I'm sure if the liberal group had done that, I'm sure if MoveOn had pounded the Bush-is-a-Nazi angle for days and days, then journalists would have turned away quickly, just as so many have in response to Limbaugh's hateful Nazi rhetoric. Right?

Right?