Fox News

Fox News: Garbage In, Garbage Out

November 22, 2011 By mario piperni

Here is a perfect example (they’re not difficult to find) of what David Frum was referring to when he wrote of Fox News being a key agent in creating a “whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.“

Two of Fox’s shining stars, Megyn ‘Barbie Doll’ Kelly and Bill ‘Lying’ O’Reilly, were discussing the pepper spraying of students by UC Davis police officers. As the two downplayed the needless brutality by police, they offered up healthy portions of that “alternate knowledge system” Fox specializes in.

First, Kelly on the harmless effects of pepper spray.

“…it’s like a derivative of actual pepper. It’s a food product, essentially.”

Yeah, right Megyn. Just like water is a harmless liquid, so pouring it down the nose and into the lungs of a person strapped to a table isn’t really torture; it’s just an alternate way of drinking water. No big deal, right?

Pepper spray in not torture but to downplay its effects by referring to it as a simple “food product” is just plain stupid and disingenuous. Here’s what pepper spray actually does to one’s system.

You gasp as the spray hits your airwaves, causing instant inflammation of the mucous membranes in your throat and nose. The lining of your throat swells—not enough to stop you from breathing, but just enough to make it tough to get your fill of air. Coughing, gagging, and shortness of breath are all to be expected. The stuff also temporarily paralyzes your larynx, making it difficult to speak. Then your mean arterial blood pressure shoots up; blood floods your face, making it appear as if it has been burned. Normal breathing—the calm in-and-out that you don’t usually think about—may not return for another 45 minutes.

As for O’Reilly, he chimed in with this bit of nonsense:

“I don’t think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police, particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus.”

How dumb is that? O’Reilly routinely Monday-morning quarterbacks every story he deems newsworthy but the actions of police on non-violent students is, according to him, off-limits to criticism because it took place at a “fairly liberal campus”? God, is there a more pompous jackass in all of cable?

All of this helps explain the results of a poll released this week.

Sunday morning news shows do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who they don’t watch any news at all.

…

Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew theirgovernment than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news. “Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

“Something?” There is “something about watching Fox News” which makes people more ignorant? They don’t know what that “something” is? Let me help them out:

PEOPLE WHO WATCH FOX NEWS REGULARLY ARE LIED TO EVERY SINGLE HOUR OF EVERY SINGLE DAY AND FED A STEADY SERVING OF REPUBLICAN RIGHT-WING BULLSHIT BY A CAST OF STOOGES AND CLOWNS WHO TAKE THEIR ORDERS FROM A MR. ROGER AILES AND THAT IS WHY FOX NEWS VIEWERS ARE MORE IGNORANT AND MISINFORMED THAN MOST FOLK.

Sorry for the shouting but I wanted to make sure that the good professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson heard me. May I also add that watching no news is preferable to watching Fox News. If you don’t watch news, you can always guess at an answer and have some chance of being correct. People who watch Fox News, on the other hand, are almost always guaranteed of dishing out the wrong answer because, as they’re fond of saying in the world of computer science – Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Jack Ohman

___

Follow MarioPiperniDotCom on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
.

Filed Under: Fox News Tagged With: Conservative Media, poll

The Fox News Fear Factory

June 8, 2011 By mario piperni

Just finished reading the excellent article on Roger Ailes in Rolling Stone – How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory. There were no big surprises in that most individuals of sound mind are acutely aware of Fox’s role as the propaganda wing of the Republican Party. What was fascinating was reading up on exactly how Ailes created his Goebbels-like factory of disinformation – one which has become a major player in American politics.

As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz tells it:

“Fox News is totalized: It’s an entire network, devoted 24 hours a day to an entire politics, and it’s broadcast as ‘the news.’ That’s why Ailes is a genius. He’s combined opinion and journalism in a wholly new way – one that blurs the distinction between the two.”

The Giant Soundstage:

Ailes has used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.

The Audience:

Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” [...]

“He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”

I imagine we all know people who fit the above description. I certainly do. One in particular is a bigoted, homophobic, hate-filled individual who spends his entire days with Fox News blaring in the background. It has warped his mind beyond any trace of reason. To hear him speak is to hear the parroting of every conservative talking point and lie ever heard on Fox. He, similar to many conservatives who rely on Fox as their single source for information, has become part of Roger Aile’s army of zombies…and so thorough is the manipulation, they’re not even aware of the full frontal lobotomy Fox has performed on them.

The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.

Great article; give it a read if you’re interested in furthering your understanding of what makes your Fox-loving neighbor tick.

Filed Under: Fox News Tagged With: Republican Party, Roger Ailes

Fox Gets Front Row Seat – “Keep Your Friends Close, Your Enemies Closer”

August 2, 2010 By mario piperni

Some on the left are freaking out over this.

Fox News Channel has been granted a much-coveted front-row seat in the White House briefing room.

The White House Correspondents Association said Sunday that The Associated Press’ reporter has been moved to the front-row center seat previously occupied by Helen Thomas. Fox’s correspondent will take the AP’s former front-row seat, and National Public Radio’s correspondent will move up one row to Fox’s old second-row seat.

The center seat was long held by Thomas, a United Press International and Hearst News Service writer. The 89-year-old columnist resigned abruptly in June amid controversy over videotaped remarks she made calling on Israelis to get “out of Palestine.” Fox, Bloomberg News (also seated in the second row) and NPR had lobbied for Thomas’ seat.

Seriously, who cares and what difference does it make? It’s not as if Fox can somehow be more smug and arrogant than they already are.

___

To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s page. Click here

Filed Under: Fox News Tagged With: chair, Fox News, political issues, politics, seating

Fox News – Confusion Central

July 20, 2010 By mario piperni

Quick. Who is the most biased and least competent business ‘expert’ on television? If you answered Fox’s Stuart Varney, advance to the bonus round.

Steve Benen…

Varney was outraged by the notion that Bush’s tax cuts would expire next year. Democrats, Varney insisted, are going to “swell the deficit” in the coming years by “raising taxes … which increases the deficit.”

First, Democrats aren’t “raising taxes,” so much as they’re following the Republican plan to let breaks for the wealthy expire on schedule. If Varney doesn’t like it, he should blame the GOP for coming up with this tax scheme in the first place.

Second, if Fox News’ “business expert” seriously believes the deficit goes up when tax rates increase, he’s in the wrong profession. It’s sheer nonsense, and a reminder of why a) Stuart Varney is something of an embarrassment to himself; and b) Fox News viewers struggle so badly with current events. An audience bombarded with incoherent propaganda is bound to get confused.

Confused? OK. That’s a genteel enough way of describing them.

___

.
To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s page. Click here

Filed Under: Fox News Tagged With: business, Fox News, politics, varney

The O’Lielly Factor

April 14, 2010 By mario piperni

Bill O’Reilly has elevated the art of lying to guru status. If one was so inclined, you could literally pick out his lies from just about every single episode of the Factor. I am not so inclined but when the buffoon lies as blatantly as he did last night, well, it requires mention. Here’s how it came down.

Last week, at a town hall meeting, Republican Senator Tom Coburn responded to a woman who was concerned about the new health care bill incarcerating people for not obtaining insurance. The Senator responded with…

“The intention is not to put anybody in jail. That makes for good TV news on Fox but that isn’t the intention.”

O’Reilly, defender of all things Fox, had this to say to Coburn last night.

“[Y]ou don’t know anybody on Fox News — because there hasn’t been anyone — that said people will go to jail if they don’t buy mandatory insurance.”

“[W]e researched to find out if anybody had ever said you are going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance. Nobody has ever said it. What it seems to me is you used Fox News as a whipping boy when we didn’t qualify there … you were wrong to do that, Senator, with all due respect.”

Of course, there was no research, at least not by O’Reilly’s staff. Research is not something Fox is known for. But if they had, they might have come up with…

November 13, 2009, O’Reilly Factor:

O’REILLY: Couldn’t they do [liposuction] at the same time [as your appendectomy]?

BECK: No, they wouldn’t. No. I don’t have universal health care.

O’REILLY: No, let’s get — well, you will soon.

BECK: Or I’ll go to jail.

O’REILLY: Are you going to be a conscientious objector to health care?

BECK: You know, this is the first time in history in our country where, just to be a citizen, just to be — just to not go to jail, you have to buy something.

November 12, 2009, The Glenn Beck Show:

BECK: “if you don’t get into their government health care, there will be jail time.”

February 4, 2010, Fox and Friends:

RUSH LIMBAUGH: “This is not even a health care bill. This is a bill that raises taxes 14 times; puts people in jail, potentially, if they don’t have health insurance mandated by the government to buy. This is an avenue to control every aspect of life.”

November 10, 2009, Sean Hannity’s show:

HANNITY: “Dick Morris was on the program last night. Penalties for people who don’t get government-mandated health insurance, uh, jail time, a possibility?“

There are more examples but you get the idea. Coburn had it right but O’Reilly could not care less. Should he make mention of this MediaMatters piece tonight, he’ll simply refer to MM as a George Soros controlled liberal smear site and that will be that. End of story. The right have trained their sheep with Pavlovian mastery. The mere mention of the phrase ‘liberal mainstream media‘ instantly discounts anything a non-wingnut source says. No point for O’Reilly’s groupies to actually check what MM wrote and discover that they are quoting directly from transcripts of Fox shows. All that matters is that MM is branded a “liberal” source and that satisfies their little minds.

___

To receive new posts directly on your Facebook page, become a member of MarioPiperniDotCom’s fan page by clicking here or to receive email notifications of new posts, click on Subscribe.
.