Fox News’ troubled relationship with the truth: Sarah Palin edition

Sean Hannity’s apology last week for using misleading footage seemed more smug than sincere, and now we know why: It’s apparently standard operating procedure at Fox News:

Today, FOX News host Gregg Jarrett was talking about Republican Sarah Palin’s book tour and the crowd she is drawing at the start of it – no small turnout, with some 1,500 people lining up early this morning for a chance to get into this evening’s premier book-signing for Going Rogue in Grand Rapids.

“Sarah Palin continuing to draw huge crowds while she’s promoting her brand new book,” FOX’s Jarrett told his viewers. “Take a look at — these are some of the pictures just coming into us… The lines earlier had formed this morning.”

But it turns out that Happening Now had pulled some video of something that happened last year: Displaying video today from Palin’s campaign for the vice presidency, on the ticket with the GOP’s Sen. John McCain – which also drew considerable crowds, as shown today in video of a smiling Palin before an adoring campaign crowd.

“This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn’t alert the control room to update the video,” Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news at FOX, sad this evening. “There will be an on-air explanation during Happening Now on Thursday.”

I wonder if the explainer will smirk like Hannity did, hand-in-the-cookie-jar style.

In any case, the second incident in two weeks tells us one of two things about Fox News:

• That caught last week by The Daily Show in an error that cast doubt on its professional ethics, Fox News responded by doing absolutely nothing to prevent a repeat of the error. Which makes the organization sloppy and arrogant and undeserving of the respect accorded other news organizations — at least until it can transparently and publicly discuss how it’s fixing the problem.

• Or this is the kind of stuff Fox News pulls on purpose all the time.

Me, I strongly suspect Option No. 2. But I’m open to Option No. 1.

(UPDATE: I neglected to give Ben a hat tip for this post. Apologies.)

Glenn Beck makes light of rape

There’s probably never a good time to use a rape analogy; it’s a uniquely awful crime. But it’s worse to use a specific rape — in this case, Roman Polanski’s assault on a teen girl, now a grown woman who (for all we know) might’ve been watching this — to make a point about health care policy.

And it’s worse yet for the analogy to be applied clumsily. Hey Glenn: It was the criminal who sought refuge in Europe, not the victim. What an incredible dumbass.

The difference between MSNBC and Fox News

Whereas Fox News’ bread-and-butter is criticizing President Obama, the liberals at MSNBC … criticize President Obama:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

Truth be told, I can barely watch Keith Olbermann. I find Maddow more palatable, but not enough to catch her show every night. But MSNBC isn’t just the leftward version of Fox News; it has conservative hosts on its air, and its liberals are more willing to go after one of their own.

That Sean Hannity sure is a smug son-of-a-gun, isn’t he?

You know, most people in anything resembling “journalism” have the good graces to act a little mortified when they’re caught purveying false information to the public. In order to rectify the situation, many “journalistic organizations” even offer transparent explanations of how they came to offer false information to the public.

But Sean Hannity and Fox News? Their “apology” for running video that purported to show big crowds at last week’s tea party protest — the video was from another protest held in September — was delivered with a smirk and an unconvincing “just an accident” apology. You’re supposed to at least pretend you’re embarrassed about deceiving your viewers, Sean!

Rush Limbaugh accuses President Obama of something close to treason

I missed this over the weekend, but today’s Maureen Dowd column — yes, I read it, damnit — dredges up this little nugget from Rush Limbaugh’s weekend interview on Fox News:

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace,” Limbaugh accused the president of trying to destroy the economy — yes, the same economy that W. came within a whisker of ruining.

“I have to think that it may be on purpose,” Limbaugh said, “because this is just outrageous, what is happening — a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.”

What the hell? One of the right’s leading political commentators is accusing the president on national television of deliberately bringing harm to his country in order to accrue power. That’s the kind of accusation that should only be made with a bushel of evidence in hand; airing it as a casual and unsupported political attack is vile hackery.

This is the point where lots of folks on the right, eager to have Rush in the corner but not always eager to have to defend his claims, pull the “Rush is just an entertainer” routine. Maybe. I certainly believe that much of what he says is an effort to maximize his audience. But the audience is largely made up of people who believe Rush’s crap. That is, verrrrry roughly, 20 million people a week. And while I don’t want to be alarmist, I do wonder how those millions of people will respond, over time, to being told not merely that the Democratic president is a bad presdient, but that he’s trying to ruin the country in order to take away their freedoms. I fear that can’t come to a good end.

Fox News, CNN and partisanship in the news

Piece in the Times today claims that Fox News merely reflects a return to the 19th century practice of partisan journalism — but that it’s not alone. Just check out the audience numbers.

In audience surveys from August 2000 to March 2001, Fox News viewers tilted Republican by 44.6 percent to 36.1 percent. More narrowly — 41.4 percent to 39.4 percent — so did the audience for MSNBC. The audiences of CNN, Headline News, CNBC and Comedy Central leaned Democratic.

Four years later, amid the Iraq war and President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, the audience data had shifted. Fox News viewers had become 51 percent Republican and just 30.8 percent Democratic, while MSNBC viewers leaned Democratic by 41.7 percent to 40.4 percent. Viewers of CNN, Headline News, CNBC and Comedy Central grew slightly more Democratic.

By 2008-9, the network audiences tilted decisively, like Fox’s. CNN viewers were more Democratic by 50.4 percent to 28.7 percent; MSNBC viewers were 53.6 percent to 27.3 percent Democratic; Headline News’ 47.3 percent to 31.4 percent Democratic; CNBC’s 46.9 percent to 32.5 percent Democratic; and Comedy Central’s 47.1 to 28.8 percent Democratic.

This is all very interesting, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about the journalism — or propaganda — being purveyed by the respective cable news networks. (Why the hell are they measuring Comedy Central in there, anyway?) It’s true that MSNBC features more straightforward liberals in its lineup than the other networks — but it also has former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough in the morning. CNBC has Reagan-worshipping free market prophet Larry Kudlow as a key part of its lineup. CNN has Lou Dobbs. And Headline News was Glenn Beck’s first television home, lest you forget.

So it’s not necessarily the case that all the non-Fox networks decided to appeal to Democrats as a business strategy. It seems just as possible — just as likely, in fact — the demographics have changed because conservatives have decisively fled the non-Fox networks for the warm ideological tongue bath they get from Fox. That’s left the other networks with only Democrats as their audience. And as the lineup of stars above suggests, they still don’t cater to their ideological audience as thoroughly as Fox News does. Suggesting, as the Times does today, that Fox isn’t all that unusual flies in the face of common sense.

Bill Kristol believes insiders like Newt Gingrich are outsiders

Bill Kristol in today’s WaPo:

In a recent Rasmussen poll, the only candidates with double-digit support among Republicans were Mike Huckabee (at 29 percent), Mitt Romney (24 percent), Sarah Palin (18 percent) and Newt Gingrich (14 percent). These four are running way ahead of various senatorial and gubernatorial possibilities. So a party that has over the past two decades nominated a vice president (George H.W. Bush), a senator (Bob Dole), a governor (George W. Bush) and another senator (John McCain), now has as its front-runners four public figures who are, to one degree or another, outsiders.

This is a bit of dishonest framing on Kristol’s part. He surely knows that every president since Jimmy Carter — with the exception of the first George Bush — has won office by running as an “outsider” pledging to bring change of some sort to Washington. Even Al Gore, the sitting vice president, tried to fashion himself as an insurgent with the “people versus the powerful” theme of his 2000 campaign.

But it kind of defies common sense that two governors — one of whom has his own show on Fox News — a vice presidential candidate and a former speaker of the House can in any rational sense be judged as “outsiders.” As always with Kristol, the question is whether he’s lying or dumb. I don’t see why we have to choose.

Karl Rove, Fox News and chutzpah

You’ve got to admire the man’s chutzpah. It’s bad when presidents single out news organizations for criticism and reduced access, you see:

Karl Rove, a Fox News contributor who advised President George W. Bush, said Obama’s aides have tried to “demonize” Fox and compared their approach to that of President Richard M. Nixon.

“This is a White House engaging in its own version of the media enemies list,” Rove said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It’s unhelpful for the country and undignified for the president of the United States.”

Except when it isn’t:

If Times readers did not already know the paper’s relationship with the White House was in serious disrepair, they found out on September 18. That day, Times reporter Rick Lyman wrote a front-page piece about how, despite having been assigned by the country’s most influential newspaper to cover Cheney’s re-election campaign, he was not welcome on Air Force Two, where 10 seats were reserved for the travelling press corps. None was available for him, or for the previous Times reporter assigned to the Cheney beat. Lyman’s article, headlined Chasing Dick Cheney, was written with a slightly tongue-in-cheek tone (as much irony as the still-staid Times allows) but could not mask the strain between the paper and the White House, the kind of rift usually kept from public view as administration and news officials exchange behind-the-scene phone calls to try to patch things up.

Cheney had already made clear this summer that he had no intentions of maintaining cordial relations with the Times when he blasted its coverage of the 9/11 commission as “outrageous” and “malicious.”

The Bush White House’s open feud with the Times represents a clear break with the tradition of most Republican presidents – including the current president’s father – tolerating the major mainstream press outlets despite misgivings or unhappiness with their coverage.

Karl Rove’s punditry career relies entirely on everybody forgetting everything that happened before 2009.

Breaking news! Fox News distorts the news!

OK, that’s actually old news, which is why I only have snarky jokes to make. Still, Media Matters’ analysis  that Fox showed only opponents of health reform in its town hall coverage would, I think, pose a challenge to serious conservatives. Doesn’t a realistic view of the world — and the ability to effectively counter your opponents arguments — require depicting the existence of opposing views and understanding/representing them fairly?

I mean, I get it: “Liberal media” blah blah blah. But the angry opponents of health reform were certainly getting their air time on CNN and MSNBC the last month or so. On Fox, the opposition simply disappears when it’s not being mocked.

In the world of Fox News, everybody hates health reform

There’s not much to add to the pile of commentary about Fox News’ distorting effects on the public discourse, but it’s nice to see it quantified sometimes:

Reform opponents outnumbered supporters 63 to 10. A Media Matters review of digital video and Nexis transcripts of Fox News programming during August 10 and 11 revealed the number of guests in opposition to progressive health care reform efforts to be more than six times greater than the number of guests who were supportive of such efforts.

But complaints about it and $2 will get you a cup of coffee, so meh. There’s not much point to watching any of the cable news channels, as far as I’m concerned. But Fox definitely goes to the bottom of the list.