Tag: Fox News

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Fox News ends interview after guest calls Fox News “a wing of the Republican Party”

Author and Pulitzer prize winner Tom Ricks had his time cut short on Fox News after pointing out that Fox News’s coverage of the Benghazi attacks has been inordinately heavy during an interview with the conservative network on Monday.

Ricks, who has written extensively on the American military, called Fox an “operating as a wing of Republican Party” that “hyped” the Benghazi attack as a faux-scandal.

Later, a “news staffer” told Ricks that he was rude while he was on air. Ricks’ segment, according to an interview he gave with the New York Times, was about “half as long as planned.” 

“I had told the producer before I went on that I thought the Benghazi story had been hyped. So it should have been no surprise when I said it and the anchor pushed back that I defended my view,” Ricks told Politico. Ricks also told the New York Times that he was going to discuss the “lack of combat readiness of some Army units” but he never got the opportunity,. “They seemed to lose interest in that,” he said.

(via ThinkProgress)

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Fox News has little time for LGBT issues

Media Matters notes that Fox News had little time for the marriage equality wins or Tammy Baldwin’s historic US Senate win in Wisconsin.

From November 6 to November 9, Media Matters combed through transcripts of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News for terms related to same-sex marriage. The organization determined that Fox News devoted far less time to the subject than it’s competitors – only one segment and nine mentions to the marriage equality wins, which marked the first time in history that American citizens voted in favor of same-sex marriage. When discussed by Fox newscasters, these victories were usually “bundled with other ballot initiatives,” rather than given individualized attention.

Media Matters also notes that Fox News failed to report on the election of Rep. Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay candidate to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. By contrast, her election received in-depth coverage on the other networks.

Read more at the Advocate.

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NJ Gov. Christie: “The President has done a great job”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie declared the devastation from Superstorm Sandy in his state to be a “major disaster” and “devastation,” but he also stated that working with President Obama on securing resources for the state has been “great.”

“The president has been all over this, and he deserves great credit,” Christie said. “He gave me his number at the White House and told me to call him if I needed anything, and he absolutely means it. It’s been very good working with the president and his administration. It’s been wonderful.”

President Obama and the governor spoke three times on Monday, Christie stated.

“He asked me what I needed. I said if he could expedite the Major Disaster Declaration without all the normal FEMA mumbo-jumbo. He got right on it,” added Christie. “I got a call from FEMA at 2 a.m…and then this morning I understand he signed the Major Disaster Declaration for New Jersey.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie praises President Obama for his response to Hurricane Sandy at the 6:00 mark.

Note, however, the response the Governor gives to the Fox team when they ask about Mitt Romney at the 2:10 mark. Not a good moment for Fox.

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Fox and Friends runs anti-Obama campaign ad as “journalism”

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Note that Fox & Friends isn’t playing a campaign ad or a YouTube spot from an outside political action committee.

Nor does this come from the production company of one of its opinion-program hosts. The video starts with “Fox and Friends Presents” on the screen, making this an explicit argument from the news channel itself. This is a four minute video – not a casual comment thrown around here or there.

Should a news organization produce and publish attack ads like this? If anyone wanted to look for evidence that the overall Fox News organization intends to campaign against Obama rather than cover the campaign, this video would be difficult to refute as evidence for that claim.

While the video attempts to make an argument against another four years of President Obama, that shouldn’t be the job of news-reporting organizations.

And the remarkable thing was the the hosts on the couch for this show had the audacity to present it as journalism and congratulate the producer who put it together.

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Fox News calls out Mitt Romney for “accounting trick” regarding women’s unemployment statement

Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday called out presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for using an “accounting trick” to assert that women had lost 92.3 percent of the jobs during President Barack Obama’s first term.

“The number of jobs — this is an amazing statistic — the percentage of jobs lost by women in the president’s three years — three and a half years — 92.3 percent of all the jobs lost during the Obama years have been lost by women!” Romney had said while surrounded by a group of women in Hartford, Connecticut last week.

“You know, 858,000 women have lost their jobs since President Obama took office,” Mitt Romney’s Senior Advisor Gillespie declared. “Ninety-two percent of the job losses in this recession or this recovery — slow stifled recovery — have fallen on women.”

“Wait,” Wallace interrupted. “You know that it is true that more women have lost jobs and it’s true that more women are without jobs now, but it is not true that 90 percent — they did under Obama, but many, many more men — because they are in the job sectors that people lose jobs first — lost jobs under President Bush.”

“So, it’s a little bit of an accounting trick,” Wallace added. “And all of the independent fact finders have said it’s misleading.”

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Fox News: What’s the BFD? WTF?

After its years-long misinformation campaign against health care reform, Fox News is now down to attacking the Obama reelection campaign for selling what Fox deems as “vulgar” T-shirts to celebrate the law.

The campaign recently released a line of T-shirts bearing the slogan, “Health reform still a BFD,” which plays off Vice President Joe Biden’s famous open mike moment during the health care law signing ceremony in March 2010.

On March 23, Fox’s leading culture warrior, Todd Starnes, called the “BFD” shirts “vulgar.” Fox Nation quickly trumpeted his attack:

This morning, the Fox & Friends Saturday crew devoted several segments to parroting Starnes, with guest co-host Nicole Petallides calling the shirts “so vulgar” and asking, “Would [Obama] like his daughters to wear that T-shirt?” Co-host Clayton Morris said: “I wouldn’t want my son to see that. I wouldn’t want him to see Daddy in a T-shirt like that.”

Morris also said that “you expect more from the presidency of the United States than to be tweeting out from their own account driving to you a T-shirt that has a vulgarity on it. It just doesn’t sit well.”

The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America arm released a line of shirts with the slogan, “Health reform is a BFD,” a week after Biden’s comment — two years ago.

And if Fox genuinely feels that “BFD” is offensive, wouldn’t the network also object to the “WTF” construct?

In January 2011, Fox News contributor Sarah Palin used the phrase “WTF” on the network to repeatedly attack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech. Palin, of course, was the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate in 2008.
(source)

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Fox News 2008: Presidents don’t have the power to lower gas prices

Well, now isn’t this interesting?  The busy people at Media Matters have taken a look through the archives, and lo and behold, guess who said “no President has the power to increase or to lower gas prices.”

Very, very interesting clips from Fox News where practically everyone there was giving President Bush a “pass” when gas prices were rising in Summer 2008.

NOW, however, following GOP strategy, Fox News is blaming the Obama administration for rising gasoline prices — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by energy analysts.

In 2008, Fox’s coverage occasionally even mirrored today’s facts: expanding domestic oil drilling will not significantly lower prices, and the only way to reduce our vulnerability to gas price spikes is to use less oil.

Remember when I mentioned politics is just a big, big game?