Mother Jones: What's Inside Glenn Beck's Brain?

"Transition," already, will ya?

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Not Necessarily The News

H/T: HuffPo

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Evan Bayh Is The New Spokesmodel At Fox News

Thanks to Vanity Fair for the imagination to picture ersatz Democrat and former Indiana Senator Evan Bayh in fictional Fox News hair. Now I hope I can get the image out of my head.
Fox News has hired the squishy, bland Bayh, and he was characteristically as ecstatic as oatmeal, saying “I’m pleased to offer analysis of public policy and politics to the millions of Americans who get their news from Fox.” That part about millions of Americans getting their "news" from Fox was apparently meant to be taken seriously, too!

I know this will shock you, but since leaving the Senate, Bayh became a lobbyist. As ThinkProgress points out:

Note that there’s considerable synergy between Bayh’s job at McGuireWoods LLP and his Fox gig. This way business enterprises hoping for regulatory favors or subsidies from the federal government can hire McGuireWoods not only to take advantage of Bayh’s influence and knowledge on the Hill, they’ll also be gaining on on-air television spokesman, presumably one whose client affiliations won’t be disclosed to the viewing public. And since as best we can tell Fox has no journalistic standards, it’ll be an ideal venue for peddling whatever nonsense he likes.

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O Canada!

The True North strong and free...

From Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on HuffPo:

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada's Radio Act requires that "a licenser may not broadcast....any false or misleading news." The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio. Harper's proposal was timed to facilitate the launch of a new right wing network, "Sun TV News" which Canadians call "Fox News North."

The post is here.

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HuffPo/AOL: "A Merger OF Visions"

A huge convergence of the blogosphere, media, and the Web with the announcement that AOL has purchased the Huffington Post.

(As a reminder, JackRabbit Café is priced to move!)

More here.

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TV News Is Royally Screwed

From Tuesday's TVNewser via MediaBistro.com:

Not long after Buckingham Palace confirmed there would be a royal wedding next year of Prince William and his fiancee Kate Middleton, the news networks went in to high gear with Royal coverage.

The three network morning shows lead with the news in their cold opens; all three dubbing it “breaking news.” CBS tells us that Erica Hill is getting on a flight (Tuesday night) for London where she will anchor a split version of “The Early Show” (Wednesday). “Today” show’s Natalie Morales and “Good Morning America”‘s Bianna Golodryga are also heading over (Tuesday night) and will be in place for their shows (Wednesday) morning.

Let's see: the networks didn't bother to aggressively cover the run-up to the Iraq War or the financial meltdown and they routinely present cheap human interest stories and infotainment as hard news. But--FUCKIN'-A!--give 'em a wedding featuring a filthy-rich inbred British tribe and it's ALL HANDS ON DECK!

And that's the way it is, huh?

All The Shit Unfit To Print

Excerpted from Patrick Goldstein's The Big Picture in the Los Angeles Times:

Only in the nutty world of Fox News is there anything possibly controversial about celebrating a renowned chief. But apparently the Fox News crew hadn't managed to fill the daily quota of anti-Obama screeds, so the Fox's website got hold of a typically bland USA Today story about (President) Obama's new book, zeroed in on the one potentially controversial angle and came up with this headline: "Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General." Fox even managed to get that wrong, since there is zero evidence that Sitting Bull actually killed George Armstrong Custer at the famous Battle of the Little Big Horn. If you go to the post, you'll see the headline now reads: "Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Defeated U.S. General."

Stay tuned; Glenn Beck is surely on the case.

TV Land

H/T: HuffPo

Matt Drudge Still Can't Quit Bill Clinton...

Oh, For Christ's Sake...

From NBC Sports:

Look, if there's anything that proves President Obama isn't a Muslim, it's the fact that he skipped church to go play golf. That's as American as a fife and drum on the Fourth of July. But despite the fact that Ward Cleaver tried to get away with the same thing in practically every episode of Leave it to Beaver, conservative-leaning blogs are in a holy uproar of Obama's frequent golf outings. Example: he's played 43 rounds of golf -- 23 of them played on a Sunday. That's more than Bush in both terms! That's about every other week. How Christian. NOT.

The Obama's are on a 10-day vacation at Martha's Vineyard. From the Boston Herald:

Instead of attending church services at one of the dozens and dozens of quaint, island Christian churches yesterday morning, the commander in chief hit Our Lady of the Fairways, aka the Vineyard Golf Club, yet again, to play 18.
It was Obama's second outing to the posh, private golf club since landing Thursday on The Rock. The prez teed off at 8:30 a.m. under cloudy, drizzly skies. A perfect day to be inside. Like, say, in church!
Now you'd think, with polls showing that one in five Americans believe Obama is a Muslim -- and with the furor over the president's flip-flops on the Ground Zero mosque -- that his White House handlers might have orchestrated a nice little photo op of the first family doing a little vacation worshiping yesterday morning.
Because, despite the administration's insistence that Barry is a Christian and that he prays daily, most Americans have noticed that Obama rarely attends church. That's a noticeable departure from previous presidents, such as George W. Bush and Clinton, who were on their knees every Sunday.
Of course, the last time Obama had a regular church, it was Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fame, and, well, we all know how that turned out.
The president's handlers have said Obama doesn't attend services regularly because he doesn't want to be "hugely disruptive to congregations." This is apparently not an issue on the golf course.

Heartening to see the media focusing on the pressing matters of the day, isn't it?

Rachel Maddow Hands Bill O'Reilly His Sorry Ass (Again)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rachel Maddow Knows Exactly How To Deal With Fox News.

If The Truth Hurts, Fox News Is Pain Free.

Emily Henry is the Managing Editor of the South Los Angeles Report. Jose Lara is a teacher. Fox News is a fake news organization.

Those are the facts.

Here's Ms. Henry on HuffPo:

It began with an article posted on the Fox News website -- With Revolutionaries 'Looking On,' Teachers Take Kids on a Protest Trip to Arizona -- and soon spiraled into a slugging match between the far, far left and the far, far right. Anything involving the SB 1070 law has a tendency to do that, especially when it also happens to involve teachers, students and South Central.
The Fox story implied that Santee Education Complex teacher Jose Lara had led students on a "field trip" to Arizona to protest the SB 1070 law. The set up of the piece was obviously designed to raise questions about indoctrination: should teachers air opinions in front of students, potentially encouraging them to follow suit, or simply keep their mouths shut and teach?
But Lara wasn't shocked by the content of the story. He was disturbed by the journalistic process by which it had come about.
Lara, whose staunch social justice activism is captured through his FLIP camera and distributed via a handful of social networking accounts, was not directly quoted in the article, but both his Facebook and YouTube accounts were used as sources. Being that his first encounter with the story was after its publication, the situation raised questions for Lara about the validity of journalists sourcing social networking accounts rather than actual people.
If they had spoken to him directly, Lara says, they would have realized that they were publishing a factually incorrect account of events.
Lara has composed a response to the Fox news article and the questions it raised for him about "fair and balanced" journalism:

Fox News does it again
By Jose Lara

In a recent article, Fox took another swing at immigrant rights activists, teachers, and our public school system by misreporting and misleading the public.
According to Fox, three teachers took a Los Angeles School District sponsored field trip to Arizona to protest the new law, SB 1070. However, nothing can be further from the truth. Instead of fact checking and conducting authentic journalism, Fox decided to look to YouTube and Facebook for their "fair and balanced" news report, and without establishing actual contact with the subjects of the story, published it anyway.
Here is the truth: Firstly, teachers did not take any students on a field trip. The Los Angeles Unified School District would not have approved of such a trip. Secondly, the high school student quoted in the Fox article went on the Arizona protest trip with her mother, who is also a teacher. All of Fox's sources appear to come from Facebook, YouTube and online discussion groups.
I have a few questions for Fox:
Is a journalist who gets all their information from YouTube and Facebook without fact checking really a journalist at all?
Shouldn't Fox retract this story if they know it to be false?
Who benefits from stories like this?
Perhaps Fox News does not intend to produce authentic journalism, but yellow journalism instead. That is to say that Fox uses eye-catching headlines and over-sensationalized stories with little to no authentic research in order to gain ratings.
And, unfortunately, it is a successful method of attracting eyeballs. It also increases hate and division among people. The Fox News message board is filled with hateful rants - comments such as "Deport them all now", "Bring it on beano", and "America is being invaded!!!!" Fox fuels the fire by attempting to pass off opinion pieces as authentic journalism.

Matt Drudge Ponders The Big Issues.

Let's Go To The Videotape!

H/T: Guyism

Sarah Palin Is Working On A New Paperweight.

And the shit just keeps on comin'!
From the AP:

Sarah Palin's new book has a title, "America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag," and a release date, Nov. 23, publisher HarperCollins announced Tuesday.
The Alaska ex-governor and former GOP vice presidential candidate, whose memoir "Going Rogue" has sold more than 2 million copies, has been working on a tribute to American values.
It will include "selections from classic and contemporary readings that have moved her," according to HarperCollins, along with "the nation's founding documents to great speeches, sermons, letters, literature and poetry, biography, and even some of her favorite songs and movies."
The book is inspired not only by her "strong belief in the importance of family, faith, and patriotism," but by some of the people she met last year while promoting "Going Rogue."
Palin skipped major cities such as Seattle and Los Angeles, traditional stops on most author tours, and instead focused on smaller communities more receptive to her conservative message.

So, no--Simple Sarah isn't really writing a book. (Does anyone really believe she wrote her first one?) What the half-term, cashed-in former Alaska governor seems intent on selling to her gullible public is a collection of stuff she probably found on Quote Garden.

What's The Rush? We're Listening To NPR.

From Mother Jones, a f#ck you to Rush Limbaugh and his roving band of shrieking, opportunistic mimics:

A common question on the left is, "Why is there no liberal talk radio?" That is, no wildly popular liberal version of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Laura Schlesinger. And the answer is: there is. It's called NPR. When lefties listen to the radio, that's what they listen to.

In one of the great under-told media success stories of the past decade, NPR has emerged not as the bespectacled schoolmarm of our imagination but as a massive news machine poised for what Dick Meyer, editorial director for digital media, half-jokingly calls "world domination." NPR's listenership has nearly doubled since 1999, even as newspaper circulation dropped off a cliff. Its programming now reaches 26.4 million listeners weekly — far more than USA Today's 2.3 million daily circ or Fox News' 2.8 million prime-time audience. When newspapers were closing bureaus, NPR was opening them, and now runs 38 around the world, better than CNN. It has 860 member stations — "boots on the ground in every town" that no newspaper or TV network can claim.

Read more here.

Auto-Tune The News: Pure Poppycock.

When Matt Drudge Uses His Red Banner Headline, He's Probably Lying.

The New York Times reports on President Obama's just-announced nuclear weapons policy, and as usual, the hyperbolic Matt Drudge once again fails basic reading comprehension:

From the piece's second paragraph:

But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.

The frothing right-wing talking point incubator is clearly attempting to paint Obama as a Commie pinko peacenik pacifist who will curtsey and bow before unilaterally disarming. Drudge is nothing if not entirely predictable.

Other excerpts:

Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to create incentives for countries to give up any nuclear ambitions. To set an example, the new strategy renounces the development of any new nuclear weapons, overruling the initial position of his own defense secretary.

It eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the Cold War. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons, or launched a crippling cyberattack.

“I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,” Mr. Obama said during the interview in the Oval Office.

Mr. Obama’s new strategy is bound to be controversial, both among conservatives who have warned against diluting America’s most potent deterrent, and among liberals who were hoping for a blanket statement that America would never be the first to use nuclear weapons.

The most immediate test of the new strategy is likely to be in dealing with Iran, which has defied the international community by developing a nuclear program that it insists is peaceful but that the United States and its allies say is a precursor to weapons. Asked about the escalating confrontation with Iran, Mr. Obama said he was now convinced that “the current course they’re are on would provide them with nuclear weapons capabilities,” though he gave no timeline.

The full New York Times report is here.

Rachel Maddow Vs. Scott Brown's Naked Lies.

Nice to see someone in the media doing their job...