FOX News never met a community organizer they didn’t hate. Desperate to exacerbate the GOP’s recent attacks on ACORN, FOX is fueling the fire of misinformation about the nation’s largest grassroots community organizing group. They attacked ACORN’s Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis last Thursday for endorsing Barack Obama in a video, claiming ACORN should not be allowed to make public endorsements since they are partly government funded. Once again, however, FOX is dead wrong.
According to Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party in New York that created Lewis’s video, “ACORN is not a c3 non-profit. Quite the opposite — it has long fought to engage low-income Americans in politics, and its political action committee has long endorsed candidates for president on down to dog catcher in the attempt to hold politicians accountable to working people.”
Working Families New York has fought successfully for a minimum wage hike, paid family leave, and to extend healthcare coverage, among other recent campaigns. And as Cantor points out, voting the Working Family line for Obama (which ultimately is added to the total number of Democratic votes under a New York provision that allows two parties to endorse the same candidate) conveys a message for real progressive change.
Lewis is the co-chair of the Working Families New York, just as ACORN has many members who belong to other organizations fully capable of making public endorsements. ACORN also has numerous political action committees at the state level working directly on various electoral races. Not to mention ACORN Votes, a federal PAC that endorsed Obama back in February.
Yesterday, Stuart Varney was the substitute host on Fox’s “premiere business news” show, “Your World with Neil Cavuto.” During what quickly morphed into an hour-long Obama smear-feast, Varney implied that the Obama campaign kicked reporters from three newspapers off its campaign plane because their editorial boards endorsed McCain. (I haven’t heard a word on this show about the reporters McCain has kicked off his plane — here and here.) Unfortunately for Fox, the interview didn’t go quite as planned.
UPDATE: Varney introduced his guest, Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News with this:
“Kicked off the Obama plane. Reporters from three newspapers are getting the boot just days before Election Day by the Obama campaign. Those papers are the New York Post, the Washington Times and the Dallas Morning News. The Obama campaign says it simply doesn’t have enough room on the plane to meet demand. But, considering all three papers have endorsed McCain, is something more sinister going on here? Reaction now from Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News who was just given the boot from the plane.”
After several seconds of opening banter Varney asked, “You think flat out you were kicked off the plane because your newspaper endorsed the opposition?” (Don’t you love that? The “opposition?”)
Slater:
“Stuart, I have no evidence of that. We were not told that. We don’t believe that. We know that we did endorse John McCain. Ah, in fact, I think it’s entirely possible that there simply wasn’t enough room. … I really don’t think this was a function of the endorsement. I think this was a function of their decision to have a mix in the final days of this campaign which worked more to their advantage - more network people, more outreach, ah, possibly some other folks.”
Oops. Though this short segment didn’t go as planned, Fox managed to push a lot of buttons: They’ll repeal the Fairness Doctrine; the First Amendment restricts the freedom of speech of kings and queens (wah, wah); will Obama govern like a Socialist Commie dictator?; he hates America, and freedom of speech is out the window. When you don’t report the sleaze that the Republicans are doing and have done, you can get away with dumping on “the opposition” like this.
FOX News is in the desperate throes of backing a losing party. Despite what Megyn “Obama’s Baby Mama” Kelly would have you believe, FOX has been the GOP’s mouthpiece throughout this election, viciously maligning Barack Obama while pushing the party’s conservative agenda. (For proof of just how much slander they have spewed, check out FOX Attacks Obama, FOX Attacks Obama 2, or FOX Attacks Obama Just Like Kerry.) In fact, I hold them as responsible as McCain’s most bigoted supporters for stoking the racial prejudice and xenophobic hatred that we’re now seeing in campaign events across the country. Amazingly though, the Obama campaign has begun calling out FOX for their loathsome media bias.
First, Obama criticized FOX on national television during the third presidential debate. Then, in an interview for The New York Times Sunday magazine, Obama told Matt Bai, “I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls.” And now we have Obama staffers confronting FOX on their own network. Just watch as Bill Burton remains unflappable during this heated exchange with Kelly, who completely loses her cool.
In response to McCain’s ludicrous attack on Obama for being “the Redistributor” of wealth — an attack FOX has of course perpetuated and exacerbated with their Joe the Plumber socialist nonsense — Burton calmly tells Kelly: “This is a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of FOX News, the Drudge Report and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months.”
It is, as Burton says, a fake news controversy. Even conservatives like George Will have said that 95 percent of the government’s job is to redistribute wealth. But in a hopeless attempt to paint Obama as a Socialist, the Republicans and FOX News alike are on the verge of losing a crucial ideological battle on free market fundamentalism, which is probably why Burton’s composure causes Kelly to become choleric.
FOX isn’t merely rearranging the deck chairs on the GOP’s Titanic anymore. They’re violently throwing those chairs at everyone trying to make their way to a lifeboat.
On October 12, FOX News’s Eric Shawn interviewed FOX contributor Liz Trotta on the topic of the economy. Trotta is well-known as an abrasive, bullying type and she was in rare form as she urged the GOP candidates to go after Obama and Biden with a vengeance.
A couple of days later Sarah Palin appeared on Rush Limbaugh to complain that she wasn’t getting a fair shake in the press. She then noted that she has “nothing to lose” by continuing her thoroughly debunked “guilt by association” talking points.
This video compares the raw original broadcast to the video made available on the FOXNews.com story claiming that the crowd reaction was “mixed.” The FOX News video not only had poor audio quality, making the boos hard to discern, it also completely edited out the video from when the boos were loudest.
On October 7th, after the second Presidential debate, FOX News Channel’s Greta van Susteren interviewed Las Vegas reporter Molly Ball about the Nevada raids on the offices of ACORN. Despite the fact that Ms. Ball corrected van Susteren’s erroneous assertion that the FBI raided the offices, the very next day Steve Doocy on FOX and Friends repeated the incorrect information.
Additionally, as usual, during the F&F segment, they aired a photo and a video clip of Obama designed to evoke images of Malcolm X.
For more information about ACORN and voter suppression, go to www.bradblog.com
“Here’s what Fox has been talking about just since Tuesday’s debate,” Stewart said, before showing clips of the following:
Megyn Kelly discussing voter fraud
Sean Hannity mentioning William Ayers
Megyn Kelly, Brian Kilmeade, and Steve Doocy discussing Newsweek’s liberal bias
Sean Hannity mentioning Reverend Jeremiah Wright
Megyn Kelly referencing Obama’s “deep secret ties” to the Kenyan government
“Fox & Friends” introducing country star Aaron Tippin’s “Drill Here, Drill Now!”
and a collection of Bill Ayers clips, punctuated by Frank Luntz downplaying the results of a post-debate focus group that suggested Obama won the debate.
Ohio’s Ken Blackwell, of all people, appeared on Hannity & Colmes to resurrect the voter fraud meme that was so popular on the network in 2004, only to be dropped the instant Bush was re-elected.
In this interview, Hannity and Blackwell (whose controversial history was not disclosed to viewers of the “We report. You decide” network) made a deliberate effort to suggest Obama would be connected to the fraudulent efforts. Of course, there was no discussion about voter caging, voter suppression, purging of voter rolls or vote tampering.
On FOX and Friends yesterday, Brian Wilson interviewed people at a diner in PA about the bailout failure yesterday and the financial crisis in general. He then asked for a show of hands in an impromptu presidential vote.
Watch Jon Stewart slam Sean Hannity for lobbing a series of softball questions at Sarah Palin that were clearly designed to give the governor a chance to attack Democrats. When it comes to journalism, FOX is as hard-hitting as an infomercial!
