It's amazing how it works.

Isn't it amazing how broadcasters on the right can say all these crazy attention getting things on their "entertainment" and "opinion" shows and then you take a poll of Republicans and they seem to believe it's the way things are in reality. . .

. . such a freaky unpredictable coincidence. . .

Media Matters For America has been focusing their energy on crashing the right wing media for a long time now. They don't just tell us about things. . though. . they are very good at collecting and presenting the evidence. They also provide their sources when they debunk things.

Kuttner pwns Hannity

Multimillionaire Sean Hannity proved he's not just a loudmouthed blowhard but seriously out of touch with everyday Americans. Kudos to guest Robert Kuttner for refusing to be intimidated. From the 9/10/08 Hannity & Colmes.

Media Activism: Protect The Box From Fox

There has been a lot of activism against Fox News lately. Color of Change is the most recent but there has also been some great work by Robert Greenwald and Hip Hop Artist: Nas among many others. There has even been a recent revelation by former White House Press secretary, Scott McLellan that the administration was giving Fox commentators Republican talking points to make sure they were on the same page as the Administration in their broadcasts. We here at Media Crashers also feel that Fox News is the poster child for what is wrong with the news media today and we would like to contribute to this effort.

Today we are pleased to suggest the Protect The Box From Fox netroots uprising.

Today, we call upon all cable remote savvy netroots media activists to participate in, perhaps, the greatest political prank of our generation. A little bit of "friendly fun" for us to have with our friends and family. Did you ever turn everything on and blast the radio in someone's car so that they are surprised when they start it up? It's a little like that. This prank, however, also has the added bonus of shutting down, in a small way, an invasive intellectual heist of a TV network right at it's source, the cable box.

The concept is simple:

We believe that Fox is political pornography. Our politicians have given us a tool to fight pornography on the cable box. It is called "lockout controls." Go to your cable boxes right now and figure out how to use those controls to lock out Fox News. Once you feel comfortable with how this is done, go to your parents house and lock it out there. Go to your brothers house, your sister, your children, anyone you can think of and protect that box from Fox when they're not looking! If you really want to have fun, create a new password.

The audience for Fox news is very often either not too bright, very casual, or the 50+ crowd who barely know what a computer is. Many of them might not even know what lockout controls are, let alone how to change them back. If we are lucky, they might just figure Fox got canceled on their cable service. We're sure there are some that will know how to unlock it. Others may even go to the trouble of calling the cable company and getting talked through the process of unlocking it. There are bound to be several, however, who don't know enough or don't care enough and just move on to other TV offerings.


What about free speech you say? Aren't we stepping on this poor "person's" first amendment rights?

The first amendment protects citizens and the press from being shut down by the government. It doesn't protect a giant, private, for profit, media conglomerate from being shut down by citizens who feel it is a fraud masquerading as new standard of "news." That phenomenon is what we call the free market taking action to correct itself. Some might also call it it's own form of free speech.

FOX ATTACKS: Obama Pt. 2

One of Robert Greenwald's better and more effective efforts at Brave New Films. His latest web video is documenting the Obama smear campaign on FOX news and the trail a media virus takes once it's planted.

Video Activism - Foxattacks.com - Behind Fox Attacks

This video tells the story behind the net roots movement that has become known as the "Fox Attacks" series. It covers several very important points about the power of video activism as it relates to the internet. Web producers should pay attention. You can do a lot more than just film your dog on a skateboard these days.

Robert Greenwald founded foxattacks.com as an answer to the distortions and propaganda that Fox News creates in their very agenda driven excuse for reporting. The Fox motto is "We Report, You Decide" but the reporting is so slanted that it is designed to help you arrive at the conclusion they want. Foxattacks.com has countered with the slogan "They Distort, We Reply." The victory that helped move this website into provenance in the blogosphere is the influence that they had, with the help of other online activists, on the Nevada Democratic Presidential debate that was supposed to be hosted by Fox. The argument was that Fox is not a legitimate news organization and therefore, they could not be trusted to host an event of such important public interest. I could not agree more.

The pressure of this movement was so strong that the major candidates, beginning with John Edwards, backed out of the debate and the Nevada Democrats eventually folded and backed out themselves. I consider this a major public relations victory for journalism. For the first time there was a very large and very public blow back against the Fox News brand.

In my view, we need more activism like this because Fox News is activism on a massive scale. Fox tells their audience what they want to hear based on the conservative agenda rather than what they need to hear based on objective reality. Fox also slants the stories to the benefit of themselves and their political allies and to the harm political opponents, all under the audacious title of "Fair and Balanced".

Their claim to balance is not that their individual stories are balanced but, rather, that their bias as an organization helps to "balance" out the bias of the "liberal media." The problem is that the "liberal media" holds the ORIGINAL ideal of balance first represented by the Fairness Doctrine and journalistic ethics. This definition says that they strive to give equal weight to both sides of any controversial story. Individual reporters can slip in both directions, at times but the goal of each story is supposed to be true balance. Those who are not following this practice are either bad journalists or editorial writers. At Fox, slating the story is the ideal. The majority of the programming is also editorializing and opining over events rather than trying to provide the facts in an objective way. This is not journalism and it does not deserve the respect or privileges that are attached to journalism.

In todays media journalism is failing and a great deal of the reason behind that is that Fox news has almost single handedly changed the definition of what journalism means. Journalism today means making money off stories not providing importaint information about issues of great public interest. The public is left to "decide" based on criteria that is first tested for ratings value. That is the Fox effect. If there were no political angle at all this would still be a great harm to the "fourth estate" that Fox has helped bring. The political angle just makes it twice as bad.

Lets take a look at the Fox Attacks examination of the latest issue Fox covered: The General Petraeus hearings, which were critical to the public understanding about the progress in the Iraq war. The very lives of our soldiers are at stake here so it is vital that we all know exactly where things stand. How was Fox's coverage of this event? Well. They sat down and counted the stories that were for and against the facts that Petraeus laid out and edited it all together. See for yourself:

Video Activism: Brave New Films - Fox Attacks Global Warming and Bloggers

Brave New Films is once again documenting the deliberate smearing of serious issues that Fox News advocates in it's programming.

Fox On Global Warming:

This is a Catalog of errors they have represented on global warming during their broadcasts.



Fox On Bloggers:

With no substantial proof that I have seen, Fox has characterized the liberal blogs as outlets of hate. The "hate speech" they provide are from the comments sections of the postings where anyone, including Fox producers could post with anonymity. Anyone who has ever seen comment sections know that people can get really ugly. Go to any popular YouTube video page and there are often several off the rocker, foaming at the mouth, nonsense posts that you just blow off. None of the "hate speech" cited by Fox is ever from the blog articles themselves. The quotes they will find from the bloggers themselves are usually tame when compared to right wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.




Let there be no doubt about my feelings on this issue: Fox News is the enemy of anyone who wants real information. They have created a slick, car salesman like, image with groovy graphics, controversy hungry hosts and hot blond anchors with tons of lip gloss. This entertainment packaging of news brings ratings and, as a result, the other news programmers in the country have jumped to imitate it. It's just good capitalism after all right? Unless, of course, the purpose is to get real information out.

What it is is the perversion of the whole news industry and a redefining of the word "balance". In a coordinated assault with talk radio and mega church broadcasters, Fox smeared the idea of "liberals" so that nobody in their audience would ever believe anything they say. They then went on to smear the rest of the news world as both "liberal" and "unbalanced" in order to convince these same people that they need Fox's brand of news if they really want the truth. All the while, Fox is as brazenly biased and idealogical as they want to be. They justify this by saying they are "balancing" out all those liberal media outlets. Get it? It's not the coverage itself that is fair and balanced. It is Fox, the slanted spin job propaganda outlet, "balancing" out the flow of "liberal"(formerly known as "journalistic") information in the national dialog. This means if "liberals" say there is gravity, they will have someone on arguing that there is no agreement on gravity to provide "both sides of the story." If the existence of gravity is dangerous to their ideological purpose, they will have one soft spoken intellectual arguing for gravity and two loud aggressive debaters arguing against it. All the while their audience has been conditioned to believe that liberals are too confused to bother listening to what they say.

This model of getting both sides of a story, one that is factually true and one that is factually false, has even begun to make appearances on other news outlets who have taken Fox's dog and pony show success to be a sign that the rest of them must really be "too liberal." So we now have news outlets falling over themselves to be more "Fox like." It is, perhaps, the most public and successful con job on an open information industry that has ever existed.

This is why I have so much respect for Brave New Films. They have taken Fox on directly and they are building a movement to begin calling them out for what they are. If you are a network with a 4 minute "straight news" break every half hour followed by 28 minutes of hosts and pundits spouting opinions can you really call yourself news? I think Fox can say anything it wants. This is a free country, but they should not be allowed to present themselves as either "fair and balanced" or a "news outlet" unless they meet the same specific journalistic standards that the rest of the news media was trying to follow before Fox arrived. I urge everyone to get active on this issue because this is really about getting good information so we can make hard decisions. It's not about tailoring all the the information we get so that it fits into what we WANT to hear. That puts us in a bubble where we can be controlled and manipulated.

If you haven't seen their feature film Outfoxed yet, I highly recommend it. It elaborates much more clearly on what I have said here. If you want to get more directly involved become a Fox Attacker.

Saturday Feature: Brave New Films - Outfoxed

Speaking of Brave News Films: This is a great expose of theirs into the inner workings of the Fox News network. I highly recommend it.