Fox News Sells Fracking as ‘Incredibly Good for Our Environment”

Corporate Propaganda September 16, 2013 | By WakingTimes

Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer

“Nature doesn’t give us a clean environment.”

Recently on Fox News, Alex Epstein, the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, and author of the book, Fossil Fuels Improve the Planet, argues in favor of hydraulic gas fracturing, or fracking, as it has become known. This is the technique of extracting natural gas and oil from layers of underground shale rock by pressure-injecting an undisclosed mixture of water and chemicals deep into the ground.

This particular segment serves as an outstanding example of what corporate propaganda looks like and how the media triggers our cultural programming to stimulate fear/desire conditioning, in order to persuade us into conforming to a selected position on an issue.

The clip begins with the graphic of a printing press rolling out unlimited dollar bills across the screen and the Fox host framing the conversation, asking their central question about fracking…

“…its being called a modern day gold rush… reducing the need for foreign oil. With so many opportunities to frack in the Unites States, could this technology be a new path to American wealth?”

A New Path to American Wealth?The guest, Epstein, is introduced and hails fracking as a technological revolution as important to society as the invention of the computer, explaining how we are sitting on a Texas sized amount of shale rock that should be extracted for the benefit of all.

The host goes on to explain ‘one of the big stories this week,’ a report issued by somebody about the economic benefits of fracking and how in high fracking areas they are already seeing a ‘trickling down’ of this vast wealth to the average person. Wages are supposedly up, U.S. tax revenues are up, disposable income is up, and the question is asked by the host…

“… is this really going to affect my own wallet, is fracking really going to help me save more money and live a better life?”

There are close-ups of dollar bills hovering in the background.
The central concern over fracking, for those who oppose it, is not that the economy will suffer if we don’t frack, but rather the damage it does to the environment; making people sick, contaminating water and causing droughts, drying up aquifers and causing earthquakes. This question was raised by the host, and addressed by Epstein:

“…fracking is actually incredibly good for our environment, and there’s two reasons. One is that this rock right here [holds up a piece of black oil shale rock], this exists 5000 feet away from ground water, so the last thing that’s going to contaminate your ground water is a fracking operation. But #2, look at the places in the world with the best environments. They’re the places that use the most energy, because nature doesn’t give us a clean environment. We have to clean it up, that takes a lot of energy to purify the water, to grow crops, to make the word a better place, and that’s why I titled my book, Fossil Fuels Improve the Planet.”

The host closes by stating that the EPA claims that there is no evidence that fracking ‘contaminates gravel,’ whatever that means, and so the question seems resolved to these two, and the closing postulation of the issue is offered:

“…gonna be interesting to see if we get lower energy bills across this country as a result of fracking if it takes hold.”

Clip from Media Matters:


Propaganda Is Exactly This

Propaganda according to WIKI:

“Propaganda is a form of communication aimed towards influencing the attitude of the community toward some cause or position by presenting only one side of an argument. Propaganda statements may be partly false and partly true. Propaganda is usually repeated and dispersed over a wide variety of media in order to create the chosen result in audience attitudes.”

Propaganda according to Merriam-Webster:

2: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person

3: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect

You Decide!

This short piece of corporate propaganda is aimed at triggering our programmed fear of economic insecurity, and our programmed desire to be monetarily wealthy. By appealing to both our fear of loss and need for gain, this attempts to persuade the viewer that an increase in fracking is supportive of prosperity and personal security, and therefore a good idea. There is inadequate representation of the other sides of this argument, and there clearly is strong bias toward fracking and the oil and gas industry.

In the era of alternative media, where individuals have picked up the torch of journalistic integrity, is it any wonder why alternative news sources are winning out over the corporate model that offers us brain-washing like this that Fox and Friends presents here?

So much more to the Story

As with any issue where there is a tremendous amount of money to be made by those with entrenched connections, there is alwasys so much more than what is routinely spoken of in the mainline press, and, as usual, opposing viewpoints are easily found. Here are a few other angles on the issue of fracking, highlighting some of the well-founded concerns of people not approached for comment in this Fox news segment:

• Fracking Away Our Water Supply
• Fracking is linked to Earthquakes
• Fracking: A Deadly Power Surge
• Waste Injection Wells
• Hydro-Fracking: Boom or Bust
• Radioactive Fracking Waste
• Is Fracking Even Profitable?
• 5 Consequences of Fracking

Stephen Colbert on Fox's "Benghazi-Gate"

God the Insufferable Jerk

Tuesday, September 18, 2012 by The San Francisco Chronicle

by Mark Morford

 

I am delighted to report God still appears to be a bit of an unbearable twit.Not at all pleased with your appreciation of pornography, yoga, or Barack Obama.

Petulant. Uptight. Whiny as a third-grader with recurring lice. How do we know? Because, against all deeper understanding and without a single care that He’s not the slightest bit real in the literal sense, the Almighty still insists on keeping score, observing your every move, measuring your capacity to hate others who do not agree with your narrow view of life, or love, or America.

It’s true. If all reports for the past week – and the past handful of incoherent centuries – are to be believed, God does nothing but laze about the couch with a golden iPad, tracking how many times He’s mentioned on television, who won the Packers game, how often you watch porn or say something nice to a gay person, and who commits more acts of guilt-addled fear in his glorious name.

Oh, and love. There’s love in there somewhere. Maybe. Unless you’re a liberal. Or Muslim. Or gay. Then you’re on your own.

Recent proof? Easy. Did you happen to notice how Fox News was simply bursting at the fanatical seams to tell everyone that, during our recent pair of national political conventions, the Republican party mentioned God twelve times in their platform? Twelve times! They must really love God. They must love God, despite how their candidate believes God’s message appeared on magic golden plates to a huckster polygamist in the woods in the 1820s, and called it a religion. Never mind that now.

God was reportedly sort of pleased at being name-dropped a dozen times on national television (God is wildly vain that way), despite how the lesser-known Shotguns & Slim Jims Party mentioned Him a whopping 147 times during their convention, all while blasting mailboxes from the bed of a speeding Ford F-150 in rural Idaho. But of course, their convention was only broadcast on YouTube, so God was all, “meh.”

And what of the Democrats? They only mentioned God once during their convention, maybe, in passing, sort of under their breath, and apparently completely forgot the part about Jerusalem being the capital of Godlandia. Can you believe it? If there’s one thing God cares about most in the eternal flux of the vast and impenetrable universe, it’s regional cartography. And college football.

The Republicans, as you might expect, had a conniption fit at the Dems’ omission, to the point where Mitt Romney actually suggested that the president secretly wants to remove “God” from our national identity, our currency, our scared and angry America, and replace him with… I’m not sure who. Kobe Bryant or something. Horror!

God, of course, does not like any of this one little bit. The Almighty, as envisioned by the majority of spiritually malnourished Americans, is a bizarre, baffling, curmudgeonly creation, prone to raging outbursts, impossible to please but insanely easy to offend, wielding his moral compass like a hammer made of shame and fear and only trace amounts of the aforementioned love. But only if you really earn it. And of course, no one really does.

You disagree? You dare to deny this definition of God? You perhaps think the divine is some hippie-dippy notion of, say, pure light energy, divine anima, infusing and radiating from all things at all times everywhere including Muslims and Mormons, genomes and genders, dogs and donuts, babies and bison?

You maybe think God is actually something wider and far more beautiful? An all-pervasive sense of divine consciousness, perhaps, fully present and available to every single being at all times in an instant, requiring no church, no priest, no bloody cross, no cash outlay, no whiny political party to validate and empower? What are you, some sort of book-reading communist? Pipe down and go do some yoga, hippie. Scared people are running the world.
 
It is, of course, painfully easy to mock. It is terrific but sort of lazy (I admit) fun to jab at the tragicomic American definition of God as irritable grandpa-child who cares far too much about what happens at nauseating political conventions, gun shows, children’s beauty pageants, ad nauseam.

It requires a bit more compassion to understand that most Americans, like most of the world, are simply desperate for any sort of meaning, any sort of simple understanding amidst all the madness, war, and the lack of education. And therefore even just the mention of “God” on the dollar, in the national credo, in another insipid political platform, this somehow gives a hint of stability, a shared mythology, to an otherwise impossible and terrifying world.

It’s a little tricky to unpack, but sometimes it must be acknowledged: There exists in the American mythos this fragile, long-abused idea that when you buy a gun, or a beer, or a Chinese-made pair of Levi’s using a piece of tattered green paper with the word “God” on it, that it actually means something, that underneath it all there’s this tiny, microscopic hint of divine glue holding it all together, somehow.

It’s sort of charming. It’s sort of wonderful, this delicate notion of spiritual connectedness that’s been mauled to death by capitalism and politics and buried beneath a million layers of churlish ignorance and fear of Other so rampant and sad, many Americans are terrified to leave their hometowns, much less visit another country and see how the rest of the world rocks the divine wow.

Nevertheless, it’s there. Behind the Fox News witlessness, underneath the insulting political platitudes, despite organized religion’s furious attempts to kill it with dogma and sneering patriarchy, lies a certain sweetness, a cultural naiveté borne of a deep and inescapable desire to know, to understand our place in the cosmos, even just a little, even if it means sacrificing the radically self-realized spirit to some bland and politicized whole.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not all that sweet after all. Maybe it’s one of the sadder, more debilitating aspects of the modern American condition, given how it’s no secret that organized religion, conservative politicians, marketers and megacorps alike love nothing more than to prey upon the poor and the less educated, anyone desperate for structure and divine meaning, but not quite willing or able to figure it out for themselves.

This is why the Republican cause is so frantic to invoke God as much as possible. “God” implies there’s some sort of explanation, impossible though it may be for pathetic and sinful humankind to understand. Invoking a bitter, judgmental God you can never really access (much less fully embody yourself) brings wobbly balm to those who live in fear of a complex and impossible world, those who feel everything is out of their control.

Hey, at least Angry Republican Grandpa in the sky has it all figured out, right? At least I don’t have to think too much, look too deeply in the mirror, or listen to that nagging, deep-down voice telling me nothing’s really as it seems, right? I mean, whew.

Rupert Murdoch resigns from newspaper boards

(the man who has done the most to stain the unbiased reputation of the media more than anyone else while claiming to be "fair and balanced"; and who helped to cause lowest approval rating for news organizations ever; and who broke the law in England by wire tapping politicians' and celebrities' private phone lines. we're almost rid of him!--jef)

By Arturo Garcia - RAW Story
Saturday, July 21, 2012 

The (U.K.) Telegraph is reporting that media mogul Rupert Murdoch has resigned from the boards of his various newspaper holdings in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Filings with both the United Kingdom Registrar of Companies and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicate the resignations were made within the past week.

Though a News Corporation spokesman called Murdoch’s departure from that company board, as well as NI Group, Times Newspaper Holdings and News Corp Investments, “nothing more than a corporate housecleaning exercise prior to the company split,” there is speculation mounting that it means he and his son James, at one time mentioned as a potential successor, could be on their way out from News Corp entirely.

“James and Rupert have decided that they are not welcome in the UK, and they’re right,” said Claire Enders at Enders Analysis. “There is an enforced emotional withdrawal from these assets because they are no longer useful [in terms of influence].”

How to get fired from Fox Business in under 5 mins

RIAA & Movie Studios Caught Pirating TV Shows & Movies

By Sam Biddle - Gizmodo

The same copyright barons pushing SOPA, the awful internet act, are enormous hypocrites, TorrentFreak reports. They want the law as a means of stopping online piracy—but maybe they should start with their own employees.

A Russian BitTorrent tracking firm traced pirated movies and television show downloads back to IP addresses from Sony, Fox, and NBC—as TF points out, "these are the same companies who want to disconnect people from the Internet after they've been caught sharing copyrighted material."

This shouldn't surprise anyone. When studios push fascist copyright law, they're speaking on behalf of their shareholders, not the thousands of people they employ. Those people are ordinary people, who, yes, sometimes pirate albums, movies, shows, and games, like millions of other ordinary people around the world. But the hypocrisy is more than superficial. We shouldn't ever let companies that can't control their own miscreant employees shape federal legislation for all of us.

...and...

The RIAA Pirated $9 Million Worth of TV Shows
By Mario Aguilar - Gizmodo
 
The same RIAA that makes examples out of ordinary folks by suing them for millions of dollars for file sharing? Turns out someone there's been pirating full seasons of Dexter. Nine million dollars worth. Whoops!

That number—$150,000 for each of the 60 episodes illegally downloaded on the RIAA HQ ISP (OK?)—comes compliments of YouHaveDownloaded which logged the BitTorrent activity of some 50 million users and revealed that not only are the major movie studios pirating their own movies, but the RIAA is downloading pirated TV shows. Lots of 'em.

Again, this is the same RIAA that has been shaking down a Minnesota mother of four for $1.5 million over 24 songs she shared on Kazaa. And it turns out, they're being generous in that case! Since the statutory damages cited by its own guidelines are much higher:

… copyright holders can sue you for up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each of their copyrighted works that you illegally copy or distribute.

So let's see, $150k per episode times 60 episodes comes out to roughly... $9,000,000, checks payable to CBS.

Look, the RIAA's method of "enforcing" copyright law by suing people to oblivion is unfair. But to layer hypocrisy on top of that unfairness is just gross. How about you get your own house in order before you target your next Minnesota mom?

‘Anonymous’ vows to ‘destroy’ Fox News website on Nov. 5th

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Monday, October 24, 2011

 

 

In a video statement carried recently by several official channels maintained by members of the hacker activist group “Anonymous,” a digitally generated voice explains that the online collective has decided to take down the Fox News website on Nov. 5th of this year.

The date, Nov. 5, is significant for its dramatic placement in the comic book V for Vendetta, about a freedom-loving terrorist who destroys an authoritarian government that’s come to power in the U.K. “Remember, remember the 5th of November,” is his saying, hearkening back to the “Gunpowder plot” of 1604, in which Guy Fawkes was captured and executed for his attempt to blow up Parliament.

The mask used by the Guy Fawkes character in V for Vendetta has also become a ubiquitous symbol for “Anonymous.”

To mark this 5th of November, the latest “Anonymous” video points to the network’s “continued propaganda against the occupations” as reason for vowing to “destroy the Fox News website.”

“Since they will not stop ridiculing the occupiers, we will simply shut them down,” the digitized voice explains, adding that an Anonymous-driven “propaganda campaign” against Fox News would follow.

“Fox News, your time has come,” it concludes. “Operation Fox Hunt. November 5th. May the hunt begin.”

Another ongoing “operation,” called “Operation Cashback,” is encouraging people to move their money from large banks to local credit unions.

A number of prior “Anonymous” operations have not generated the desired results, although the group has claimed quite a few stunning successes over the last year. Still, some other advertised “operations” have been fakes that never materialized at all.

Because of the nature of the group — whereas literally anyone could be “Anonymous” — it’s irresponsible to say whether this “Operation Fox Hunt” might even happen. And while “Operation Fox Hunt” does seem to fall in-line with many of the group’s stated political objectives in the past, the video also seems to exhibit a lower production value than prior legitimate “Anonymous” releases.

Still, for a group that’s wrecked shop everywhere from the Iranian and Tunisian governments to U.S. defense contractors Booz Allen Hamilton and HBGary, it’s also fair to say that anything’s possible.

Daily Show Covers FOX News' Negative Coverage of Occupy Wall Street

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes

Occupy Wall Street Protester Gives a FOX News reporter a earful

Well spoken, clear headed, and organized (if maybe kind of rehearsed--you can tell he has some of it memorized by the way his eyes seem to be reading something). Still, FOX won't air it. It exposes them for the corrupt toads they really are.--jef

Fox host calls Warren Buffett a socialist

(Awesome! So Warren Buffet makes the comment that billionaires should pay higher taxes in order to set the economy in the right direction, and one of the many bird brains at FOX calls him a socialist--Warren "Mr. Capitalist" Buffet, as in BILLIONAIRE. 

This Bolling guy, I don't know--he seems to be even more "special" than the rest of that "touched" crew they got over there. Is it that they are lying but are too dumb to know they are lying? Or are they just plain stupid and easily manipulated by their bosses to say whatever is written in their script. Because you would have to be suffering from a serious head injury or advanced dementia to think Buffet is a socialist. This Bolling guy should walk away before he ends his career in a drastic and sad way once he realizes he's been an unparalleled tool used against his fellow citizens, like many of the other mean spirited, loud and dumb spinning heads FOX employs to execute their "poor people suck, rich people are cool--except Warren Buffet the socialist" propaganda strategy. The other two parrots chime in to Bolling's chorus there at the end, like some awful 'spoken word' musical without music. Unfunny and too dumb to be real.

Warren Buffet, billionaire socialist! That's so hilarious, you almost want to give Bolling credit for coming up with a bit!--jef)

vidlink

By Andrew Jones - RAW Replay
Posted on 08.16.11

In Eric Bolling’s mind, Warren Buffett may be a socialist now.

That skepticism was shared by the Fox Business News host after the renowned billionaire again stated in a New York Times op-ed on Monday that the rich needed to pay more in taxes. In a heated debate with Columbia professor Marc Lamont Hill, Bolling was steadfast in slamming Buffet’s opinion and President Obama’s “socialist handbook.”

“What is this, is he completely a socialist and he’s playing into Mr. Obama’s hands of “Tax anyone who makes money’ and give it to people who don’t work,” Bolling asked.

Hill replied: “So basically anyone who disagrees with you is a socialist? Now Warren Buffett, one of the greatest profit makers in human history, is a socialist? I mean, come on. He’s simply saying people need to pay their fair share.”

That didn’t stop Bolling continue to display the usual conservative outrage on the idea of tax increases on the rich. After his guest compared Obama’s economic options to a revolver, Bolling added to the analogy.

“All of these bullets guys are in ‘the socialist handbook.’”

Fox host back from maternity leave with ‘post-partum compassion’

vidlink

What Scandal?

Responding to PolitiFact, Stewart reads laundry list of Fox News lies

By Stephen C. Webster | 06.22.11 | RAW Story

When comedian Jon Stewart told Fox News host Chris Wallace that Fox News viewers are the “most consistently misinformed” in “every poll,” he may have let his rhetoric run away from him, just a little — and he got fact checked by PolitiFact, which called his allegation “false.”

On Tuesday night’s show, Stewart apologized and corrected the statement, then turned around a laundry list of Fox News lies and PolitiFact’s ratings.

“Well, I tell ya what … They’ve got a lot of fucking correcting to do,” he concluded.

This video is from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, broadcast Tuesday, June 22, 2011.

The Daily Show

Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Here is Stewart's unedited appearance on FOX News Sunday.

Fox News President Roger Ailes thinks Sarah Palin ‘is an idiot’

By Eric W. Dolan - RAW Story
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011 

Roger Ailes, the president of the Fox News Channel, is not fond of former Alaska governor and Fox News contributor Sarah Palin, according to sources.

“He thinks things are going in a bad direction," a Republican close to Ailes told Gabriel Sherman of the New York Magazine. "Roger is worried about the future of the country. He thinks the election of Obama is a disaster. He thinks Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement."

Ailes was also frustrated with Palin after she refused to heed his advise in the aftermath of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, referring to Palin as a "loose cannon."

He advised Palin to "lie low" and wait to respond to media reports highlighting some of her violent rhetoric, but instead of waiting, Palin accused her critics of "blood libel."

"Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn," Palin said via Facebook. "That is reprehensible."

She joined the Fox News Channel as a contributor in 2010.

Despite his alleged troubles with Palin, Ailes recently defended her from MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who said it was "so pathetic that Roger Ailes has put her on television."

"People tell me all the time it was truly pathetic that I was the one who gave Chris Matthews his start on television," Ailes said, according to MediaBistro. He gave Matthews his first show “Politics with Chris Matthews” in 1994.

FOX Stages Fake Debate Between Ron Paul & Obama Impersonator

(Ron Paul's credibility sinks into the toilet. I can't believe he agreed to this. John Stossel is such a douchebag.--jef)

vidlink

BP Whistleblowers' Mysterious Deaths and/or Fake Criminal Charges

Short Life Expectancy for BP Whistleblowers?
By Pat Shannan

The investigation, if it can properly be so called, of the unsolved murder of the former high ranking Pentagon official and presidential advisor John P. Wheeler III, who was also an expert on chemical and biological weapons, may be taking a turn in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Wheeler, 67, a West Point grad, was beaten and thrown into a garbage dumpster. His body was discovered in a Wilmington, Del. landfill last New Year’s weekend. Both police detectives and news commentators described it as “an apparent hit,” but little else was ever learned, and no suspects have surfaced.

There was great speculation by many at the time that Wheeler had begun to blow the whistle on the mysterious bird and fish deaths in Arkansas and Texas, and was about to expose the facts tying this to the chemtrails seen in our skies over the past decade.

Now the speculation may be reverting to British Petroleum and the gulf spill because a number of other BP whistle blowing scientists, before and since the Wheeler murder, have also died mysteriously, been jailed on questionable charges or disappeared without a trace.

Matthew Simmons, 67, a former energy advisor to President George W. Bush and admired among survivalist groups for his dire warnings on the upcoming commodity and fuel shortages about to hit this nation, died in his hot tub in Maine last August. Simmons had been gaining popularity as a whistle blower for blaming BP for its covered-up responsibility in defacing and vandalizing the Gulf of Mexico while hiding the truth from the general public.

Only four days later, Ted Stevens, the 87-year-old defrocked senator from Alaska, said to have received communications regarding BP’s faulty blowout preventer, perished in a plane crash. British Petroleum had donated $1 million to the University of Alaska to catalog the papers from Stevens’s long political career.

Roger Grooters began a cross country bike ride in Oceanside, Calif. on Sept. 10 to draw attention to the Gulf Coast oil disaster. On Oct. 6, in front of the horrified eyes of his wife, who was trailing in a support vehicle, Grooters was struck by a truck and killed instantly in Panama City, Fla.

Only a month later, Dr. Geoffrey Gardner of Lakeland, Fla. disappeared. He was investigating the unexplained bird deaths near Sarasota that are suspected to have been caused by the BP oil disaster. No one has heard from or spoken with him since.

On Nov. 15, Chitra Chaunhan was found dead of cyanide poisoning in a Temple Terrace, Fla. hotel. It was officially ruled a suicide. She worked in the Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research and left behind a husband and five-year-old child.

The following week, James Patrick Black, director of operations for BP’s restoration organization for the oil spill, died near Destin, Fla. in a small plane crash.

Dr. Thomas B. Manton was one of the first to warn the public that far more oil than what BP had reported was gushing into the gulf every day and that the massive, toxic oil and chemical plumes would travel up the eastern seaboard, contaminating beaches and wildlife all the way.

“Once the winds change, it will come eastward and pollute the beaches of the west coast of Florida, and the ‘loop current’ could carry this oil spill right around Florida, through the Florida Keys and pollute the east coast of Florida as well,” Manton wrote on May 28, 2010.

Dr. Tom Termotto, national coordinator of the Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference, says Manton was murdered in prison. Manton had been sentenced to 15 years last August on a phony child pornography charge. Termotto and others say evidence was planted on his computer.

It is not known whether or not Anthony Nicholas Tremonte, 31, posed any threat to BP, but he too was arrested in January and charged with one count of possession of child pornography. Was this charge also faked? As an officer with the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources on the Gulf Coast, he may have known enough to qualify him for membership in this exclusive series of coincidences. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted.

++++++++++++

(Someone inevitably will say "well, those are just coincidences." I will respond by saying, "then you are a fool." Remember those names because those individuals gave up their lives to expose corruption at the highest levels of our corporate govt.

The president was elected on a wave of campaign promises--most of which he has either done the exact opposite of what he promised or just 'hasn't gotten around to doing them' or compromised on them to the point that they don't change a thing. One of those promises on which he has done the exact opposite is regarding openness or transparency in the govt. The man said in his campaign, that whistleblowers were courageous and needed to be protected. Yet, by October 2010, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in US history. Let that sink in for a second. And then consider this: at the rate Obama is prosecuting whistleblowers, by the end of his term--his only term as president, if we're lucky--he will have prosecuted more whisteblowers than all other presidents in US history COMBINED.--jef)

More on whistleblowers:

Former Fox News employee: ‘Stuff is just made up’

By Eric W. Dolan, RAW Story
Friday, February 11th, 2011

A former employee of Fox News called the company a "propaganda outfit" that is determined to undermine the Obama administration and Democrats.

"I don't think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up," the employee, whose name was kept anonymous, told the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters.

"They say one thing and do another," the former employee said. "They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they’re balanced or that they’re not right-wing extreme propagandist."

"You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks," the former employee added. "And God help you if you don’t because sooner or later you’re going to get burned."

The former employee's comments did not come as a surprise to many critics of Fox News, who have long suggested the channel is biased in favor of conservatives. The 2004 documentary film "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" criticized the channel and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, for skewing its reporting of events to promote conservative viewpoints.

"Like any news channel there’s lot of room for non-news content," the former employee continued. "The content that wasn't 'news,' they didn't care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything - anything - that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it."

"If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn’t explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There’s a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is."

Internal emails obtained by Media Matters also showed that a seemingly spontaneous response concerning the Obama campaign canceling an appearance on a local news station to have been scripted by Fox News' producers,

In another e-mail obtained by the media watchdog, Fox News Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon told his staff to downplay the importance of climate science that showed the globe's average temperature getting warmer.

Additional emails showed that Sammon asked his news department to refer to the public option as the "government run option" because polls showed the phrase "government option" was opposed by the public.
Perhaps not coincidentally, a poll gauging public trust in TV news found that PBS was the most trusted name in news, while trust in Fox News dropped significantly over the last year.

***

O'Reilly Producer Refuses To Comment On Fox Insider's Claim That "Stuff" On Fox Is Just "Made Up"

February 12, 2011 by Julie Millican

At the annual CPAC convention, Think Progress' Ben Armbruster confronted The O'Reilly Factor producer Jesse Watters, who is famous for ambushing progressives and others with whom Bill O'Reilly has taken issue. Armbruster questioned Watters about a recent Media Matters exclusive from a Fox News insider, who said that Fox is a "propaganda outfit" and "their M.O. [is] to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats." The former Fox News employee said to Media Matters: "I don't think people would believe it's as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up."

Despite repeated attempts, Watters refused to answer Armbruster's question. Instead, as Think Progress reported, "he tried to divert the issue by attempting to belittle ThinkProgress' 'ambush' skills," at one point "seem[ing] to take offense at a slight brush on his sport jacket, saying, 'Watch my blazer, bro.'"

Fox News gave GOP presidential candidates $55 million in free advertising

By David Edwards - Monday, January 24th, 2011 

Being on the Fox News payroll has its advantages.

Not only did five potential Republican candidates get regular paychecks from the network last year, but they also got something even more valuable: airtime.

Liberal watchdog group Media Matters found that the five received about $55 million in free advertising over the course of more than 85 hours of appearances in 2010.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee appeared for almost 48 hours. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin had nearly 14 hours of appearances.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was given close to 12 hours. Former senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum and former UN Ambassador under George W. Bush John Bolton both received about six hours.

Because Huckabee hosted a show on the network, Media Matters estimated that he received the bulk of Fox News' donation at $31 million.

Advertisers would have spent about $7.5 million each for Palin and Gingrich to appear.
Santorum and Bolton received less than $5 million each in ad-value equivalency.

Each of the five has hinted at a possible presidential run in 2012.

"I'm engaged in the internal deliberations candidly," the November 21 issue of New York Times Magazine quoted Palin as saying.

The Des Moines Register reported in November that Gingrich said he was "making personal arrangements that would allow him to launch a campaign."

On November 15, Huckabee told Fox News' Alan Colmes, "The one nice thing, whether I should decide to run or not, is that more people at least would know me by what I actually believe and say, as opposed to what some opponent has defined me to be, and that's kind of encouraging."

"If I were to get into this, I would certainly not be one of the favorites, so doing well out of the box would be much more important to me than to some of the more well-known candidates," Santorum told National Review Online in October.

In September, Bolton told Fox Business Network, "I'm thinking about it."

Chris Wallace, the network's lead news anchor, revealed late last year that the network plans to turn the Republican Party's 2012 primary elections into a "production of Fox News," similar to American Idol.

That may be good news for GOP financiers but not so much for voter awareness. A University of Maryland study published last month found that extended exposure to Fox News had the tendency to confuse voters, making them more likely to believe a number of pervasive untruths.

Out Lickspittle Mainstream Corporate Press

Doorkeepers to the House of Lies
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Anyone who doesn’t believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports on antiwar.com that Fox News “no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state,” turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making “anti-American comments.”

The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: “you are with us or against us.”

Bush’s words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government’s respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:

“No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment.”

The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse “and sometimes even anger public opinion.”

In a statement unlikely to be repeated by an American president, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers:

“I’m not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.” 

The America of Kennedy’s day and the America of today are two different worlds. In America today the media are expected to lie for the government in order to prevent the people from finding out what the government is up to.

If polls can be believed, Americans brainwashed and programmed by O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh want Bradley Manning and Julian Assange torn limb from limb for informing Americans of the criminal acts of their government. Politicians and journalists are screeching for their execution.

President Kennedy told the Newspaper Publishers Association that “it is to the printing press, the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: Free and Independent.” Who can imagine a Bill Clinton, a George W. Bush, or a Barack Obama saying such a thing today?

Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity. A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.

Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush’s “we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”

No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel’s similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.

Today no one believes that our country’s success depends on an informed public and a free press. America’s success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people’s god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.

Now that the press has voluntarily shed its First Amendment rights, the government is working to redefine free speech as a privilege limited to the media, not a right of citizens. Thus, the insistence that WikiLeaks is not a media organization and Fox News turning in a citizen for exercising free speech. Washington’s assault on Assange and WikiLeaks is an assault on what remains of the US Constitution. When we cheer for WikiLeaks’ demise, we are cheering for our own.

Fox News Won't Admit That Republicans Voted Against 9/11 Rescue Workers

Leslie Savan - December 13, 2010
On Fox & Friends this morning, Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. launched into a passionate attack on “Congress” and “the US Senate” for killing health benefits for 9/11 rescue workers. “Last week, Congress told them they could drop dead,” Johnson said, to the mournful chords of September Song. “Shame, embarrassment, outrage, anger—all the proper reactions to the conduct of our senators who…have turned their back on American heroes.” Worse, they’ve been betrayed by the same “politicians who couldn’t take enough pictures with them.” Right on, Peter.

But in his three-and-a-half-minute rant, Johnson didn’t once mention who in Congress could be such heartless hypocrites. The 57-to-42 vote was three short needed to break a filibuster, as every Republican voted against even bringing the bill to a vote, and every Democrat but one voted in favor (Harry Reid had to switch his vote for arcane procedural reasons). “People like me on TV are sometimes practiced at outrage,” Johnson said (in a rare bit that described Fox’s basic technique), “but the injustice of this makes words hard to come by.”

Especially the word “Republican.” For anyone working at the Roger Ailes–led media arm of the GOP and Tea Party, speaking that word in such a negative context would be like shouting “Voldemort” in the halls of the Ministry of Magic. Better to let viewers assume that both parties are equally guilty—or even that Republicans, whom Fox has so thoroughly associated with American heroes, are innocent. And for that, the proper reaction to Fox News’s conduct is shame, embarrassment, outrage, anger.

You can watch the performance here.