Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon was caught bragging on tape during a conservative cruise ship retreat that he flat-out lied when he speculated on-air “about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism.” Sammon goes on to add that this allegation he personally—and *ahem* privately—found “rather far-fetched.” He calls it “mischievious” but wouldn’t an honest person call it what it is: LYING? He’s the VP of the top TV news outlet in America and he publicly admits to lying on-camera??? Where the fuck is James O’Keefe?
The funny sad thing is, I’m one of those people who desperately wanted Obama to be a socialist! Talk about your delusional and dashed hopes… Anyone who says Obama is a socialist, is either an idiot or like Bill Sammon, a lying liar. (And dig the subtext: Sammon is basically saying “Hey, I’m not dumb enough to actually believe the shit I say on TV”! Hilarious).
If an NPR executive or a CNN VP said something like this against a conservative politician, or even made a generic comment disparaging the right, they’d be forced out of their job within a matter of days. Sammon—AN ADMITTED LIAR, WHO LIED ON FOX NEWS, WHERE HE IS EMPLOYED—should be repudiated and fired by Fox immediately. There is no nuance to what he said. He admitted to lying. That is what he did. The man has no credibility professionally—as an admitted liar, as a supposed newsman—moving forward.
You can help put some heat on Sammon and Fox News by sharing this video on FB and Twitter.
PS: It’s amusing to read some of the comments about this video on YouTube and elsewhere. One teabagger wrote “You Media Matters-types should all be in jail!” What does someone think they mean when they make a statement like that in this kind of context, you know? Exposing liars is a bad thing, I guess, when someone happens to agree with the lies?
Fox News’ Shep Smith, who from time to time proves that he’s actually a sensitive, thinking human being with empathy for others (unlike the vast majority of the ideologues he works with), and Juan Williams, speak the unvarnished truth about what’s going on in Wisconsin. They actially stick up for the little guy! On Fox fucking News! For reals. You won’t believe it!
Watch this. No really, watch this. It’s not often that you’re going to hear something like this on Fox News, so savor it while you can.
“They were promised this. They worked all their lives for this.” [<--Can you imagine the hate mail Smith will get for that alone???]
"I'm not taking a side on this, I'm just telling you what's going on…to pretend this is about a fiscal crisis in the state of Wisconsin is malarkey." [<--Think he'll have an uncomfortable moment around the water cooler with Sean Hannity over letting that one slip out???]
Now this is good TV! Ever since I stopped giving a fuck that I live in a land of lard-encrusted intellectual midgets and learned to sit back, relax and grab a good seat for the end times reality teevee show, my life’s been so much less stressful.
Why just a few short weeks ago, I’d have been apoplectic at the sight of these moronic Iowa Republicans passing judgement on Obama’s Middle East foreign policy as if even one of these ignoramuses could find Egypt on a map. The punch line happens just before the one minute mark, when all is revealed….
Here’s an astute comment from YouTube:
This is what happens when when you fail to learn how to think critically and judge the validity of your sources of information. These people feel confident in their beliefs because they never put any real thought into them.
Arguing with such people is often fruitless, because directly confronting them usually causes them to retreat further in their beliefs. To get them to question their beliefs you would first need to improve their methods of thinking, which is not an easy thing to do.
He’s right, you can’t just snap your fingers in front of an idiot’s face and say “Wise up, dumbshit!” and expect that it will happen. Even Fox New’s Frank Luntz seems embarrassed for these people, which is saying a lot.
First of all, my point, in case anyone didn’t get it, was contained in the bold text (”...the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.”). I’m saying that the potential for a blowback against the folks propagating the majority of this hate talk is rather ripe. If you piss in the wind, don’t be surprised when it comes back to hit you in the face. Then poor Eric Fuller went and proved my point about 3 hours later, to his shame. His story is the very embodiment of my argument in the post. The guy should have been arrested, but it’s sad
I hardly see any evidence there of a “full-throated, hate-filled rant,” either, as I was accused of in the comments by “Metzger’s id,” someone who obviously did not read what I actually wrote. (Steve Doocey IS one of the stupidest people on television. He’s a fucking idiot and I will not back down from this position).
Commenter moflcky scores when he asks “Do you think it’s worse now than it was in the 60s/70s with SDS, the Weather Underground, the SLA, the Black Panthers, the Klan and the race riots?”
This is a very good point and worth thinking about. However, I think contrasting the difference of then vs today is best served by comparing *the media* that exists today vs. what we had at that time. With just three TV networks, I think the center could hold very easily back then. In the realm of “public opinion” it was much easier to achieve a broad general agreement 40-50 years ago and so there was, by and large, a very strong “centrist” majority. The GOP of Nixon’s era has very little to do with the GOP of today, they’ve moved far, far to the right of the positions they held in the 70s. And the Democrats of today are pretty much standing in the same place, ideologically speaking, as most of the Republicans were at that time. Nixon, it can be argued, was to the left of Bill Clinton, in many respects.
The political elites of both parties moved significantly to the right in the past 40 years, even if the general public did not. As the politicians shifted rightwards, the population, or some of the population, anyway, reacted by going in the other direction and eventually—sometime in the 90s—modern progressive politics is born (just as the Great Society and Roe vs. Wade saw an awakening of the religious right/Moral Majority as a political force in the late 70s).
You could say it was “the dialectic” or “zeitgeist” in motion or even just a “generation gap”—I refer you to Spiral Dynamics or the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe. I think both get it right. The generation up and coming looks at the Tea party and largely sees a bunch of ignorant, cranky old white people. As the younger citizens of the United States grow up, the folks who are attending these Tea party rallies will be dying off. And as they do, something else will happen that no one can anticipate at the present time. That’s just the way it works.
The Weather Underground didn’t get face time to argue their beliefs on MSNBC in 1970, although admittedly they might today, depending on the ratings potential. I don’t think they had ANY influence on the general public. The same cannot be said of the radical right Tea party-types and folks like Tony Perkins, Bryan Fisher, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and the rest of them.
There is a huge chasm between some misguided grad students who most people were appalled by, and few supported, and an obviously doomed Republican Senate candidate telling her supporters that if they don’t win at the ballot box, they’ll win with guns? This isn’t some group of hippies who appear to be freaks to 99% of the population talking, this is a lemon-faced church lady-type who faced off against the Senate Majority leader and raised a record amount of cash (most from from outside of her state).
William Ayers was brought up in the comments. I find bringing up Bill Ayers, specifically, in this context (and nearly all others) to be utterly meaningless and tiresome. How is he relevant in 2011 or is this situation comparable? Can someone please remind me?. I’ll say it again: the biggest difference between the Weather Underground in 1969 and the Tea party in 2011 is that the Weather Underground never had their own cable news outlet (The Weather Channel?) and 15% of the dumbest and least educated portion of the population did NOT follow or sympathize with their ideals.
Imagine the Democrats were running Bernardine Dohrn for the Senate? Wouldn’t THAT would be the flip-side of the GOP running Sharron Angle? WHO is the equivalent to Sharron Angle on the mainstream Left? (There is NO nuance in advocating “Second Amendment remedies! It’s not a statement open to that much wiggle room in the interpretation!)
Make no mistake about it, this is what MORE THAN HALF of the country is hearing when we have to listen to this Tea party bullshit: These folks want MINORITY RULE.
They will not get it, obviously, without violence.
Well, we know that Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck and their irresponsible, hateful rhetoric had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the shooting in Tucson, because… well, they (and Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Michelle Malkin and the rest of the right-wing punditacracy clown parade) told us so. Right? Right??
But what of the people who were actually shot, but survived, or who were eyewitnesses to the tragedy? What do they think? Who do they blame for the sorry state of the toxic political climate that led a complete lunatic like Jared Loughner to seek to inflict his “Second Amendment remedies,” on them, as per the innocent, blameless Sharron Angle?
Well, can’t say it’s much of a shock to report that at least one of the shooting victims, Eric Fuller, a 63-year-old disabled veteran who had campaigned for Gabrielle Giffords in her reelection campaign last Fall, DOES blame Palin, Beck and Angle. Fuller, who was shot in the knee and wounded in the back, told Democracy Now that “It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target. Their wish for second amendment activism has been fulfilled.” In remarks Fuller prepared in advance for the interview, he added “Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled—senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic-fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls.”
In my book, Mr. Fuller’s opinion holds more water than Palin’s, Beck’s, Angle’s, Limbaugh’s and the whole of the Fox News staff’s (especially Steeve Doocey, who is a blithering idiot) combined. He took a bullet, two, in fact, so he’s got a right to his opinion. He earned it with his own blood. Suck on that, Sarah Palin!
What’s pathetically ridiculous about the entire argument from the right that the specific words of these specific people had no effect on this matter because Loughner is so very obviously batshit crazy is that this ISN’T the first incident like this in recent memory. It’s (at least) the second (if not the third: the name Richard Poplawski ring a bell?).
Why are so few people in the media talking about what happened when Glenn Beck decided to make the tiny Tides Foundation into a fearsome component of his “the progressive movement wants to destroy America with their evil Socialism” conspiracy theories last year? It HAS happened already that a mentally unbalanced person has decided to fight the vast-leftwing conspiracy that Beck and others subscribe to and propagate, with violence. Just seven months ago, a bank-robber out on parole, Byron Williams, en route to murder the staff at the Tides Foundation, opened fire on Oakland police with a 9mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308-caliber rifle with armor-piercing bullets. Williams told told authorities that he wanted to foment a revolution by “killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.” His mother told the San Francisco Chronicle that her son had been watching Fox News and was angered by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.” Williams thought that the Tides Foundation was part of a conspiracy in which the BP oil spill was a deliberate act of sabotage masterminded by George Soros and progressives.
(Self-described “progressive hunter,” Williams told a reporter that Beck “blew [his] mind.” Who I am to disagree?)
Where will all of this end? Who knows, but what happens when the people who make a living riling up dumb-ass, poorly-educated white people to hate and fear people who are different than they are or who think differently than they do, face a blowback themselves? Sooner or later, a left-wing crazy probably is gonna come after one of them. It wouldn’t stretch the imagination of anyone to figure that somewhere out there in this vast nation of 300 million people, there is a foaming at the mouth far-left nutcase (or a “radical centrist” for that matter) who feels that what’s really destroying America is assholes like Beck, Palin and Sharron Angle and who thinks killing them is the answer to our nation’s problems.
I have a sickening, sinking feeling that this isn’t the end of this, for lack of a better term, “partisan violence,” but just the warm-up acts. There is something eerily Weimar Republic-esque about the sad state of present day America and it’s extremely disturbing to attempt to draw this type of behavior to its logical conclusions. Before anyone writes in to say that it’s only the right-wing who is using the violent talk, the “reload” nonsense and the brain-damaged conspiracy theories, I get that. I know that. What I’m trying to point out here is that I think the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.
Even if the right has always been the spiritual home to the racist and cryptofascist fringe, from the KKK to the John Birch Society to today’s Teabaggers, there are crazy people all across the political spectrum. The next time—and there is going to be a next time—it might be a former member of the American middle class who has lost his home or pension who comes gunning after a Republican. The next shooter might come from the ranks of the 99ers. The next cold blooded killer could be a radical environmentalist. The next political assassin might be someone whose child died because their insurance company didn’t pay for a new medical treatment or ...?
This toxic political climate in America today is a direct or indirect consequence of a small number of politicians and pundits on the far right calling those who they disagree with “evil.” Does anyone with half a brain, really dispute that? Then something awful happens, like what happened in Tucson. And then there is more blame. Then the momentum of the bad craziness builds in some lone-wolf lefty lunatic and this energy reemerges with someone on the right getting hurt. And then it will start again. Back and forth, back and forth.
When, not if, the next politician, government official or TV news pundit who is killed turns out to be someone on the conservative side, Palin, Beck, Angle, Limbaugh, Michael Savage and the idiots at Fox News will have no one to blame but themselves.
UPDATE: Mr. Fuller was arrested today for disorderly conduct after allegedly making a threat to Tucson Tea party spokesman Trent Humphries during a “town hall” TV show taping for ABC. According to sheriff’s deputies at the scene in Tucson, Fuller took a photo of Humphries and then said, “You’re dead.”
I didn’t think events would prove my point this quickly—and regret that they have—but there it is.
Does former Miss America and Fox News personality, Gretchen Carlson play dumb—deliberately—for the money? I have my suspicions. After all, it’s not exactly easy for a Stanford and Oxford-educated person—as Carlson is—to really get down on the level of Steve “The Dumbest Man on TV!” Doocey, one of her co-hosts on “Fox and Friends.” I mean Steve Doocey? That’s pretty fuckin’ stupid. (He’s the Jerry Hubbard of Fox News and that’s really saying something. He even makes Rick Sanchez seem… well, less stupid).
Then again, Rep. Michele Bachmann herself was one of Carlson’s nannies growing up. (It all makes a strange, sad sense now, doesn’t it?)
Here, Carlson talks to a young boy who has had a near death experience (NDE) under anesthesia, and his father. They’ve written a book called Heaven is For Real. The takeaway? God is a very big person and he can fit the whole world in his hands, Jesus has a dazzling smile and there are no old people in Heaven. Gretchen seems to like this quaint notion. It seems to give the 44-year-old former Miss America comfort that she’ll be all raptured up there in the clouds with Jesus and the rest of the Republicans at the peak of her physical beauty. (Note that the kid doesn’t seem to buy a single word of what he’s saying, even though his father does seem to believe it, or badly wants it to be true).
Is pretending to be stupid, when you’re (probably) not that stupid the least dignified thing someone can do, even for a big paycheck? Wearing an El Pollo Loco Chicken costume is at least an honest way to make a living. Porn seems less degrading in many respects…
“For Christians who really kind of read the Scriptures, and believe in them and believe in these prophecies, this is really wonderful stuff. But for people outside the Christian church, what you’re talking is really crazy stuff.”
NO SHIT!
It would be really, really difficult to come up with the definitive dumbest Fox News segment ever—anything with Steve Doocey would have to be a frontrunner, no matter what the topic might be—but I would nominate the above clip to be, at the very least, amongst the lowest depths of anti-intellectual foolishness that Fox has ever sunk.
Want proof positive that Rupert Murdoch is laughing in your face as he banks billions? Then watch in horror as Christian pinhead Dr. David Jeremiah—who obviously did his research looking through Chick Tracts and Left Behind novels—discusses how the current state of the economy indicates we’re in the “Endtimes” as foretold in the (batshit crazy, epically nonsensical) “Book of Revelations.” and that Obama, natch, is the Antichrist. Line up the rubes, Rupe!
Now consider the notion, just for a moment, it’s too painful, of Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mike Pence or ___________, (fill in the blank for the next Republican theocrat shit-for-brains who’ll throw their hat into the 2012 Presidential race) with their finger on the nuclear button. Laugh all you want, these clowns are going to kill us all. But that’s okay because Jesus will come back and take all the believers and Fox News viewers and teabaggers to Heaven to be with the invisible father figure in in the sky.
A sampling of the YouTube comments:
“That man is insane. The last 15 seconds are chilling, this asshole wants the world to end and sees it as the “ultimate solution”. If this clown is right and his Jesus comes back, billions will suffer and die and he calls it a message of “hope and joy.”
“You people who constantly bash people like David Jeremiah will be on the other side of the Rapture wishing you’d listened to him. Your fate in is your own hands.”
“The solution to Armageddon: Tell them to believe in a magic and big men in the sky instead of taking real action and trying to avoid it. Christians are so hell-bent on seeing the world end.”
Take one loony, give him a suit and tie, give him a hair cut, airbrush his face and VOILA a respectable looking loony. How could we have been fooled by this?”
“Wait. His example for the evils of ‘consolidation’ is the use of the word ‘czar’ to describe administration positions? A word, a nickname, that has been used for years by both Republican and Democratic presidents? THAT’S your consolidation that’s a harbinger of Armageddon? Not corporate consolidation. Not the increasing merging of corporate and political interests, like, I dunno, say… FOX NEWS? Well for fuck’s sake. Looking for the hand of Satan in the world, it’s this guy.”
This is fucked up. Watching this clip, I felt violence welling up inside me.
Stupidest? Meanest? Grumpiest? Racist? Jingoistic? Xenophobic? Most ignorant of history? Most likely to be married to a cousin?
Close, but the answer won’t come as a huge surprise: Oldest. From The Hollywood Reporter:
In a survey released by analyst Steve Sternberg, Fox News has the oldest audience among fully distributed cable networks. The network’s average viewer last season was 65 years old, according to Nielsen. Heck, it’s viewers are even older than viewers of Hallmark Channel, Military Channel and Golf Channel.
Perhaps the reason viewers tend to leave Fox News on all day racking up hours of big Nielsen numbers is they can’t actually change the channel?
Long after I’d given up hope of seeing anything even close to a principled stand by a Republican, something incredible happened. It’s amazing to me that the party responsible for my wonderment is the same attorney who represented George Bush in the Bush v. Gore election caper, former Solicitor General, Theodore Olson.
Last year, Ted Olson joined with David Boies, the opposing lawyer in Bush v. Gore, and a staunch Democrat, to bring a federal lawsuit against Perry v. Schwarzenegger challenging Proposition 8, the California constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. This odd couple of ideologically opposed lawyers, of course prevailed in overturning Prop. 8.
This morning on Fox News Sunday, Olson appeared with Chris Wallace to discuss the recent defeat of Prop 8 in a California courtroom. I find Chris Wallace to be the single toadiest, most craven, ass-licking employee of Fox News. That’s really saying something, I realize, but Chris Wallace is a nauseating one-man wind-up toy of Republican talking points. He’s not a journalist, he’s a weenie. He’s not a conservative, he’s a Republican and as Olson proves in the following clip, there is a very big difference between the two. Republicans used to have a credible reputation for being anti-statist and wanting to keep the government off the backs of the people and out of their lives. That was then and this is now. Now, who the fuck knows what they stand for except for the interests of the ruling class and abject stupidity? If the Republicans got smart and ran someone brilliant like Olson instead of ignoramuses like Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin, maybe they’d have a chance in general elections, but that’s not going to happen, not for a long time:
Olson: (to Wallace) Well, would you like your right to free speech? Would you like Fox’s right to free press put up to a vote and say well, if five states approved it, let’s wait till the other 45 states do? These are fundament constitutional rights. The Bill of Rights guarantees Fox News and you, Chris Wallace, the right to speak. It’s in the constitution. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the denial of our citizens of the equal rights to equal access to justice under the law, is a violation of our fundamental rights. Yes, it’s encouraging that many states are moving towards equality on the basis of sexual orientation, and I’m very, very pleased about that. … We can’t wait for the voters to decide that that immeasurable harm, that is unconstitutional, must be eliminated.
Media Matters has a great look at the way Fox News covered the Tea party rallies in Nevada recently. Comparing it to Woodstock although there were but 8000 attendees. One of their anchors saying “God bless these folks.” And of course covering the stump speech mumblings and goofy patriotic platitudes of their own on-air personality, Sarah Palin as if she was Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.
Everyone describes Fox News as the GOP’s propaganda arm, but even more than that, it’s the network for stupid people. Fox’s anchors, “experts” and “reporters”—clearly—are as blinkered and as uninformed as their enraged, mouth-breathing viewers. Think about it: If Fox News didn’t exist, could Steve Doocy get a job in the news industry anywhere outside of Florida? At Fox News his bungling white guy idiocy is valuable commodity! His corporate overlord Darth Murdoch pays him an estimated $2 million dollars per year to say inane things on teevee! Incredible. Doocy must be the all time inverse-IQ-to-wealth ratio champ! Well played, dummy!
Below, thrill to the sight of nudnik Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins as he asks a child how she feels bearing the “costs of the government” on her shoulders. What a fucking knob this guy is. Here he asks a woman what her dog thinks about Obama’s policies.
Roger Ailes, the name behind the most trusted name in news.
A poll of 1,151 registered American voters were asked how much they trusted each of the major television news networks. The network that came out on top? The Fox News Channel.
“49% of Americans say they trust Fox News to 37% who disagree,” the poll’s authors wrote. “Predictably there is a large party split on this with 74% of Republicans but only 30% of Democrats saying they trust the right leaning network.”
“CNN does next best because it is the second most trusted of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. 39% say they trust it compared to 41% who do not, with 59% of Democrats, 33% of independents and 23% of Republicans saying it carries credibility with them.” “The major networks all have the majority trust of Democrats but less than 20% from Republicans. NBC, perhaps because of the ideological bent of MSNBC, does the best among Democrats at 62%. Overall 35% of voters trust it to 44% who do not. CBS does the worst among Republicans, with 69% distrusting it. A plurality of independents express distrust of all five outlets we tested.
