News Hounds

Robert Greenwald Tells It Like It Is About Fox News

Robert Greenwald was on MSNBC's The Ed Show Friday (10/23/09) discussing the Obama administration's calling out Fox News. As usual, Robert got right to the heart of the issue and why it matters. "It's exciting. We should all get up and cheer and thank them for doing it. Because, remember, Ed, the crucial thing with Fox News has always been not the people who watch Fox, but every other news organization, except for yours, that has in the past picked up the lies, picked up the distortions, and amplified the message that Fox is trying to drive out there. With the Obama administration calling them out, I hope and believe it will be harder for the other news organizations to play follow the leader." Oh, and he gave us a nice shout out, too. Video after the jump.

Keith Olbermann: Send Me Everything You Can About Glenn Beck

Keith Olbermann is not taking Beck's bigoted witch hunt lying down. He writes on Daily Kos: Find everything you can about Glenn Beck, Stu Burguiere, and Roger Ailes... Tuesday we will expand this to the television audience and have a dedicated email address to accept leads, tips, contacts, on Beck, his radio producer Burguiere, and the chief of his tv enablers, Ailes (even though Ailes' power was desperately undercut when he failed to pull off his phony "truce" push).

This becomes necessary after this in order to prove various cliches about goose and gander, and to remind everybody to walk softly and carry a big popsicle, and most particularly to save this nation from the Oligarhy of The Stupid.

Glenn Beck on The O’Reilly Factor: The Last Thing I Want to Do Is Be the Fear-monger

Guest blogged by Julie

On Tuesday night’s O’Reilly Factor (8/11/09) O’Reilly invited Glenn Beck on to discuss some random General Electric stuff combined with a so-much-for-the-truce slam against NBC News, and whether Beck is, in fact, a fear-monger. (Ya think?) In the wake of five advertisers pulling their ads from Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News for his comment that President Obama is a racist, including Lawyers.com, Progressive Insurance, Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson, and now Geico, is O’Reilly helping Beck do a little damage control, or is O’Reilly subtly doing a little more damage? With video.

Network Bosses Tell O'Reilly and Olbermann To Stop Feuding

At least, that's what the New York Times is reporting. Brian Stelter writes, "In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN)." Well, not quite. On June 18, Fox's Bill O'Reilly said that a "fawning" NBC special about President Barack Obama was "part of GE's plan to put the President in a positive light in return for federal dollars – big federal dollars... And now there are charges that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt and NBC boss Jeff Zucker have expanded the strategy to include sliming Republicans. That is, using NBC News not only to promote Obama, but demean the opposing party." Regardless, the so-called "truce" begs a question: If a Fox News boss is interested in toning down the network's attacks on GE/NBC, then why isn't it doing the same thing regarding its racial attacks on President Barack Obama? (H/T Michael Froomkin) UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald makes the excellent point, which Stelter somehow missed, that this is "another example -- perhaps the most glaring yet -- of the corporations that own our largest media outlets controlling and censoring the content of their news organizations based on the unrelated interests of the parent corporation."

O'Reilly Whines That British Black List Is “Risky Business”

Guest blogged by Julie

In case some of you don't know, Britain's Home Secretary, Jackie Smith, has issued a sort of black list of people who can't enter the country, consisting of people who practice “hate speech.” One who made the list was far right-wing hate-monger, Michael Savage – and, I guess since the list didn't include Janeane Garofalo, Keith Olbermann, or Sean Penn (but included one of the right-wing dispensers of red meat to the faithful), Bill O'Reilly seems to suddenly think bias is bad. With video