News Hounds

Fox News Year In Apologies

Media Matters put together a compendium of Fox News apologies for false information, fake videos and cutting and pasting from the GOP. It's quite a list. But isn't this a bit premature? It's not even Thanksgiving yet and the War on Christmas hasn't really begun. There's still plenty of time for any politician caught drunk driving to be labeled a Democrat; at least one GOP memo about health care reform can still make it into the "news" portion of Fox News and for adoring crowds to show up in advance for January's O'Reilly/Beck tour, even if the crowds look a lot like the 9/12 Tea Party protesters and leave their coats at home.

Is Glenn Beck Trivializing Rape In Comparing Government Run Health Care To Rapist Polanski?

Remember when the right wing got so upset about a comment made by Democratic Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, who referenced Nazis in the context of a comment about Guantanamo. They were very angry about the inappropriateness of using a Nazi metaphor in connection with American politics. Flash forward to 2009 and the right wing routinely compares Obama and health care reform to Hitler. Despite the ADL’s Abraham Foxman’s statement that this type of rhetoric is "outrageous, deeply offensive and inappropriate,” Glenn Beck, a voice for America’s radical right, persists in the Obama/health care reform as Nazi metaphor. Last night, on Beck’s “One True Thing” segment, he outdid himself in the "outrageous, deeply offensive and inappropriate” category when he compared government run health care to what Roman Polanski did to a 13 year old girl. In the use of a disgusting act of violence to describe a health care system, he insults our duly elected representatives who are working on health care reform, those who support it, and all who have been sexually assaulted. The question to Beck is “have you no shame, sir?”

H/T: TPM

Bolling and Luntz Spin Cash for Clunkers Success as "Failure"

Reported by Hula

On Tuesday’s (8/18/09) Glenn Beck show, guest host Eric ("Pelosi as a catcher? She'll get hurt") Bolling used flair and falsehoods, and discredited “pollster” Frank Luntz, to paint the Cash for Clunkers program as a failure. With video. Updated with photo

Glenn Beck "Jokes" About Poisoning Nancy Pelosi; Transcript, Official Video Scrubbed

Guest Blogged by Jonathan

Dictionary.com's definition of the word 'joke' is as follows: "1.Something said or done to provoke laughter or cause amusement, as a witticism, a short and amusing anecdote, or a prankish act: He tells very funny jokes. She played a joke on him." Another example of a joke (albeit, a bad one): What do you find in God's toilet? Holy crap!

Jokes are made to entertain and to amuse people. Someone needs to tell that to Glenn Beck, who "joked" about poisoning Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Thursday's (Aug 6th) edition of "The Glenn Beck Program." With Video

Chicago Tribune Reporter Blasts Fox News And Hannity For “Hijacking” His Credibility

Earlier in the week, I posted about Hannity’s sensationalized and misleading “Special Investigation” baselessly suggesting that Illinois Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias is a mob-connected “protégé” of President Barack Obama. Since then Giannoulias has come out swinging against the report in a diary on Daily Kos. calling the piece “long on falsehoods, misinformation and guilt by association and short on facts. And of course, they are not doing 'Special Investigations' on the problems facing everyday Illinoisans.” OK, no big surprise there. Hannity was not named Media Matters’ Misinformer of 2008 for being a stickler for the truth. And there’s always another side to a story, though Hannity’s “Special Investigations” rarely finds one. But what is unusual about this case is that the reporter quoted in Hannity's report, Rick Pearson, is objecting to how he was hoodwinked by Fox into lending credibility to a hit piece that would otherwise have none. Pearson likened the incident to “identity theft.”