“Fair & Balanced?”
Reported by Priscilla - August 9, 2010 -
Fox apologist “Johnny Dollar,” cited my thread about Martha MacCallum’s interview of right wing Hugh Hewitt as an example of our unfair criticism of Fox News, actually our “hatred of Fox.” (As if!) My criticism was not that MacCallum didn’t include somebody from the other side. As Mr. Dollar points out, liberal Mark Levine was interviewed in a later segment; so it’s all good, if not “fair & balanced.” (snark alert) Mr.Dollar somehow misses the point. I realize that two “talking heads” is not always possible. But in the absence of a counterpoint, it would behoove the interviewer, in this case Martha MacCallum, to, as a “news” person, attempt to comport herself in a reasonably objective manner.
Her comment, in the midst of a discussion of how liberals are “out of touch” with the rest of America regarding the opponents of the building of an Islamic cultural center, was what betrayed a bias: “it’s something that’s very essential to this conversation and you talk about people being made to feel that they’re morons and a lot of folks listened to Mayor Bloomberg, the other day, about the mosque situation and his tone was clearly that if you don’t understand why you need to be religiously tolerant and allow this mosque, then you’re just not getting it…” MacCallum was interpreting Bloomberg’s ”tone” – an interpretation that’s straight of the right wing playbook about “liberal elites.” The fact that she giggled at Hewitt’s comments also showed a certain lack of objectivity and a certain unprofessionalism. On another note, one of Mr. Dollar’s posters appends, after many of his comments about News Hounds, his comic “News Hounds New Slogan.” Although it looks like it’s his original comment, it really comes from a conservative writer on a David Horowitz blog. Calvin Freiburger made this comment in a thread on "News Real Blog", about what a nasty bad librul I am in daring to criticize what appears to be an anti-Hispanic bias on the part of Sean Hannity. Our “new slogan” has no quotes or attribution connected to it. While Mr. Dollar seems to be obsessed with critiquing News Hounds as “Fox Haters,” (part of a growing trend), he should advise his contributor about plagiarism. On another note, if Mr. Dollar's resident News Hounds observer wishes to comment on this blog, rather than taking cheap shots on another blog, that might be feasible as long as he refrains from the ad-hominems that got him banned from this site in the first place.
Freiburger's comment:
Comment on Mr. Dollar's blog:
Update: None other than the esteemed Calvin Freiburger himself has given his approval, to "Blackflon" to use his comment. Mr. Freiburger claims, in an article that whines about how News Hounds is trying to "smear" "Johnny Dollar," that my screen print of one of the plagiarized quotes was not sufficient and that I needed to link to the comment in question. Well, here's one of the comments. And while "Blackflon" did explain the origin of the quote on his original comment with Mr. Freiburger's quote, that doesn't excuse him from not using quotes in subsequent comments. Surely, if Mr. Freiburger writes a term paper on - say - Shakespeare and, after using a quote from one of the plays, does not use quotation marks in subsequent use of the quote, his professor might not be pleased. And if Mr. Freiburger thinks that I'm going to waste my time responding to his original charges, he's "barking up the wrong tree." All I will say is that I stand by my original contention that Sean Hannity is a racist and that Mr. Freiburger's defense of said racism suggests that he too might harbor the same sentiments. Mr. Feiburger, a student at Hillsdale College, needs to realize that he's just a right wing blogger - in the same sense that I'm, as he calls me, a lefty blogger. He really is overinflated with his sense of self-importance.
