Ah shucks. All I did was watch F&F for potentially interesting nuggets that Ellen might miss at dawn. Being over here means that I could watch at mid-day and the experience gave me a good idea of the sort of fortitude needed to do what Ellen has been doing with diligence since the beginning. You rock, girl! (now where did that come from?)

Haven’t watched even one second of the silliness that is F&F since then. Would be easier if I believed they actually washed that couch down after each show.

Thank you, Kevin. You are one of the blessings of our recent years.

Thank you, Bemused.

Readers may not know this but she has been a big help behind the scenes, especially when I was blogging regularly at Crooks and Liars.

I find the value of this website to be the immediate and historical corrective it places on the desperate spin Fox News regularly applies to current affairs. The intent of Fox News by Roger Ailes is to create a narrative that reinforces the right wing beliefs of its core audience. In this narrative, there’s almost nothing a right wing official can do wrong and almost nothing a non-right wing official can do correctly.

If you were to listen to the Fox News version of history, you would conclude that Ronald Reagan led the greatest presidency the world has ever known, that George HW Bush was a beloved president, and that George W Bush was a great and strong president. If you listened to Fox News, you would conclude that the only events of the Bill Clinton presidency were Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky and Newt Gingrich’s rise to power.

If you were to rely on Fox News, you would conclude that the presidency of Barack Obama was one of unmitigated disaster and failure. You would conclude that only unabashed far-right libertarian approaches would address any problems anyone might face.

Fox News is an important part of the right wing’s attempt to rewrite both current and past history in its own image.

Which is why the efforts of News Hounds are so important. Because it’s necessary to continually point out where Fox News is either leaving out important facts or inventing its own material in the process of rewriting that history. Left unchecked, the right wing would simply assert that its assumptions were in fact true historical facts. By constantly correcting these attempts, News Hounds clarifies not only the underhanded methods Fox News and GOP pundits in general are using but also what the actual historical facts are.

Because of News Hounds, in twenty years it will be possible to immediately counter and correct the attempts of the Bill O’Reillys and the Greg Gutfelds to play their assumptions as historical truth. It will be possible to publicly question these people as they try to act as elder statesmen/women, and it will be possible to reveal their biases for what they are.

This is a service that will be necessary and useful long after Fox News has faded from memory.

I discovered Newshounds in 2008 after getting incredibly spittingly furious at the blatant trickstery of FoxNews where it was so easy to realise that what they were broadcasting was not “news” but deliberate recourse to snake-oil rhetoric aimed solely at preventing a black man from being elected President. Ten minutes of listening to the early Sarah Palin and realising that she would be a heart beat away from taking over from the fairly reasonable but oh so elderly John McCain had scared the living daylights out of me. I googled “mad as hell at Fox” and found a posse of kindred spirits at Newshounds. That led me to the book “Outfoxed” where I learned about some tricks I’d not yet sussed out for myself. Sheeesh.

Newshounds is a great site because it allows many people to participate in pointing out how Fox distorts reality. People who try to fly in the face of reality are shot down by facts not preconceived ideas. Refreshing. Fox is despicable for nurturing the sort of blatant ignorance that can result in nurturing of fear and hence violence. While the foxy faithful like to present themselves as proud and brave, their behaviour is not that of Gary Cooper in High Noon but more like a rabbit quivering in a corner who would shoot at the shadows if it had a gun. That would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous for everybody around them.

Anyway, my deepest thanks to the original team for plowing through hour after hour of Fox programming in order to collect the data (aka facts) for the book and the film.
And thanks to the Newshounds team of volunteers for keeping us up to date on the antics of that poor excuse for a news channel.