Ruth Marcus Should Watch This Video

Maybe if Ruth Marcus actually familiarized herself with what FoxNews has been doing for the last 9 months she wouldn't come off looking like such a spectacular hack.



President Obama's White House didn't start this war, they just finally decided to launch a counter attack. Villagers can keep hitting the fainting couch all they want, this is not only appropriate, its also LONG overdue.

Fuck FoxNews

The Responsibility Of Cable News

Great video from Media Matters



(h/t Oliver Wills)

Connecting The Dots

Eric Boehlert has a post up at MediaMatters.org about the connection between Richard Powlawski, Glenn Beck, Jim Adkisson and the rest of the right wing hate machine. Definitely worth the full read.

Jon Stewart Is Smiling Right Now

MediaMatters has launched a new financial media watchdog site, "Financial Media Matters". Jim Cramer get used to the spotlight.



(h/t Greg Sargent)

Well That Explains A Lot...

Dear Cable News Folks,

You might want to have an economist on your show if you want to, you know, discuss the economic stimulus bill. Just a thought.


Thanks for nothing assholes.


Sincerely,

Moi

Faux Nooz Exposed, Oh Noez

Does this really surprise anyone?

More Media Lies About Obama: Inauguration Edition

I can admit that I was inclined to believe the press reports that President Elect Barack Obama was set to break the record for costs of an Inauguration. I didn't really read to much into it. My thinking is over time we always end up paying more for things. But then the reports came out that the price tag was over $100 million and that was supposedly 4 times what Bush's innauguration cost. Honestly, although I should know better, I never thought about whether or not the media was lying. The story was reported by so many different sources that I just ASSumed it was right. I wasn't exactly mortified by the numbers but I did think there was a chance that it might reflect badly on Obama that in a time of economic crisis, that kind of green was being spent on swearing him in. And sure enough the WingNuts were having a field day with the story.

But as I said in an earlier post today, our new media goes a long way in terms of helping to dispel false stories like this one so that Democrats aren't railroaded like they would have been in the past. This time MediaMatters.org does the honors:

Did you hear that "some are saying" Barack Obama's inauguration will cost "$160 million," which is $100 million more than George W. Bush's last swearing-in? That's the tale the crew at Fox & Friends was telling on January 15. "Why does the thing have to cost so much?" demanded co-host Gretchen Carlson. "I don't get it. George Bush spent $42.3 million and that was just four years ago." She wondered why Obama needed "another $100 million" for his celebration.

The Fox News crew wasn't alone. The Internet and cable news were filled with chatter about the jaw-dropping (and unsubstantiated) number suddenly attached to Obama's swearing-in. But the sloppy reporting and online gossip about the price tag illustrated what happens when journalists don't do their job and online partisans take advantage of that kind of work.

It also highlighted the type of news you can generate when making blatantly false comparisons. In this case, it was the cost of the Obama and Bush inaugurations. The connection was unfair because the Obama figure of $160 million that got repeated in the press included security costs associated with the massive event. But the Bush tab of $42 million left out those enormous costs. Talk about stacking the deck.

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Unfortunately, that didn't matter. At least not to conservative partisans who grabbed onto the Daily Mail story (via Drudge) and announced a blatant hypocrisy existed within the press because, they claimed, four years earlier, reporters and liberal pundits raised questions about the cost of Bush's inauguration, but suddenly were mum about Obama's, even though at $160 million, it was going to cost nearly four times as much as Bush's bash. (Actually, it wasn't just liberals or the press raising questions about the Bush inauguration; a strong majority of Americans wished Bush, during a time of war, had scaled back the glitz for his second swearing-in.)

Online, the inauguration condemnations were swift and fierce. The cost of "Obama's upcoming celebration" was "dwarfing" any previous swearing-in expenses and was climbing into "the $100 millions," claimed right-wing weblog The Jawa Report, which relied on the Daily Mail for its misinformation.

The unsubstantiated $160 million figure was also picked up and repeated on MSNBC, where news anchors spent all of January 14 announcing Obama's inauguration was going to cost "$160 million." The eye-popping dollar figure was accepted as fact, even though nobody in the press could actually explain where that number had come from. Plus, MSNBC suggested the $160 million tab just covered parties and activities, not the larger security costs.

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Here's why using the $160 million number and comparing it with Bush's 2005 costs represented a classic apples-and-oranges assessment: For years, the press routinely referred to the cost of presidential inaugurations by calculating how much money was spent on the swearing-in and the social activities surrounding that. The cost of the inauguration's security was virtually never factored into the final tab, as reported by the press. For instance, here's The Washington Post from January 20, 2005, addressing the Bush bash:

The $40 million does not include the cost of a web of security, including everything from 7,000 troops to volunteer police officers from far away, to some of the most sophisticated detection and protection equipment

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The question for the press then becomes: How much did the government spend on security for Bush's 2005 inauguration? How much did it cost for the wartime administration's unprecedented move to turn the nation's capital into something akin to an armed fortress, with snipers on rooftops, planes flying overhead, Humvee-mounted anti-aircraft missiles dotting the city, and manholes cemented shut?

Back in January 2005, that figure was impossible to come by. "U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said last week that he was unable to estimate security costs for the inauguration," The Washington Times reported. The cross-town Washington Post also had no luck in 2005 finding out the cost of security: "[Government] spokesmen said they could not provide an estimate of what the inauguration will cost the federal government."

However, buried in a recent New York Times article published one week before the controversy erupted over the cost of Obama's inauguration, the newspaper reported that in 2005, "the federal government and the District of Columbia spent a combined $115.5 million, most of it for security, the swearing-in ceremony, cleanup and for a holiday for federal workers" [emphasis added].

You read that correctly. The federal government spent $115 million dollars for the 2005 inauguration. Keep in mind, that $115 million price tag was separate from the money Bush backers bundled to put on the inauguration festivities. For that, they raised $42 million. So the bottom line for Bush's 2005 inauguration, including the cost of security? That's right, $157 million.

Now undoubtedly over the next 4 years there will be negative press written about President Obama that is true and there is no getting around that. But I would advise you that when you do read one of those negative articles to go to sites like MediaMatters just to make sure the story is on the up and up before you decide how you feel about it.

Finally The Truth Comes Out

Thank you again Media Matters for illustrating the hypocrisy of Rick Warren's rhetoric on Prop 8 in California. LGBT activists would do well to bang this drum instead of trying to demean President Elect Barack Obama for inviting Warren to do the invocation at the inauguration IMHO. The more people learn that he was lying through his teeth the more he will lose his prestige and the trust of the people that follow him. From Media Matters:

During her December 19 Dateline NBC report on Rev. Rick Warren, after noting Warren's support for California's Proposition 8 -- which amended the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage -- co-host Ann Curry reported that "Warren says he joined the fray out of a concern that if Proposition 8 wasn't passed, pastors would lose their right to preach about the biblical definition of marriage." Curry then added, "But many constitutional experts say that fear was totally unfounded, and gay rights leaders saw Warren's stance as an infringement on their civil rights." As Media Matters for America documented, while previewing her interview with Warren the day before, Curry uncritically reported that Warren "was worried that this Proposition 8 would prevent him from getting up on the pulpit and speaking out against same-sex marriage," echoing the falsehood that had Proposition 8 not passed, members of the clergy could have been restricted in what they could say in the pulpit and could have been forced to perform same-sex marriages.

In fact, Proposition 8 and the California Supreme Court decision it sought to overturn had nothing to do with members of the clergy, and did not address their actions or speech in any way. As Media Matters has documented, the California Supreme Court itself noted the irrelevance of its decision to clergy, saying in the majority opinion that "no religion will be required to change its policies or practices with regard to same-sex couples, and no religious officiant will be required to solemnize a marriage in contravention of his or her religious beliefs."

Liar Liar Scarborough's Pants En Fuego

You gotta love how Joe Scarboroughtries to sell himself, much like Bill O, as a paragon of media integrity. For the past two weeks Joe on his MSNBC show "Morning Joe" has helped to lead the charge in the baseless smearing of President Elect Barack Obama with some manufactured ties to disgraced Illinois Governer Rod Blagojevich. Interestingly enough Scarborogh has also been pointing to his bonafides as having held the Bush administration to account for the Valarie Plame scandal as proof of his "fair and balanced" approach (Seriously, FoxNews was MADE for this guy). But you know, as a somewhat frequent watcher of Morning Joe (its like a train wreck, I just can't turn away) I could never remember such a time when he was trying to shine a light on the cover up of the Valarie Plame scandal. So of course I used "the google" and whaddyaknow, the guy is, once again, lying through his frikkin teeth. Thank you God for giving us MediaMatters so slimeballs like Joe Scarborough can't get away with this kind of blatant revisionist history. This is from February of this year:

Summary: In again refusing to acknowledge that former White House senior political adviser Karl Rove was involved in leaking the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame to conservative columnist Robert D. Novak, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough falsely suggested that Rove was not a source for Novak.

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During an interview with Novak on the July 18, 2007, edition of Morning Joe, Scarborough suggested that Rove had played no role in the leaking of Plame's identity, saying that the press "followed [the CIA leak investigation] like a pack of dogs talking about was it Rove, is it [Vice President Dick] Cheney, is it [President] Bush, who was it, who was it, and when they found out it was [then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage, everybody kind of yawned and went on."

The next day, after Media Matters for America pointed out that Scarborough had falsely suggested that Rove was not involved, Scarborough claimed that Media Matters was "very upset because of my interview yesterday with Bob Novak, talking about the narrative that the left wing had for a very long time that this whole Valerie Plame leak was a diabolical plot hatched by Karl Rove." Scarborough later introduced Novak -- appearing for the second straight day on the show -- and said he was "[h]ere to clear that up and talk about his book, Prince of Darkness [Crown Forum, July 2007]." In response to questioning from Scarborough, Novak explained that Rove was his confirming source.

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SCARBOROUGH: All right, so here we have John McCain proving once again that he's a liberal, and I'll tell you why. Because liberals have spent the past 30 years calling Bob Novak a liar. And every time liberals call Bob Novak a liar, they're the ones who end up with egg on their face. I remember during the Valerie Plame episode. Remember, Bob Novak told us from the beginning, "This wasn't an ideologue that gave me the name. This wasn't Karl -- this wasn't a Bush operation." And liberals, "Oh, he's lying, da da da da da." And then remember earlier this year, Bob Novak -- and, of course, Novak was right. The liberals were wrong. And then earlier this year, you had Bob Novak talking about how the Clintons were shopping dirt on Obama.