More from Jesse LaGreca

This guy has got his shit together!




FOX - Run the damned video!

or is FOX "Fair and Balanced like a thumb on the scales?"

Tea Party exposed!

The authors of the study on Religion in government and published American Grace have found who the tea partiers used to be. The results are somewhat surprising.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Whoever has been advertising (Koch brothers and the FOX News Network) for the tea party has been selling a lie.

Fear is what FOX News sells. Roger Ailes is FOX News.

As we get reports of the criminal organization operating as a News of the World in Great Britain and learn how it has determined to a large extent who runs the British government - often by publishing information obtained by illegal hacking - we in America should look at the American head of the same hydra - FOX News. The Guardian has prepared an excellent article on FOX which AlterNet has posted. Here are some excerpts.

The key to decoding Fox News isn't hosts Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn't even News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. "He is Fox News," says Jane Hall, a Fox commentator for 10 years, who defected over Ailes's embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. "It's his vision. It's a reflection of him."

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816m last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch's global haul. The cable channel's earnings rivalled those of News Corp's entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch's beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3bn writedown after acquiring the Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones newsgathering operation – Fox News has one-third of the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50%. Nearly half comes from advertising and the rest is fees from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100m households, attracting more viewers than all other cable news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to "throw off a billion in profits".

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. "Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all," says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp researching a biography of the Australian media giant. "People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News."

[...]

The Obama era has spurred sharp changes in the character and tone of Fox News. "Obama's election has driven Fox to be more of a political campaign than it ever was before," says Burns, the network's former media critic. "Things shifted," agrees Jane Hall, who fled the network after a decade as a liberal commentator. "There seemed suddenly to be less of a need to have a range of opinion. I began to feel uncomfortable."

Most striking, Ailes hired Glenn Beck away from CNN and set him loose on the White House. During his contract negotiations, Beck recounted, Ailes confided that Fox News was dedicating itself to impeding the Obama administration. "I see this as the Alamo," Ailes declared. Leading the charge were the ragtag members of the Tea Party uprising, which Fox News propelled into a nationwide movement. In the buildup to the initial protests on 15 April 2009, the network went so far as to actually co-brand the rallies as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties."

According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Sharia law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama's citizenship. At the height of the healthcare debate, more than two-thirds of Fox News viewers were convinced Obamacare would lead to a "government takeover", provide healthcare to illegal immigrants, pay for abortions and let the government decide when to pull the plug on grandma. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland revealed that ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That's because Ailes isn't interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimisation.

"What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame," says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. "He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilises it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin's politics of resentment. He's the golden thread."

Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America's most conservative voters. Republican candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypassing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as "matadors" who want to "tear down the social order" with their "elitist, horse-dung, socialist thinking". Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetises conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line. "I'm not in politics," Ailes recently boasted. "I'm in ratings. We're winning."

The only thing that remains to be seen is whether Ailes can have it both ways: reaching his goal of $1bn in annual profits while simultaneously dethroning Obama with one of his candidate-employees. Either way, he has put the Republican party on his payroll and forced it to remake itself around his image. Ailes is the Chairman, and the conservative movement now reports to him. "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us," said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. "Now we're discovering that we work for Fox."

Roger Aisles is working to be the kingmaker here in America. To do it he has coarsened American politics and made it much less responsive to the needs and desires of Americans.

FOX News and Roger Aisles are a cancer in America's belly and need to be recognized and dealt with. If that is done, perhaps the Republican Party can recover to some extent and once again become a serious American political party.

Is News Corporation a criminal organization? Sure looks like it.

The Guardian has just published an explosive story about whether the Murdochs knew about the criminal activities at News of the World.

Tom Crone and Colin Myler were well aware that the statement they were about to make could prove fatal to James Murdoch.

When the Guardian pointed out in the wake of his parliamentary testimony that Murdoch's son had sought to blame them for concealment, one friend of the two men said: "To contradict James will be as good as coming out and calling him a liar."

Myler and Crone, the News of the World's then editor and News International's top newspaper lawyer, both of whom have lost their jobs in the wake of the phone-hacking affair, subsequently spent the day debating what to do.

If their statement of Thursday nightis correct, Rupert's son will have proved to have misled parliament. He will also have destroyed the Murdoch family's last line of defence against the scandal – that they knew nothing, and had been betrayed by those underlings they trusted.

Myler and Crone are, in effect, accusing James Murdoch of being part of the cover-up, one in which the company's executives vainly twisted and turned to conceal the truth about phone hacking and blame it on a single "rogue reporter".

James Murdoch's crucial claim to the committee was that he had personally agreed to a massive payout, of £700,000 to hacking victim Gordon Taylor, in ignorance of the true facts. He said Crone and Myler had told him the payout was legally necessary.

The Labour MP Tom Watson, one of the affair's most persistent investigators, extracted from Murdoch towards the end of the committee session what was to prove an explosive claim.

He claimed that Crone and Myler had concealed from him the crucial piece of evidence in the case – that an email had come to light with a voicemail hacking transcript, marked "for Neville", ie Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World chief reporter.

The existence of this email, if made public, would explode the "rogue reporter" defence and begin to implicate the rest of the NoW newsroom. It was – and is – the smoking gun in the whole hacking case.

This brings the entire scandal right into the office of the two Murdochs. There will be little doubt that the criminal actions of News Corporation organizations was policy from the very top and that both the Murdochs lied about it to Parliament.

Is this enough to challenge the News Corp ownership of American TV licenses? It should be.

It is my strong opinion that the inheritors of large fortunes mostly spend their lives defending the social position their inherited wealth has given them. Such people live in fear of somehow losing the fortune they were given and could not replace with their own skills. The fear of loss of their fortune drives them to immoral actions. Both Murdochs, father and son, are such inheritors of a fortune they must defend.

Why does FOX dominate the ratings wars for news media?

Steve Benen in the Political Animal at Washington Monthly posted an article that reported FOX "News" has going away more viewers than any other media outlet that is counted as part of the news media. I just realized why they dominate those ratings. FOX is the only organization being measured as a member of the news media that caters to viewers who demand social certainty in the face of great social changes. It is also the most likely of any media outlet to warn its viewers that everyone else is lying to them. FOX carefully crafts an image to attract frightened people who recognize that we are in a period of great social change and who are afraid they are going to lose what they have because of it. Then they promise that if the public elects the politicians it promotes that image will come true.

This is not a problem for people with great wealth since possession of wealth protects people from all but the most radical social change. They live in gated communities and avoid meeting with anyone not of their class. They protect themselves by promoting increased police, more laws and in these days of globalism, by getting their friends in government to spend more on the military. But even the most wealthy are afraid, that's why the Republicans are catering to them with tax cuts and with repeal of the inheritance tax.

The poor as a group are not up in arms because they can't be in any worse condition even if things do change radically, and American history shows that little will get better for them no matter what changes.

Look at the public which is being counted as viewers. Fox's ratings are based on middle class cable TV viewers who fear the current social changes will cause them to lose what they have. The American public right now is more afraid generally than I have ever seen, and I am in my late 60's. The closest to this that I have ever seen was during the 60's when the race riots and assassinations were happening, but that was not stacked on top of economic disaster - especially the many foreclosures - and a radical right-wing government removing the social safety net as was installed in 2001 (and which Obama has not appeared to change much.) There are a lot of reasons to be afraid of loss, especially for the middle class, and those who have controlled the government in the twenty-first century advertise that the government will not and cannot help if individuals lost their security. That was Ronald Reagan's great message and it has been the message of the American right-wing since the nineteenth century.

To frightened middle class people a government using authoritarian means of control looks very attractive. That's especially true if the media can sell the idea that the social changes that are the threat are all caused by the demands of the lower social classes. So FOX sells the ideas that the economic problems of today were caused by poorly managed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because the Democrats wanted more poor people to get their own homes. (Completely untrue. See also An autopsy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) The drug problem is caused by crazy poor people hopped up on Meth who have uncontrollable demands to pay for their drug habits, so the only solution it to imprison them. (Also completely untrue.) Other similar simplistic lies include blaming crime on immigrants, usually from Mexico. These lies are especially aimed at the darker-skinned Mexicans of Indian descent since that resonates with America's innate suspicion and fear of darker-skinned people. These and other similar lies are spewed by FOX in order to hand control of the American federal government to their politicians in the conservative Republican Party. But since the solutions being proposes are based on lies and half-truths, they won't work. The government that implements those solutions will see them fail and have to fall back on police powers to control the lower classes who will be taxed to make up the money given to the wealthy and the big businesses.

This is what the attack against Social Security is all about. Social Security retirement is well funded for a long time, but the excess money the baby boomers have paid to cover their own retirement were put into government bonds and either wasted on wars or given to the wealthy in tax breaks. Next year the baby boomers start to retire and are going to demand the money loaned in treasury bonds be paid back. The only solution is for the government to start taxing the wealthy to pay back what it borrowed or lower benefits so that it does not have to pay the money back to the (middle class) retirees who thought they were saving for retirement. Since the wealthy have a lot of investment in government bonds they do not want the government to default and they do not want their taxes raised, so Pete Peterson and friends will lower Social Security benefits so that it never has to be paid back.

Another major problem is that the failed government policies being promoted by FOX lies and half-truths will justly cause criticism. Since the policies are not based on facts which can be independently verified, expect to see government censorship and police reactions against leakers. That's the core of the attack on Julian Assange and Wikileaks. The government applies security primarily to protect themselves from criticism. Most of the material is already known to real enemies. But policies based on lies cannot be supported by reason. They have to be maintained by force.

One group especially likely to react with approval towards an authoritarian government is the elderly middle class. These people are FOX' most fervent viewers. They have a lot to lose and as a person gets older he realizes that he no longer has he time and energy to recover lost property and expected future benefits when those things he expected to have are taken from him. When a person is younger the idea of taking risks to improve his life is exciting, especially since the young are usually sure you will win when they take risks. (Same reason I buy a lottery ticket.) As a person gets older he has more to lose and much more awareness just how easy it will be to lose it. This is why older people are more likely to be afraid and demand greater security than younger people are.

What does that have to do with the ratings? FOX provides the clearest image of a society that does away with uncertainty for the middle class (sure it's mostly lies) and they discourage their viewers from watching any other media that presents a less saccharine (but more realistic) image. All the other "news" media provides information about threats and very little reason to feel secure. So those most in need of reassurance gravitate to the only source in the media - FOX. Everyone else scatters their ratings to all of the other media members.

Voila! FOX dominates the ratings with a very high percentage of older, misinformed viewers.

Jon Stewart on how FOX handles "news."

Jon Stewart describes FOX's perpetual revulsion machine. Not only is is funny, it is extremely educational.

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CNN calls FOX news Liars

Here is the tape.

The cable news networks viewers have interesting demographics

Daily Kos Commissioned and reported the results of a nationwide poll of who watches the three major cable news networks, MSNBC, CNN and FOX. The results tell us a lot about modern America. Here is their analysis:

Cable news networks have a level of influence that far exceeds their audience, since their actual audience is actually quite small. Most people simple don't watch cable news networks, but the ones that do are generally influentials.

Republicans watch Fox News and nothing else, Democrats split between MSNBC and CNN, and Independents watch nothing. MSNBC, in particular, depends on Democrats for the vast majority of its audience. One would think they'd realize this and get rid of Joe Scarborough to boost its morning ratings.

The South, unlike the rest of the country, appears to have their TV dials stuck on "FOX NEWS". Except for the youth, that is. 82 percent of 18-29-year-old respondents never watched FNC.

We then asked, "When it comes to accuracy and trustworthiness as a source of news would you say that [Media Org] is extremely reliable, reliable, unreliable, or extremely unreliable?"

Combining "extremely reliable" and "reliable", and "unreliable" and "extremely unreliable", Fox News clocked in at 35-41. Republicans (and the South) obviously think they're the word of god, while Democrats think it's shit.

CNN came in at 44-34. For Republicans, it was 20-61. They actually believe all that crap about the "Communist News Network". CNN garnered good numbers from Democrats (56-20) and Independents (48-30). Again, the South (28-53) was at odds with the rest of the country, which generally gave the network high marks for accuracy and trustworthiness.

As for MSNBC, Democrats gave it the highest marks (37-7), followed by Independents (24-16). Republicans, of course, think the network is crap -- 6-31. MSNBC was easily the least-recognized network of the bunch, with 60 percent of respondents unable to give an opinion. That "not sure" number was only 22 percent for CNN, and 24 percent for FNC.

The fact that the audiences are small but consist of influentials suggests that watching cable news is something done by the more well-to-do upper class groups of people. The fact that the audiences are small confirms that the mass news media on cable TV has broken down into niche markets. So this is a report on an upper class (probably upper middle) consisting of influentials and it's also a report on which media outlets cater to the different categories in that class.

The fact that the South is FOX territory tends to confirm my own belief that the conflict between what are politically labelled conservatives and liberals is actually a culture clash between rural traditionalists and urban modernists. These two cultures are socialized differently and in fact even think differently.

It's clear from the political clashes between them that the two groups consider very different issues to be of greatest priority for America, and the way each group treats government is an outgrowth of those different ways of thinking and different priorities. I find it no surprise, for example, that the rural traditionalists are also exclusionists - thus the immigration issue, and the modernists support diversity.

Traditionalists are not fact based. They think in terms of what the traditional authorities tell them is true. They will not be swayed by facts, no matter how obvious. I'd suspect that FOX News has made themselves into one of those authorities, along with Church leaders and high level political authorities like the President. This latter is probably why putting a liberal Democrat 0r worse, an African American, into the position of President is considered the equivalent to lese majeste or worse. That's why electing Clinton over George H. W. Bush, a member of an old-line upper class family, was so emotionally upsetting to so many conservatives. Clinton's enemies had to redeem the Presidency from his presence.

No, I can't prove this, but it fits. It explains a pattern of facts that I have not seen otherwise adequately explained.

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Addendum 9/30/2009
I stated above that traditionalists are not fact based, but that I cannot prove it. A group of researchers, however, describe what they call Motivated Reasoning which is exactly what I was talking about.

Traditionalists have an emotional need to be "right" and so they reject facts that show they are not. Motivated Reasoning describes how they go about rejecting those facts they find uncomfortable. But where do they get the mistaken ideas they consider "right?" FOX News and the other Murdoch propaganda outlets as well as such right-wing propaganda organizations as Regent University, Liberty University, the Discovery Institute, the Heritage Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the CATO Institute and others.

Where do the rightwing talking points come from?

Jon Stewart masterfully explains the Crank Cycle.

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And yet, Glenn Beck still has a job.

Glenn Beck's latest atrocity on the air should have been enough to get him fired by any reputable media or news organization. But he's with FOX, so they love him. Here is Meteor Blades with an evaluation and samples of Beck's simple-minded racism.

Next we have Eric Kleefeld who points out that "Obama-Haters Becoming Increasingly...Racial In Their Rhetoric."

Bill Clinton received the same kind of treatment after he was elected President, apparently because he had the effrontery to be a Democrat who defeated the Republican candidate to take the job. Only Barack Obama has the super-effrontery to be an African-American who defeated a Republican. So not only were the liberals so consumed with Lese Mageste that they took the job of President that the right-wing assumes belongs to conservative Republicans, they even did it with a Black man.

It is driving the conservatives around the bend. Reading the right-wing blogs is a study in insanity and anger. And those are Beck's audience.

The entire right-wing crew is out there playing with matches and explosives. Look for more lone-wolf assassins coming out of the woodwork because the right wing talk show hosts and FOX commentators are inviting them.

More from the FOX propaganda channel

It is really amazing how the FOX "news" people can drink the koolaide and appear to even believe their garbage. Jed I provides a really interesting exchange between FOX anchor Megyn Kelly and Bill Burton from the Obama campaign. As Jed I points out, watch how Kelly becomes infuriated as Burton calmly makes his points and lets her rant inanely.

FOX News corruptly broadcast the paranoid ramblings of the grandiose Andy Martin

It would be difficult to follow the 2008 Presidential election and not quickly become aware of the undercurrent of emails that spread the false claim that Barack Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his true religion. At last, three weeks before the election, the New York Time has gone back to track down the individual, Andy Martin, who is source of the strange lies that are being spread, and the source is even more amazing than the strange stories he dreams up. Here is what the New york Times has to say about Martin.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases. [Snip]

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

Andy Martin can be written off as an energetic paranoid delusional nut job, but those who use him to attack Barack Obama, like the corrupt FOX news, have their own agendas.

FOX used Andy Martin as the source of a so-called documentary on Barack Obama without mentioning anything about his history as a failed lawyer, perennial candidate for election, the fact that a federal judge found that he had so abused the federal courts that he has been declared "a vexatious litigant" who can no longer file legal actions without prior approval of the courts. Mr. Martin's violation of that court order led to the dismissal - with prejudice - of his law suit against Media Matters for allegedly slandering him by writing that Mr. Martin is an anti-Semite. In addition, Andy Martin was declared in contempt of court for filing the law suit in violation of the previous court order declaring him a vexatious litigant.

Andy's so-called research has no support outside his fevered brain, but FOX News could not find other negative material to us to attack the Democratic candidate for President. So FOX went with the rantings of an individual previously determined to possess a “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

It's not like FOX was unaware of this history of Andy Martin (originally named Anthony Robert Martin-Trigona.) Wikipedia has an extensive entry on Andy Martin, one easily available to anyone with a computer and the ability to Google. FOX pretends to be a news organization. They knew or should have known Andy Martin's history before using him as the source of their broadcast.

It is well-known now that there are lies, damned lies, and then below that can be found the the fevered propaganda swill of FOX TV. Their use of the baseless ramblings of Andy Martin to attack Barack Obama are a clear example of the garbage that is the stock in trade of FOX.

Bill O'Reilly defeated my war on Xmas - this year

This is really frustrating. I had all kinds of really good plans for defeating Xmas this year, but I received an email From Bill O'Reilly informing me that Xmas had been rescheduled to Saturday, December 29th this year.

By the time I woke up this morning and learned that the conservatives had slipped Xmas in on me already, it was too late to implement my plans. So O'Reilly won. You Xtians get your Xmas this year. Again.

But I'll stop it next year!

Bwa hahahahah.

FOX whines about being ignored by Democrats

Jonathan Zasloff at the Reality-Based community has the right idea about FOX 'News.' They are beginning to feel the pain of being left out in the cold by the Democrats.

The bipartisan crowd, I am sure, would recommend that Democrats start appearing more often on FOX's shows. No way. If they show up at the Democratic Convention, give them the same access an uncredentialed stringer for an unknown publication gets. Let them stand out in the rain (if it ever rains in Denver) and search for unused electric plugs.

They have proven repeatedly that they are enemies to the Democrats. Now they are drowning. Throw them an anchor.

FOX's Bill O'Goebbels does it again

FOX's premier propagandist and master of "The Big Lie", Bill "O'Goebbles" O'Reilly compared Daily Kos to Capone, Mussolini. Media Matters for America describes the event.

Strange. Whenever I see the master propagandist, O'Goebbels, of the Republican Ministry of Propaganda (other wise known as FOX) I get a mental picture of him happily unloading people from cattle cars and sending them into a camp through a gateway that has a sign over it. The sign, translated from the German, says "Work Makes you Free."

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[If most Americans weren't too young to remember the pictures of the sign in German that said "Arbeit Macht Frei", today's Republican Party would not exist, and Bill O'Reilly might have to work for a living if he were out of prison.]

The source of the failure of the American political dialogue is exposed - again.

Al Gore recently published his new book, The Assault on Reason. Needless to say, the Murdoch-owned "American Standard" felt that it was not that good a book. Unsurprising, since Al was directly attacking the media that operated like the (gulp) American Standard and Fox News, both owned by Rupert Murdoch.

So naturally, Andrew Ferguson (who is an editor at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard) wrote a closely reasoned and extremely logical fact-based review that demonstrated how Al Gore had missed the mark. And if you believe that then you are planning your for your next vacation in the thriving metropolis of Baghdad, to be followed by a tour of the completely recovered New Orleans that Bush promised he would cause to happen.

Ferguson starts his review with a lie that demonstrates that he can't be bothered to read the material that criticizes his lie-based fantasy world. Go read the description provided by Media Matters.

Politics TV refuses to cover FOX Democratic debate

The National Democratic Party has scheduled a debate for Democratic candidates for the nomination for President, to be held in Nevada (home of Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader) and to be controlled and broadcast by FOX "News" (the propaganda arm of the radical right-wing of the Republican Party.)

FOX ceased long ago to be a news organization, and is as much an enemy of America as Dick Cheney, his NeoCons, and al Qaeda. Why the Democratic Party would give them the contract to operate and broadcast a pre-primary debate I find it hard to imagine.

Politics TV, the excellent webcasting organization who has brought us the Jane, Marcy & Others Show from the Libby Trial has refused to contract with FOX to cover that debate. Here is the explanation that Politics TV presented.

Politics TV has got it right. What is wrong with Harry Reid?

Time to break up the TV news conglomerates.

This is from Juan Cole.

"Rupert Murdoch, who gives you Bill O'Reilly, Daniel Pipes, and other fantasists of the hard Right by his ownership of a vast media empire admitted at the Davos conference that his companies had "tried" to propagandize for Bush's Iraq War. He said that they were critical of the execution of the war, though. He doesn't watch or read his own media if he thinks that. It is never a discouraging word and 'what were the RNC talking points today?' over there in Foxland.

"Murdoch's remarks are a good reason for which the news conglomerates should be broken up so that a wider range of views can be published. While Murdoch complains about competition from the internet, the fact is that far more people watch television than get their news from any blogger.

"Murdoch's media have done more to cheapen American values and drive the country toward fascistic ways of thinking than anything since the McCarthy period in the 1950s. The airwaves belong to the public, and this man only licenses them. When will the public take them back and use them for purposes of which Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin would have approved?"

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In order for Rubert Murdoch to purchase the TV stations that were the basis for the FOX network, he had to become a U.S. citizen. As I recall, his application for citizenship was expedited so that he could buy the stations.

The problem is that his international set of networks is able to pull money from where it has a monopoly and use it to crush the local competition such as ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. Since the American networks other than CNN cannot go international, they remain unable to compete with FOX beyond simply copying FOX and eliminating any differentiation. They end up as parasites on FOX rather than competitors. FOX gets the bigger markets and they get the left-overs.

One solution might be to strip Murdoch of his U.S. citizenship and require him to sell off his holdings in the U.S. Another solution would certainly be to require the fairness doctrine to be put back into place and apply it to Cable as well as broadcast stations.