At the present, the UK,Europe, and Australia have better news services than we do, so he’s being rather chauvinistic.

His 20th Century innovation was more appropriately mid-20th Century journalistic standard honored in the US with lip service.

By the way, calling things you don’t like “un-American” is the lazy, jingoistic rhetoric of Fox News.

Sorry BT, but NOT when the thing you’re calling is, you know, actually un-American, then it’s not lazy.

And I can see the argument for it. If you believe that in this democracy that we call American that the duty of the press is to inform rather to misinform, then when you in fact intentionally misinform you could be said to be un-American.

IMO.

As usual, YMMV.

As far as I know, the UK’s Guardian is the most independent of the major news media outside of the internet political/news blogs. It takes no corporate money.

I think that un-American applies to Fox in the sense that in promoting the right wing ideology it opposes this country’s best interests. That news is not traditionally always unaligned is a different section of the same subject: it’s American as apple pie to have strong viewpoints, but not to work actively against the public and the country.

I’m not sure I would call Fox News “un-American” but I do think their definition of “American” is vastly different than what the people on FDL think it is. They are a media organization that has taken the John Birch Society view of the world and made it their mission statement. Add in the fantasy historical view of America that Hannity espouses and the hysterical paranoid rantings of Beck and you have the formula for right wing success. The wildest nightmares and fears of the Right are validated every day but to what end? If it’s money then I can’t think of a more cynical motive but if it’s something else, the promotion of a racist, classist and corporatist political agenda, then I see it as nothing else but subversive.

I don’t want to call it “un-American” but it’s getting increasingly difficult to see it as anything but.

Emanuel: “It’s not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”

That’s putting it kindly.

Faux ‘news’ has more in common with Jerry Springer than it does with CNN or MSNBC.

What Emanuel should have said: “It’s an organization that parades around pretending to be something that it is not and as a result is irrelevant, or even harmful, to our country’s political discourse.”

Faux ‘news’ helped the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress create a lot of the problems that we are now facing. The least they can do is help the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress fix those problems.

Otherwise, yes. Faux ‘news’ is “un-American.”

Off the subject but really big
http://www.infowars.com/ap-declared-obama-kenyan-born/
Obama is Kenyan born.
McCain and Palin set to move into White House.

And we’re blessed right here today with FauxNews like bullshit!!!

Aren’t we lucky???

I mean, even on a Sunday teh stoopid get paid for being teh stoopid.

God Bless America!!!!

I agree that FOX news should be ignored.

Read it and weep…..
http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/president-obama-admitted-he-waskenyan-born/

S
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Instead of un-American I think a better description of Ailes and Fox News would be subversive, except the First Amendment, as currently interpreted allows subversion, I guess, as long as it’s done by the “Press”. I’m curious how the courts would act on civil suits against the Hannities, O’Reilly’s and Becks of the world, for slander, disinformation, or incitement to violence. Oh well, time for another Margarita.

Please swim around the long line… not even any by-catch to be had here.

Faux News is as amurikan as Joe McCarthy.

What’s un-American about manipulating public opinion for profit? Good lord, that’s the cervical vertebrae of modern capitalism right there.

The real fraud written is the assertion of ‘media independence’ existing as a concurrently active conceit rather than an co-opted and obsolete form.
With this premise and others, Mr. Weisberg displays a somewhat shallow grasp of interpretable media history in this column.

un-American? un-American?

They have done everything except order their beckenstein monsters, who are freely roaming the country, to pick up their 2nd ammendment, guaranteed assault rifle and start shooting up the White House, the Prez, the Democrat congress, starting with Nancy Pelosi, and go after the lefty, leftist progressives who voted these radical marxists into office. (Or are they socialists? Naxis? I can’t keep it straight)

Yeah, I’d say they are un-Amerikan

Actually, the relatively modern trend of an “unbiased” press is the new thing, not FOX ‘News’ and its GOP slant. Most all 18th and 19th Century newspapers in the U.S. were vigorously partisan sheets often owned by local and national party officials. But just because something has a long history doesn’t make it right; slavery comes to mind. Supposedly we’ve progressed a bit since Amos Kendall was flogging Andrew Jackson’s policies. But if FOX is going to be partisan-—which they are-—then they ought to be honest enough to admit it. Which, of course, they aren’t.

Correct but the biased press of the earlier years made no pretensions of being anything but what they were. And most folks knew the biases of the various competitive papers.

The difference is Fox pretending to be unbiased while being the mouthpiece of the Republicans.

Edit: Just noticed your last line so we agree on this.

you know, the fact that fox and friends use the term “unamerican” doesn’t mean we can’t use it

in fact, that’s the reason they do it, the call us “against the military” because they are, they call us “fascist” because they are, they call us economically ignorant because they are, they call us “tax and spend” because they do, they call us “balloon the government” because they do and they call us unamerican because they are

fox is DEFINATELY “anti American”, anti democracy, pro federalist, pro robber baron, anti middle class, anti economic stability

anti american

There is no media indepenence. These stenographers are vile and hateful. They pay people millions of dollars a year in effect to incite violence and spew hatred amongst their fellows, they couldn’t care less about what is good for the country. They persuade people to consitently vote against their own insterest by fear campaigns that said people are too stupid to understand play on their worst fears. They encourage people to carry guns to events that POTUS will also be attending. I don’t know what you call this but I don’t call it American.

BlueTexan, I read Weisberg a bit differently than you do, and perhaps it’s because I’ve lived for periods overseas where the Murdock model was developed–AND where they’ve had some collassally corrupt government sell-offs of incredibly valuable natural resources.
Tabloid news is considered ‘normal’, and the NYT would be too ‘hoity toity’ for most to buy; only the white collar bank managers, doctors, and the affluent would buy the Financial Times or the Guardian (or the Syndey Morning Herald). Those publications actually fact-check.
Murdock-type tabs tend to have screaming 8-inch headlines like: “Woman Has Sex With Dogs”. I kid you not — the stuff is unbelievable brain rot. (And people buy it to wrap their fish and chips, which is why it is called ‘fish wrap’.)

I don’t see Weisberg claiming that Murdock ‘invented’ a partisan US press.
That’s not how I read this.
But without question, Murdock applied what might be called ‘neoFeudalist Economic Principles’ to the press, both overseas and finally in the U.S. And he brought assumptions that Tabloid News = ‘news’ to the U.S.

IMHO, Murdock is really a neoFeudalist, Free-Marketeering Overlord.
(EW uses the term ‘neoFeudalist,’ and it’s a very useful term in thinking about Murdock, and other ‘global investors’ who figure they can just move on and buy some lovely island to dwell on after they’ve left the rest of us in hollowed-out, decrepit cities.)

His logic is the logic of money: get money, then use it to buy politicians to write or change the legislation you need to control resources (in this case, ‘media resources: cable, satellite, news outlets, media of all types’) — and then, using your editorial control to influence all coverage of policy discussions to imply that the one truly great, noble economic act is to privatize, you basically legitimize destruction of every natural resource, decent politician, or claims that a ‘common good’ needs to be protected.
The neoFeudalists are rabid privatizers, and as Naomi Klein points out if a crisis needs to be created in order to grab resources, a crisis will be created. (So it’s quite clever of Murdock to have a 6 pm news for ‘creating and covering crises’, is it not?)
Privatize mines!
Privatize pristine beaches!
Privatize water systems!
Privatize sewers (and yes, watch those ‘utility bills’ climb)!

The politicians who get media coverage and flattering articles are those who enable your neoFeudalist ability to gain, retain control of, and expand your control of resources of all kinds, whether they are natural resources, capital and currency, or human.

Any politicians who threaten to reign in, or break, your control of resources is going to be ignored, and if not ignored, then you’ll hope for some salacious sin to cover. Failing that, you simply smear them. For more examples, see Fox News and it’s radio affiliates. (Or see also: Spitzer, Eliot.)

The US has a tradition of media in the ‘public interest’.
The US tradition of the NYT, and the WaPo (back in the day) and the Christian Science Monitor, and McClatchy’s work simply does not exist in Australia. (And any Aussies who want to argue are free to try it, but trust me when I say that I’ll win the argument.) That kind of tradition also doesn’t exist in England in the same sense that it does in the US.
So when Murdock thinks of ‘news’, he probably thinks in neoFeudalist terms: money, and political influence. Period. He has no concept that a League of Women Voter would recognize as ‘common good’ or news in the traditional US sense of vibrant metropolitan newspapers.

I believe that Weisberg is correct — in the sense that in the US for about 200 years, the ‘media’ was conceived of as a ‘commons’, handed down through English Common Law. Information = ‘the public interest’. For that reason, there were rules about who could own, profit from, and use it.

Murdock shows no real ability to conceive of news as ‘public interest.’
It’s either going to be in his interest, or in nobody’s.
I see no middle ground.
He doesn’t get it, and he never will.

Although Hearst was definitely a believer in creating wars to sell more papers/ads, Murdock comes at it with a whole new level of raw sewage as ‘news’.
Murdock is Hearst on steroids in the iPod age.

I think you cut Weisberg far too little slack; if you’ve ever lived where the Murdock ‘tabs’ have screaming headlines almost as sleazy as women having sex with dogs, kids being conceived in champagne glasses, and boys in balloons, you know what I’m talking about.
Murdock is a really dark force; for him, information is simply a commodity for extracting wealth.

At least in the UK, the Murdoch-owned Sky News is fairly inoffensive . That’s because news broadcasters have to satisfy certain regulatory constraints — ones that Fox News (simulcast in the UK on Murdoch satellites) has violated.

You can argue that Murdoch has applied the UK/Aus newspaper model to cable news in one of the few Anglosphere nations that makes such a thing possible, in the context of the newspaper market described by RAMA. The interesting question, moving forward, is whether the acquisition of the WSJ will be followed by an attempt to turn it into something closer to a national partisan broadsheet.

Fox News aka, The Jesus Channel/ GOP TV/ The Glorious Official Republican Government News Network.

While Fox News has the highest ratings, it’s also the same group of people that make up just 20% of America’s electorate… the far right-wing of the GOP.

There will always be an audience for the far right and that’s Rupert Murdock’s Fox News demographic.

Rupert keeps them frothing at the mouth with manufactured fear and GOP talking-points, phony outrage.

Fox is also a right-wing echo chamber.. notice that when “The Wall Street Journal”, “The Weekly Standard” people are on Fox News there’s never disclosure that these people are all Rupert Murdock employees.

Imagine if MSNBC or CNN did this… I don’t know how Fox News gets way with constantly recycling Rupert Murdock’s employees (sockpuppets) from his various media properties.

There’s hardly a word on the “MSM” about Murdock’s world wide (far right-wing) media empire.

Murdock has a lot of influence, example: all of his various sockpuppets, Hannity, Beck, etc, and all of Murdock’s worldwide media holdings trash global warming, President Obama and anything else right-wing Rupert Murdock dislikes.

I think that press and especially individual journalists are deathly afraid of Rupert Murdock and what he can do to them professionally.

Rupert Murdock is the new William Randolph Hearst.

Another thing, Sarah Palin, who is a favorite among the Faux News/ Right-wing crowd is getting Rupert Murdock’s wingnut welfare.

Palin’s (Rupert Murdock’s ghostwriter) book publisher is HarperCollins… a wholly owned Rupert Murdock subsidiary, you ‘betcha.

Also, there should be an award given to the guy that writes the ominous, scary music for Fox News… he’s obviously a full-time employee.

No seriously… whenever there’s a special where Rupert Murdock wants to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein has WMD, or that Iran/North Korea is going to attack America tomorrow, or a Hannity or Beck segment where they want to scare their right-wing audience (even more) there’s always that ominous music to go along with the story.

It’s like a scary GOP music video.

Book Salon a couple of flights upstairs with Michael Huttner and Jason Salzman’s 50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America hosted by Toby Wollin

Unlike Newspapers radio and tv licenses are given out by the government to companies in exchange they provide free tornado warnings, cover Presidential speeches and provide news to inform people.
The news does not make as much money as a hit show does but they have to do it to keep their license.
Fox by lying in their news and claiming guys like Beck are entertainers and not news when all they do is talk about the news seems in the first case in breach of contract. In the second case guilty of fraud they work to pretend Beck is news then in court say he is not.

They are not literally “un-American.” They are anti-democratic (small “d”).

They would have their followers believe that the result of the democratic process of 2008 is to have an illegal alien non-president who wants to subvert American As We Know It, turning everybody into Nazi Zombies through FEMA re-education concentration camps — all the while threatening to pull the plug on grandma.

That’s what their free speech communicates to those who can hear those particular dog-whistles. And, of course, it doesn’t stop there.

What’s their call to action — the rallying point at the end of their various anti-democratic arguments? Obama is going to take your guns and ammo away, along with your America As We know It, so you’d better get out there and arm yourself to the teeth.

And, BTW, he’s just like Hitler, and we know what Hitler deserved, Right?

Yup. And I’d defend to the death their right to say whatever they want. Though it is just possible I and We (The People) might just have to end up fighting them to do it.

Unless, of course, we let them secede. But that never goes well, does it. I mean it only cost almost 700,000 American lives the last time this level of violent rhetoric was ratcheted up.

Nicely done!

You should read #9, #10, & #13″s comments, for examples of their brainwashing efforts.

Thery’re the fdl dog whistlers.

Murdoch is an old-time fascist in the mold of Hitler and especially Goebbels. And he depends upon liberals who make the same (weak) argument you do — defending his “right” to spread lies and smear people who disagree with his agenda (which is getting whatever he wants) and calling it freedom of the press.

It’s all in the art of redefining the meanings of words. If you say something is so just b/c you say it is and no one challenges you, then you can say a word means whatever you say it does, too — and soon everyone will either believe you or try to ignore you and hope that you go away but you’ll gain some degree of legitimacy regardless.

Murdoch’s not been totally successful in his endeavors to rule over the world’s thought processes (no ego problem there, huh?) but he’s got a few more assistants onloan from the goppies: Frank Luntz, David Frum, Bill Kristol, being the 3 Stooges of Neocons Wordsmiths.

Ironic that Jews are helping Hitler’s fascist agenda to take hold in the US and Israel and anywhere else they can.

Edit my earlier comment (#28):

Make that #’s 7, 10 & 13 — reichwing trolls.

I wish your organization would stop call Fox a ‘news’ organization. If everyone would call Fox an opinion network, that would be more justified. It is not anything but and those who watch it are as mesmerized as watching a reality show – e.g. Dancing with the Stars (Tom Delay) style.

Good day everyone. “First-timer” here. Love the responses on FDL pieces. I learn some good insights…Thanks!

I just read one of the stories on AOL’s ‘cover page’ on it’s website, with a survey question: 1) do you think fox news is fair and balanced?; or 2) is it unfair and unbalanced? Well, 69% said it is the former–fair and balanced. If you dare, take a look at some of the comments those unbalanced folks have left.

Weisberg’s a career douche. ‘Nuff said.

This is one of those subjects that can’t be discussed rationally. A number of people have their minds made up and nothing said will change them. It is their truth that Fox isn’t news and it does not matter what else is said.

But, it really doesn’t matter. Whether they are convinced or not is irrelevant. Fox will continue to grow.

All Presidents face stiff critiques from the press. Obama is not used to it yet, but he will be as time goes on.

It really doesn’t matter if any Obama officials go on Fox. As with most politicians, right or left, they would just spew a bunch of baloney anyway. That to me is the larger issue; it’s sad to see these guys, of whatever party, get on the air and grandstand, lie, misdirect and bullshit us all. It’s become a game.

Usually, interviews with political figures are a waste of time.

These same views expressed by the Obama administration are the same ones used by dictators as a pretext to shutting down papers, magazines and TV stations “they are not news,” “They are only causing trouble,” “They are agitators,” etc. etc.

The only thing missing here is the POWER to shut them down, NOT the desire.

Take a cursory glance at the bios of William Randolph Hearst, Harry Chandler and Colonel McCormick.

how did joe pulitzer get left outta that group ???

joe dint change his spots just cuz they named a prize after his sorry ass

Yes i agree with this view, Fox news are “Un American” Limousine@service

Fox News may have superficial similiarities to the John Birch Society but it is incorrect to state as Splicer does that they have the JBS view of the world.

FBI FILES ON BIRCH SOCIETY:
http://ernie1241.googlepages.com/jbs-1

Glenn Beck has often recommended the writings of former FBI Special Agent W. Cleon Skousen. For a report on the mythology surrounding Skousen’s FBI career, see:

FBI FILES ON W. CLEON SKOUSEN
http://ernie1241.googlepages.com/skousen

All of these bright minds defending the indefensible. Blue Texan is right (uh, correct), but just didn’t take it far enough. If you are any kind of student of early North American history, the English colonies had some of the most partisan press around that had only a nodding acquaintance with the truth. Even the revered Benjamin Franklin engaged in ‘Fox-type’ journalism, at times.
I too grew up in a a foreign country and saw the Murdoch model of the news stranglehold of an oligarchical press on the dissemination of information. But, P.T. Barnum was absolutely correct. Never all of the time. Sooner or later they catch on. And oh the bloodbath that ensues. And the media oligarchs usually are the first victims and the most violently destroyed.

Let’s join MoveOn.org in standing up to Fox New’s smears,
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/10/20/moveon-org-asks-democrats-stay-fox-news

Fox News hires the professional smearers at the Washington Times who has been twisting up this country ever since so-called Rev Moon founded it,
See,
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/11202