Conservatives' Media - A perpetual dishonesty machine

Gabfly1 · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from Tsing Tao:

...i wonder if glenn has ever heard of this irrelevant author.
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Beck mostly hears his own voice.

bugscoe · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from hermit:

Wow, you are dense
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You defend the Gibbs video by showing a similar video of "scathing" lies which you disapprove of.

Wow, you are a logically gifted girly man.

hermit · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from bugscoe:

You defend the Gibbs video by showing a similar video of "scathing" lies which you disapprove of.

Wow, you are a logically gifted girly man.
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I didn't defend the Gibbs video, what I actually said was that 'you can't use Gibbs' words to claim Obama lied simply because Obama didn't offer a correction.

bugscoe · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from hermit:

I didn't defend the Gibbs video, what I actually said was that 'you can't use Gibbs' words to claim Obama lied simply because Obama didn't offer a correction.
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Why did you post the Dana P video?

hermit · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from bugscoe:

Why did you post the Dana P video?
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Since you are a crusader exposing lies, I thought a list of 945 documented lies would be right up your ally.

bugscoe · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from hermit:

Since you are a crusader exposing lies, I thought a list of 945 documented lies would be right up your ally.
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So you agree, Gibbs is a lying douchebag?

Eight · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from hermit:

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh regularly tout their supposed accuracy and often claim their critics never prove them wrong. Fittingly, this in itself is a complete falsehood. Limbaugh and Beck are wrong for a living, but have been rewarded for their perpetual wrongness by assuming the role of the two most important cogs in the conservative media.

Every day, the conservative noise machine -- Fox News, Beck, Limbaugh, and other prominent conservative talk radio hosts and bloggers -- hurl false accusations with the hopes of damaging the Obama administration, Democrats, and progressives politically. Make no mistake: this is the primary motivation for the majority of the stories they promote. Pesky things like "facts" and "reality" are, at best, a trivial concern.

Often, these attacks are baseless, easily debunked, and laughably absurd -- yet conservative media outlets rarely (if ever) offer corrections when they are proven wrong. Instead they either double down on their attacks or simply ignore that they were wrong in the first place and move on to the next overhyped bit of nonsense.

While it may seem like a minor story in the grand scheme of things, one example from this week perfectly exemplifies the utter lack of journalistic standards endemic to conservative media.

Early this week, conservatives were in their usual panic mode over what they claimed was evidence that the Obama administration "backed" or "preferred" the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the terrorist better known as the Lockerbie bomber. As we pointed out, reports -- often the same reports these conservatives were linking to in order to make their arguments -- indicated that the administration wanted Megrahi to "remain imprisoned in view of the nature of the crime."

Fox News twisted reality to claim that the "U.S. Backed Freedom, Not Prison, for Bomber." Matt Drudge splashed a huge headline across his website announcing that the "White House Backed Release Of Lockerbie Bomber." Pam Geller -- whose deranged rantings have earned her frequent appearances on Fox News and bylines on Andrew Breitbart's "Big" websites, Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller, and the American Thinker -- called for a "special investigation" and a "charge of treason" for Obama.

Rush Limbaugh -- while bragging, as he often does, that he was "executing assigned host duties flawlessly" with "zero mistakes" --claimed that Obama "backed the release" of the Lockerbie bomber because he wanted to "make nice with the Muslim world."

Late Monday, when the State Department released the administration's correspondence with the Scottish Ministry of Justice, it confirmed in unambiguous terms that the administration was "not prepared to support Megrahi's release on compassionate release or bail," and that "it would be most appropriate for Megrahi to remain imprisoned for the entirety of his sentence." They stipulated if he were to be released, he should remain in Scotland rather than risk him receiving an "extremely inappropriate" "welcoming reception" upon being transferred to Libya.

So, after this story completely fell apart, did conservative media figures correct the record and let their readers/listeners/viewers know that the administration did not "support" or "prefer" the release of the Lockerbie bomber?

Of course not.

Conservative blogger Jim Hoft -- whose ongoing popularity and influence in conservative media says a lot about their complete indifference to accuracy and credibility -- linked to the letter and proclaimed that the administration "preferred" his release. This was akin to pointing at the ground and saying "this is the sky."

Fox Nation, almost 48 hours after the story had completely fallen apart, still had the following headline and image on their front page:

And you can be sure that in a few months, whenever Sean Hannity or anyone else in the noise machine decides to twist a news story to claim that the Obama administration is "weak on terror," they'll point to the time the administration supposedly "preferred the release of the Lockerbie bomber" in order to buttress their point.

It's a perpetual dishonesty machine.

If this were an isolated incident, perhaps it would be possible to (partially) excuse conservative media outlets for their shameless performance "covering" this story. But as we detailed this week, the right-wing media routinely promote fake stories (for example, the epic freak-out over the imaginary Obama proposal to "ban sport fishing.")

For another good example of how the perpetual dishonesty machine works, have a look at this segment from Tuesday's Fox & Friends. In it, Glenn Beck, Steve Doocy, and Peter Johnson Jr. seized on reports of the U.K. supposedly "admit[ting] its socialized health care is a mess" in order to attack health care reform. They rehashed some old favorites from conservatives' misinformation campaign about health care reform, claiming that we "modeled" reform on the British system and fear mongered about imaginary "death panels." Neither of these attacks were true when they appeared last year, they weren't true this week, and they won't be true the next time Fox's hosts bring them up.

This pattern is undeniable, and at this point is just expected behavior for the conservative media. The larger problem is that "mainstream" outlets still frequently treat garbage from conservative media figures as newsworthy, and ombudsmen at major newspapers like The Washington Post regularly chastise their colleagues for not seizing on conservative nonsense faster.

It says a lot about the state of the media when Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and other prominent media conservatives can be caught pushing a blatantly false story, offer no correction, and have their behavior met with a collective shrug. Conservative media outlets retain their unfortunate power and influence over the public discourse because they are able to lie largely without consequence.

They did it all this week, they did it all last week, and they'll do it again next week.

http://mediamatters.org/columns/201007300026
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just go to Foxnews for the ads then...

hermit · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from bugscoe:

So you agree, Gibbs is a lying douchebag?
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So those who lie are douchebags in your book? Care to say the same thing about your Con idol Bush.

bugscoe · Aug 31, 2010

Quote from hermit:

So those who lie are douchebags in your book? Care to say the same thing about your Con idol Bush.
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So you agree, Gibbs is a lying douchebag

Trader666 · Aug 31, 2010

That's rich, coming from a compulsive liar like you hermie!

Quote from hermit:

So those who lie are douchebags in your book? Care to say the same thing about your Con idol Bush.
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