Posts Tagged ‘Fox’
Fox News hates the Muppets – Muppets respond
Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy hit back at Fox News during a UK press conference following the London Premiere of their new film. Fox had publically criticized the film for supposedly pushing a ‘dangerous liberal agenda’ at kids.
Har!
America’s conservatives lead the world in paranoia. They may not get what they think they need; but, they surely sound like they get what they deserve.
Phone hacking phallout: CEO of Wall Street Journal resigns
Les Hinton, Rupert Murdoch
Les Hinton, the head of News Corp’s flagship American newspaper and a trusted, long-serving executive, resigned on Friday over his role in the phone-hacking scandal that has rocked Rupert Murdoch’s global media company.
He became the first high profile casualty of the controversy in the United States, where he had been chief executive of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, a financial news service, since Mr Murdoch’s takeover in late 2007.
In his resignation letter, Mr Hinton, 67, apologised for the “pain caused to innocent people” by repeated illegal intrusions by News of the World reporters and private detectives.
Mr Hinton was in charge of News International, Mr Murdoch’s British newspaper division, from 1997 to 2007, when most of the egregious cases of phone tampering that have come to light occurred…
He continued: “When I left News International in December 2007, I believed that the rotten element at the News of the World had been eliminated, that important lessons had been learned and that journalistic integrity was restored.
Sounds as if his departure was the event that removed the rotten element at the News of the World.
Mr Hinton had worked continuously for Mr Murdoch since joining one of the Australian newspapers that were the foundation of the News Corps operation as at the age of 15.
Few people were closer to the tycoon, and he held a variety of senior posts, including leading the Fox television station network and the American newspaper division, which includes The New York Post, before the highly prized capture of the Wall Street Journal.
Given the industrial scale of phone-tapping, bribery and other misconduct now acknowledged by the company, media experts questioned how Mr Hinton did not know what was going on…
No less culpable than Nixon or Bush – or Conrad Black and Bernie Madoff – of the crimes they committed.
Animal pictures of the week: 17 June 2011
Barn Owl in flight, Norfolk, England
Nutball Republican invents new birther lie on the presidential trail
Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said on Monday that he would “love to know more” about where President Obama was born and claimed — falsely — that Mr. Obama was raised in Kenya…
Mr. Huckabee’s comments were prompted by the conservative radio host Steve Malzberg, who asked Mr. Huckabee: “How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth certificate — why, Mr. Obama, did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate?”
The former governor responded: “I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough.” Mr. Huckabee, who is now a Fox News host, then talked repeatedly about his concerns that Mr. Obama was raised in Kenya…
“If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather,” Mr. Huckabee said.
First I’ve heard that the Brits weren’t imperialists. They had the honesty to brag about it – instead of crap lies about regime change.
Mr. Obama did not grow up in Kenya. According to his official biography, the president was raised primarily in Hawaii by his mother and maternal grandparents and spent several years in Indonesia when he was a young boy.
In a statement released Tuesday evening, Hogan Gidley, the executive director of HuckPAC, Mr. Huckabee’s political action committee, said that Mr. Huckabee “simply misspoke” and that “he meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia…
Mr. Obama’s father was from Kenya, but in his first book, Mr. Obama wrote extensively about the fact that he spent almost no time with his father, who left his mother and saw Mr. Obama only once, in Hawaii…
Face it. The amount of time Republicans spend playing kissy-kissy with the KoolAid types confirms they have turned over political strategy and tactics entirely to the nutball wing of the party. Yes, they’ll keep hold of the pursestrings, control of the legislation really important to the corporate backbone of the Party of NO.
But, TV time, ideology and insanity are in complete control of the bigots, birthers and balmy.
Rupert hands out bonuses: $1 Million to GOP governors
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
With Republicans hoping to recapture a number of statehouses in November, the media conglomerate headed by Rupert Murdoch is inserting itself into the races in bold fashion with a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association.
The contribution from Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and other news outlets, is one of the biggest ever given by a media organization, campaign finance experts said.
Democrats seized on the donation as evidence of the News Corporation’s conservative leanings, with Media Matters for America, a liberal group that has tangled often with the company, calling it “an appendage of the Republican Party…”
Jack Horner, NewsCorp spokesman [can you believe that's his name?], said that the company’s corporate side made the donation with no involvement by its news operation and that the gift would not have any impact on newsgathering operations. “There is a strict wall between business and editorial,” he added.
Officials at the governors’ association did not respond to requests for comment. The contribution, first reported by Bloomberg News, was made in June and is included in the Republican group’s most recent second-quarter filings…
The News Corporation and its political action committee, News America Holdings, have given donations over the years to both Democratic and Republican candidates and causes, but never in the amount approaching the June donation, records show…
Of course, the sleaziest end of the pool of American corporate scumbags always distributes largesse to a range of political lackeys. That’s how they’re paid to practice their lackeydom.
The donation generated significant buzz in Washington on Tuesday. Much of it focused on Fox News, whose stable of highly rated, conservative hosts have made it the frequent target of liberals [and anyone else who stands up for a Free Press], who accuse the network of blurring the line between news and opinion.
Federal court wipes FCC’s Bush Era cursing rule
A federal appeals court has tossed out a government policy that can lead to broadcasters being fined for allowing even a single curse word on live television, concluding that the rule was unconstitutionally vague and had a chilling effect on broadcasters.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan struck down the 2004 Federal Communications Commission policy, which said that profanity referring to sex or excrement is always indecent…
“To place any discussion of these vast topics at the broadcaster’s peril has the effect of promoting wide self-censorship of valuable material which should be completely protected under the First Amendment,” it added…
“The score for today’s game is First Amendment one, censorship zero,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, policy director of Media Access Project, which joined the case on behalf of musicians, producers, writers and directors.
Carter Phillips, a Washington lawyer who argued the case for Fox Television Stations, called the decision satisfying. He said the court had “sent the FCC back to square one to start over” by not only tossing the FCC’s fleeting expletive policy but also a broader indecency policy as unconstitutionally vague.
The FCC fleeting expletive policy was put in place after a January 2003 NBC broadcast of the Golden Globes awards show, in which U2 lead singer Bono uttered the phrase “f—— brilliant.” The FCC said the F-word in any context “inherently has a sexual connotation” and can lead to enforcement.
The Right-Wing high priests of the Supreme Court previously upheld the ruling – and policy.
19th Century minds still work very hard at preserving the family values of the 14th Century.
Image of oil spewing enthralling – for the first 2 minutes
It’s beginning to feel like this has been with us forever.
And harder for us to believe that one of these days, or months, or years, it will be gone.
It’s the live video feed from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. When BP engineers lowered those cameras in the first place, you can bet they never imagined that the resulting pictures would be watched by hundreds of millions of infuriated people around the world.
They were for in-house use — to monitor the well, a well that was intended to be an uncontroversial source of enormous profit for the oil company. The cameras were like the security cameras that most corporations install around their office buildings. Just a little something so the bosses can keep their eye on things…
The ceaseless image of the oil spewing has become like an international night light — except without the comfort. It’s always there. We can count on it, even though we’d prefer not to.
It has become the logo of the disaster. It is a ghastly portrait in perpetual motion. Every time there is a dash of hope that the oil will stop gushing, something newly bad happens. In recent days, it was the temporary removal of the containment cap deep in the Gulf. The oil surged harder. And we, in our spare moments, watched.
The television feed is like a heartbreaking mutation of those lava lamps from the 1960s and 1970s — those oddly shaped doodads with the colorful churn of liquid trapped inside, an undulating mixture hypnotic in its incessant and random kinetic swirl. The terrible difference, of course, is that the frantic churn from the oil pipe is not trapped. It is freely headed toward unwelcoming shores.
In my neck of the prairie, folks who maintain a fascination with that live feed are as demented as rubberneckers who hit their brakes and slow down to peer at carnage on the opposite side of the freeway after an accident.
But, the lazy dullards of the entertainment-as-news brigade really drive me to distraction when they stick a frame in the corner of “news” programs, hour after hour after hour showing that fracking bubbling pot at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. What are we supposed to learn from it? There’s nothing in that video as entertaining as a lava lamp is to a stoner.
About as useless as prayer groups gathering to implore some sky-dude to stop the leak.
Reality TV for truly stupid TV producers.
Fox ignores news conference on healthcare, economy
Click on photo for video…
Obama buys prime time. Fox helps by pushing World Series back!
Look! There’s Bill Ayres hiding behind a tree.
Major League Baseball has agreed to push back the start time of Game 6 of the World Series by about 15 minutes so that Fox Broadcasting Co. could sell Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama half an hour of prime time on Oct. 29.
The campaign also has bought the same time period — 8 p.m. on Oct. 29 — on CBS and NBC so that he can run a 30-minute program on all of the networks. Each network is selling the time for between $950,000 to $1 million. Buying time on all of the major broadcast networks would allow Obama to reach more than 20 million people on the Wednesday before the election. A spokesman for Fox said the network will make available a similar 30-minute block of time for the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, if he chooses. Time for McCain would be either later that night (if there is no Game 6) or the following evening.
Major League Baseball did not have an immediate comment.
Where do we even start? Conservative TV networks who not only sell time to the candidate they love to hate – but, shove one of their cash cows around to accommodate said candidate?
This would be “Tee Hee” with all caps if I could stand it.
Fox Biz Network adds Wall Street Journal technology columnist
The Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal, two siblings in the News Corp. family, are contractually restricted in what resources they can share. But they have taken another step toward family unity by announcing that the personal technology columnist Walt Mossberg will be a regular contributor to the upstart cable channel.
The announcement makes Mossberg, who writes two columns for The Wall Street Journal, the most prominent person from the newspaper to contribute to the cable channel, created by News Corp. last October, about the same time that it was buying Dow Jones.
A 15-year contract that extends until 2012 between CNBC, the dominant business channel, and The Journal prevents many Journal reporters from appearing on Fox Business programs…
“As long as we stay away from branded, regularly scheduled segments of business news, we’re safe,” Kevin Magee, an executive vice president at Fox News, said in an interview. “Breaking news is fine and nonbusiness news is fine.”
It’s beginning to look as if Murdoch realize the “fair and balanced” crap act needs to be abandoned to grow to an all-encompassing market. You can’t count on selling sophisticated biz news to NASCAR reality junkies. And as business TV goes, FBN is a mediocrity.
