When George H.W. Bush, in a craven bid to put himself into
the White House, began to call the American Civil Liberties Union
“un-American,” the ACLU needed someone substantial to defend it.
In a showdown, who better to back you than an actor who’s
played Wyatt Earp? Without hesitation, the star signed on, and soon national
ads were airing that began, “I’m Burt Lancaster and I have a confession to
make: I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU.”
In fact, Lancaster was an ACLU board member, and had
expressed his concerns about civil liberties and democratic ideals through his
involvement in film projects such as Seven
Days in May and Executive Action.
“His political ideas had now distilled down to what he
called a central ‘simple’ belief: the Bill of Rights was what ‘made this
country unique’ by empowering the individual while setting limits on
government. The balance between them was fragile and too easily lost without
the vigilance of a group like the ACLU,” wrote Kate Buford in her biography Burt Lancaster.
“In the feel-good ambiance of the Reagan/Bush era, he saw a
nostalgic kind of conformity that had, in his opinion, nothing to do with the
hard work of tolerating unpopular opinions if a free society. Censorship,
discrimination, abortion rights — for him they were issues of personal freedom.
’He was a very common-sense kind of guy,’ said (ACLU communications director
Linda) Burstyn, ‘very aware of his own strength, which made him protective of
others who were not so strong — the people other people pushed around.’”
Although he could be cruel and controlling at times,
Lancaster was also brave and generous, a self-made liberal intellectual who
always pushed the limits of his art and regularly stood up for the underdog.
Director Sydney Pollack recalled, “You couldn’t scare him.
He knew who he was, what he was worth — knew himself better than anyone I’ve
ever met. He was, in a curious sense, fearless: he had no fear. I was always
curious: Where’d this guy come from, to be like this? It was because there was
nothing at stake for him in terms of his own self-worth.”
“Burt would come out in the morning to get the newspaper in
a nightshirt and Rayfiel said that looking at him was like going to the zoo and
there’s one animal that just stands out, that’s built different and better than
anyone else. That’s what Burt was like — he was like a better animal. He had a
stronger and more integrated character than most people have. He was in one
piece.”
And director John Frankenheimer said Lancaster was “a very
dedicated honest man who wanted to do good work in a society where it’s very
difficult to do good work.”
“The Republicans have begun to see that they have fallen into a trap of their own construction: the party of the rich, which catered to the yokels, is now in danger of being taken over by the yokels... Incoherent, celebrating violence, sentimental, paranoiac and resentful: it's all there cooking on the stove of high unemployment.”
— David Seaton
By Dan Hagen
Just listen to them. They’re telling you what they really want.
Whom did Fox News star Glenn Beck say he wanted to “kill with a shovel?” Whom did he “pray would burst into flames?” What remedy did Sharron Angle say would “turn the country around?”
On Fox News, on Aug. 6, 2009, Beck "joked" that he'd like to murder Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by poisoning her wine, then had the transcript scrubbed to hide his statement. Fox News host Bill O'Reilly suggested that the CIA should kidnap Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and perhaps even waterboard Pelosi, at a stop on his “Bold & Fresh” speaking tour on Jan. 23, 2010, in Westbury, NY. Fox News pundit Liz Trotta, while discussing the idea of assassinating Osama Bin Laden and Barack Obama, said, “Well ... both, if we could!” then laughed happily.
So why did Palin remove the cross hairs she had aimed at Giffords' district immediately after the shooting? Why did she censor herself if — as she was busy lying — they were not cross hairs at all but “surveyors’ symbols?”
Fearing violence from Tea Party activists right after the shooting, Arizona Legislative District 20 Republican Chairman Anthony Miller and others tendered their resignations. If Tea Party threats of violence and bull's eye symbols are harmless metaphors, why did these Republicans resign?
The obscure Tides Foundation was brought up several times on Beck's show, characterized as part of what Beck identified as a conspiracy by Obama and left-wing organizations to spread socialism. Then Byron Williams, an anti-government gunman, engaged in a shootout with police in Oakland, CA, while he was on his way to target Tides and the ACLU.
The Phoenix minster Steven Anderson instructed his congregation during the summer of 2009 to “pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell.” The next day, one of his congregants showed up at an Obama event with an assault rifle and a handgun.
The Pittsburgh man Richard Poplawski shot and killed three police officers in April 2009, telling friends he feared that Obama planned to confiscate weapons. He expressed fear about a supposed plan by FEMA to herd people into concentration camps. He had seen it discussed by Glenn Beck on Fox News.
The Tea Partier Greg Girard was charged in February 2010 with stockpiling weapons, and possessing explosive devices including tear gas and pepper ball canisters. Girard had just previously written online that Sarah Palin is on a “righteous mission from God.”
How about Jim Adkisson, that devoted fan of Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and O'Reilly who shot up that Unitarian Church on a quest to murder “liberals?” What on earth could have inspired him, do you think?
On the other hand, the president whom Charles Pierce has dubbed our C-Plus Augustus, George W. Bush, had people arrested in July 2004 merely for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts. And on the 4th of July yet. Yes, wave that flag of freedom, right wingers.
Connect the obvious dots on any of this publicly and you cue the Tea Pity Party, which suddenly trades its snarls for whines, never wanting to take responsibility for the political violence it so eagerly gins up.
A leadership responsible to only an uninformed or partially informed electorate can bring nothing but disaster to our world.
— Edward R. Murrow
The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
— Marcus Aurelius
By Dan Hagen
The worst thing a journalist can do is to lie.
Beyond their duty to their employers, professionals have an overriding responsibility to the public. So you should not be able to hire a physician to murder someone, or an attorney to frame an innocent person in a criminal conviction, or an engineer to build a highway bridge designed to collapse.
And because the overriding responsibility of the profession of journalism is to provide honest, fair, relevant, factual reporting about matters of public importance and concern, you should not be able to hire a journalist to peddle partisan propagandistic lies as “fair and balanced” public truth.
American citizens must be assured of information that is not based on lies if they are to run this nation.
Infomercials on television ape the format of a news broadcast, with actors disguised as news reporters, in order to leech the small amount of credibility still retained by American journalism in order to hock magical investment schemes or miracle floor wax.
Fox News takes the same low road for an even lower reason – to confuse, mislead and deceive the American public about matters of national and global importance.
At Fox News, the public's supposed watchdog has been trained to savage the people it’s supposed to protect, and always while their backs are turned.
Fox News instructed its employees on the propaganda slant of the day in daily memos from former Fox News Senior Vice President John Moody and Fox News Managing Editor Bill Sammon. For example, they were ordered not to turn the 9-11 commission "into Watergate," to create "heat" for John Kerry on his "flip-flop voting record" and to lavish praise on George W. Bush for his "political courage and tactical cunning." Hence the uniformity of the channel’s lies.
Certainly Fox News is completely biased, frequently excluding Democrats entirely from its "fair and balanced" Sunday opinion panels. A week before the 2008 election, a memo to the news staff collected quotes from Obama’s autobiography, Dreams of My Father, that Sammon claimed contained “references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists,” along with “a couple of his many self-described ‘racial obsessions.'" They were to be used as fodder for "fair and balanced" Fox News attacks on the Democratic candidate for president.
This is not about mere “bias,” even though bias is the very breath of life to Rupert Murdoch’s and Roger Ailes’ cable news channel. Bias, which can sometimes be unconscious, is a tendency to thumb the scales of public debate.
Nor is this about mere “opinion,” even though Fox News has perversely interwoven that into virtually all aspects of its “news” reporting.
This is about telling lies concerning matters of objective fact – the deliberate crafting of partisan propaganda to be slipped into the public debate under the cover of a profession that is supposed to impartially uncover, verify and report the truth.
For example, which political party a politician belongs to isn't a matter of opinion. It's a fact Fox News lies about.
Fox News suddenly identified disgraced Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina as a Democrat on the very day he admitted his philandering.
A coincidence? But Fox News also suddenly changed Congressman Mark Foley's party affiliation from Republican to Democratic the very moment it was inescapably confirmed that Foley was sexually soliciting teenage male pages in Congress. On Dec. 20, 2012, Fox News even turned the fundamentalist Christian religious fanatics at the Westboro Baptist Church into "liberals" and "Democrats."
Fox News' White House correspondent Major Garrett was forced to apologize for another such “mistake” -- his fake HBO-Obama story. During the Nov. 4, 2009, edition of America's Newsroom, guest co-host Martha MacCallum started the fake story that President Obama watched an HBO special about himself instead of the Nov. 3 election returns. On the Nov. 4 edition of Studio B with Shepard Smith, Garrett apologized for "mishearing" press secretary Robert Gibbs and reporting the false information. In July 2013, Fox Business host Stuart Varney lied that federal studentloans are subsidized "at great cost to taxpayers," ignoring the fact
that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the federal student
loan program will contribute more than $50 billion in revenue to the Treasury
in 2013 alone.
On Jan. 2, 2010, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) was told he’d have the final word on health care in a debate with Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) -- but he never got to deliver it. After Franks argued that the health care bill was creating a "socialist government-run system," Sestak was given 20 seconds to respond -- only to have the screen go black in the middle of his first sentence. The satellite feed cut out before the Democratic congressman could actually make his case. A flustered anchor "apologized" for the "technical difficulties."
All just "mistakes," don't you imagine? But isn’t it funny how every "mistake" Fox News makes manages to falsely malign Democrats and/or shield guilty Republicans?
On April 27, 2004, Fox News star Bill O'Reilly — a constant liar — claimed that his call for a boycott of France had cost that nation "billions of dollars," citing reports in "the Paris Business Review" as evidence. No such publication exists or has ever existed. In fact, American imports from France actually increased after O'Reilly called for his boycott, which was meant to punish France for failing to endorse Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq under false pretenses. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in February 2004, the United States imported $2.26 billion in French goods and services, up from $2.18 billion in February 2002.
It was an attempt by O'Reilly to justify contemporary atrocities by U.S. troops in Iraq. Exposed as a liar, O'Reilly had Malmedy changed to "Normandy" in the transcript in a clumsy attempt to cover up his tracks.
By the way, I would argue that O'Reilly's Malmedy incident was no mere juvenile smear attempt. It was, initially, a particularly nasty lie that maligned U.S. troops in an attempt to explain away Republican policies of torture and war crime. The scrubbing of the transcript was a SECOND LIE designed to hide the first after it was exposed. Any scrubbing of transcripts is a prima facie lie that violates every standard of professional journalism.
George W. Bush's speechwriter David Frum admitted that the Republicans didn't regard Fox News as a news organization at all, but as a propaganda operation working for them. Fox News has done little or nothing to refute that charge.
Rewriting history on Aug. 6, 2008, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade denied that Bush ever tried to tie Al Qaeda to Iraq to justify his invasion, flatly stating that Bush “never even said there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.” On June 17, 2004, Bush told the press, “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”
Fox News lies with audio. On March 21, 2010, Fox News inserted fake video and audio of health care protesters into Rep. Bart Stupak’s press conference announcing that he would be supporting the health care reform bill. The fake audio made it sound as though the protesters were part of the event, threatening to drown him out.
In May 2010, Fox News video of President Obama’s speech at West Point erased cadets' applause after the president discussed ending the Iraq War. In the official video, cadets applauded after Obama said, “through their competence and creativity and courage, we are poised to end our combat mission in Iraq this summer.” In the Fox News version of the video, there is no applause but instead a strange and awkward pause.
Fox News lies with editing. For example, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace aired a corruptly edited video of President Obama's Sept. 12, 2012, Rose Garden address to push the Mitt Romney lie that Obama waited two weeks before calling the attack on a U.S. Consulate in Libya an act of terror.
Fox News lies with video. In November 2009, Fox News host Sean Hannity spliced in footage from the 9/12 rally on the Mall to make Michele Bachmann's Capitol Hill tea party look much, much bigger than it actually was. He was later forced to admit it.
On the Nov. 18, 2009, edition of Fox News' Happening Now, Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett described “pictures just coming into us” as “huge crowds” that have amassed while Sarah Palin is “promoting her new book.” The pictures that were supposedly “just coming in” were actually year-old video from the presidential campaign. The following day, co-host Jane Skinner was forced to apologize for "mistakenly" airing the fake crowd video.
On June 17, 2010, the day that Republican Rep. Joe Barton made his infamous apology to BP's CEO for the fact that the White House was making the corporation pay for poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, Fox News TWICE edited out his embarrassing, politically damaging apology. On Nov. 14, 2012, Fox News' The Five aired an out-of-context clip from Obama's press conference to make the false claim that he was "giving up on climate change." In fact, the president said the opposite about climate change, adding that we have "an obligation to future generations to do something about it" — but that contradiction of their lie was kept secret by Fox News.
And then there were the balmy palms of Wisconsin. In March 2011, O'Reilly presented footage purportedly showing angry, near-violent union protesters in Wisconsin, where the Republican governor was busy working to destroy public employee unions. Unfortunately, alert viewers could spot the palm trees in the background. This allegedly damning footage was of protesters in California. The real Wisconsin protesters were apparently too peaceful for O'Reilly. Reality is often so inconvenient for the scripted Fox News message. "The Fox News approach to
journalism doesn't just drive liberals crazy," Connor Friedersdorf observed.
"It's also bad for all who want Obama to be held accountable. It makes
conservative opposition to him dumber, less informed and less effective than it
would otherwise be, because O'Reilly's whole schtick is based on contrivance
more than substance."
Fox News lies even with word choice and inflection. Note how
Fox host Elisabeth Hasselbeck reported an unemployment report highly favorable
to the Obama administration in November 2015: “That’s right, Steve. Only 271,000 new jobs were
added last month. That is up from September as well. Analysts were expecting
more than 180,000 jobs for October.”
At times, the Fox News mask slips so badly that even the pretense of journalism is abandoned. Fox News lied when it passed off a Republican Party press release as its own reporting, complete with typo. During the Feb. 10, 2009, edition of Happening Now, Jon Scott claimed to "take a look back" at how the economic recovery plan "grew, and grew, and grew." In doing so, Scott referenced seven dates as on-screen graphics cited various news sources from those time periods. All of them came directly from a Senate Republican Communications Center press release.
A Fox News on-screen graphic even reproduced a typo contained in the GOP press release.
Reporting on a Washington 9-12 rally he promoted in 2009, Fox News host Glenn Beck rejected the crowd estimate of 70,000 offered by city authorities. Instead, he said, an amazing 1.7 MILLION people attended, citing a supposed study by the University of I Don’t Remember.
“We had a university, the university, I think it's the University of -- I don't remember which university it is -- um, look at the pictures,” Beck said.
After being called on a falsehood he told during his Restoring Honor rally in August 2010, Beck cheerfully admitted he lied because he "thought it would be a little easier.” Rhapsodically, Beck had claimed that he held George Washington's handwritten first Inaugural Address in his hands at the National Archives, but a spokeswoman at the institution said that is, of course, not permitted.
"Case in point: In
summer 2011, a story surfaced on the right-wing blogs that an auditor for the
Justice Department had found out some DOJ employees attending a meeting at the Capital Hilton in Washington, DC, had been served refreshments, including muffins for which the hotel charged $16 apiece," wrote Fox
News mole Joe Muto. "It’s no surprise that the story spread like wildfire
on the blogs and was soon picked up by cable news. It was a great story for the
right, reinforcing preexisting notions of government excess and willingness to
waste taxpayer money, the incompetence of the Obama Justice Department, etc.
One problem: It wasn’t true." The $16 was the price of a full breakfast,
including tip, as Hilton Hotels proved. And Fox News knew the story was a lie.
But do you think that stopped Fox news from "reporting" it? No,
O'Reilly reported it repeatedly as fact, for several weeks.
Some Fox News lies are so stupid that it’s difficult to believe they aren’t mistakes. But whatever they are, they remain hideously unprofessional episodes that, like Fox News’ deliberate factual lies, display contempt for the truth.
On June 24, 2010, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade posed perhaps the stupidest question ever uttered on the channel. "The president took a matter of hours to pick a commander in Afghanistan, so why is it taking months to plug the leaking oil?," he asked.
On a Dec. 4, 2009, episode of Fox & Friends, a graphic was displayed with the question heading: "Did scientists falsify research to support their own theories on global warming?" The results shown below indicated that 59 percent of people believed this was "somewhat likely," while 35 percent thought it was "very likely" and 26 percent considered it "not very likely."
In April 2008, Fox News presented a graphic showing that the Lincoln-Douglas Debates were between Abraham Lincoln and the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Hard to tell if that was a deliberate lie or just a complete contempt for history and accuracy. Better file that one under "Fox News Lies" and cross-reference it with "Fox News Thundering Ignorance."
Stupidity and racism had another collision on Fox News on the July 8, 2009, edition of Fox & Friends, during a discussion of a Swedish study showing that married people are less likely to get Alzheimer's, when co-host Kilmeade said that Americans don't have "pure genes" like Swedes because "we keep marrying other species and other ethnics."
He said, “Swedes have pure genes, because they marry other Swedes, because that’s the rule. Finland — Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society. In America, we marry everybody. So we’ll marry Italians and Irish.”
The uglier the remarks get on Fox News, the less likely it is that the hosts are lying.
When then-Sen. Obama secured enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination for president, he and his wife Michelle exchanged a fist pound greeting before he gave his speech. Pitching an upcoming "body language expert" segment, Fox News host E.D. Hill referred to the exchange as a possible "terrorist fist jab." In August 2012, Fox News host Dennis Miller fantasized on the air about throwing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi off a cliff.
On Aug. 6, 2009, Fox News star Glenn Beck “joked” that he'd like to murder Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by poisoning her wine, then had the transcript scrubbed to hide his statement.
O'Reilly suggested that the CIA should kidnap Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Pelosi, and perhaps even waterboard Pelosi, at a stop on his Bold & Fresh speaking tour on Jan. 23, 2010, in Westbury, NY.
In May 2008, Fox News pundit Liz Trotta, while discussing the idea of assassinating Osama bin Laden, confused his name with that of Barack Obama, then said, “Well ... both, if we could!,” and laughed happily.
Lucky that Fox News’ endorsement of assassination and torture hasn’t had any tangible results so far, eh? But are we sure about that?
The obscure Tides Foundation has been brought up several times on Beck's show, characterized as part of what Beck identifies as a conspiracy by President Obama and left-wing organizations to spread socialism. Then Byron Williams, an anti-government gunman, engaged in a shootout with police in Oakland, CA, while he was on his way to target Tides and the ACLU.
Naturally, Beck denied any connection.
On June 9, 2010, on Fox News, Beck exhorted his audience to shoot their political opponents in the head.
He said, “I will stand against you and so will millions of others. We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don't. The radicals that you and Washington have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep's clothing — change the pose. You will get the ends. You've been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You're going to have to shoot them in the head.
"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," said "Nixonland" author Rick Perlstein in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. "(Roger Ailes) 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."
It is a self-righteous sense of victimhood and not information that Fox News is peddling, and it shows in their audience. "According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers," Rolling Stone noted. "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."
Fox News propagandists routinely demand to be treated as "journalists" when they are trying to steal the credibility of legitimate reporters, then skate back behind their "pundit" label whenever they want to blatantly lie or advocate, say, torture or assassination. It's a dirty little dance they've perfected.
As Joseph Goebbels observed, "It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is, in fact, a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded to clothe ideas in disguise." In a nation seriously damaged by the Bush-Republican policies for which Fox News served as head cheerleader, THAT is the mission of Fox "News."
The lies of Fox News are the result of a deliberate News Corporation policy to pervert American news with as much corporate/Republican propaganda as they can get away with. The fact that they can get away with so much of it reflects the corruption of American culture -- what Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi called "...all the different species of lies that by the early 21st century Americans accepted as a matter of routine -- the preposterous laugh tracks in sitcoms, the parade of perfect-looking models used to sell products to the obese, the endless soap operas about the rich and the beautiful cruising the OC in Testarossas, marketed to a country in which 10 percent of the population lacks enough to eat."
The problem is that much of the white working class in 21st century America actually likes to be lied to, just as long as their prejudices are vigorously massaged by the people who are picking their pockets and robbing them of their rights.
Do Fox News’ lies have an insidious effect? Of course. During the summer of 2010, the White House was forced to insist that President Obama is a Christian who prays daily. A poll had showed that nearly one in five people said they thought Obama was Muslim.
No evidence had ever been published suggesting Obama was not a Christian, so what could explain that poll result? Maybe the fact that Fox News speculated that Obama was “secretly Muslim” in reports on Aug. 7, 2007, Jan. 29, 2009 and April 14, 2010, among many other dates?
"The whole point of Fox, Murdoch explained, was to 'dethrone' more traditional media outlets — outlets that did actual news reporting (Fox is dominated by talking-head commentators) and that were not expressly ideological (in the sense that Fox places itself at the service of the corporate-dominated and militarist wing of the GOP)," media critic John Nicholas noted. Fox News sells convenient fictions, and makes inconvenient truths disappear. For example, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's blundering in London was a major news story in 2012, but not on "fair and balanced" Fox News. They made it vanish.
Once, Fox News could not have gotten away with the blatant lies they are telling. But in the 21st century, they have two great advantages — a cowardly corporate media and a corrupted political culture that fear to expose them, and a low-information, poorly educated American audience that likes to be lied to. Fox News has high ratings for the simple reason that it lies.
The people who watch Fox News don't want honest reporting. They want to be told that liberals are always wrong, and that their own ugly little prejudices and hatreds are well-founded and perfectly justified. So that's what Fox News tells them.
I wonder if, when Fox News fans make the groundless, whining claim that, "Other news organizations lie, TOO," they realize they are admitting that Fox News is completely rotten, and that they prefer hearing lies that please them — and so themselves betray the truth?
Unfortunately, to deliberately deprive yourself of honest reporting makes as much as sense as trying to drive while wearing a blindfold. Both practices inevitably end up in a bloody crash.
As Hannah Arendt observed, “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear." "Roger Ailes has helped kill conservatism in America, by never allowing it to criticize itself. When journalism puts power above truth it isn't, to coin a phrase, 'actual journalism.' It's propaganda. And I, like others in the Stalinist atmosphere, was just rendered invisible in the one-party state that is the GOP's media-industrial complex." No liberal uttered that last quote. It came from the conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan, who, unlike other right wingers, is afflicted by honesty and a willingness to state the obvious from time to time.
Fox News’ fans have little to say about all this, except to bark that “all news organizations lie” and immediately turn tail when you demand that they prove it. To make that intellectually dishonest claim without any evidence is merely a way of letting the actual, documented liars at Fox News off the hook. And that’s their intention.