Faux News – The McLobster of Journalism!

In Maine and parts of Canada, McDonald’s seasonally offers a sandwich called the “McLobster.” I kid you not. While these days they apparently advertise it sometimes as a “lobster roll” and “100% real lobster” (I would be shocked if that claim was not misleading in some fashion), back when I first saw it advertised in 1988, McDonald’s proudly claimed – again, I kid you not - that the McLobster was “made with flecks of real lobster!” Yes, that’s right, “flecks.” The only person I know who actually admitted to trying it was, shall we say, underwhelmed.

There’s a lot of buzz currently about Chris Wallace’s interview with Bill Clinton, where Wallace sandbagged the former President – namely, Clinton was told he was going to be asked about his Global Policy Initiative, and Wallace pulled a bait-and-switch by asking Clinton about his record on catching or killing bin Laden. Is Clinton’s terrorism record a fair subject? Of course. But it’s completely dishonest to misrepresent an interview to one’s subject beforehand. It’s also standard practice for Fox News.

The Washington Post has a brief write-up here (and Howard Kurtz is sure to cover it tomorrow). Questiongirl has the video posted here. ThinkProgress has a full transcript here.

While the Post article notes that Wallace is “not usually accused of being part of the network’s conservative commentariat” at Fox News, and he in fact spoke out against the distortions of ABC’s propaganda piece The Path to 9/11, there’s little question of what this segment was about. Besides being a typical Fox News sandbag job, its other goal is of course trying to rewrite history and paint the Democrats as weak and Bush as responsible on national security before the election.

Of course Fox has a commercial agenda as well a rightwing one — they’ve been selling this interview as “Clinton Gets Crazed!” — not far off from “Presidents Gone Wild!”

But just imagine if Clinton hadn’t responded so forcefully? Conservatives will doubtlessly sell this as “Clinton gets defensive about his lousy record on terrorism.” But I think Chris Wallace has gotten so used to Faux Dems (“I’m not a liberal, but I play one on Fox News!”) he forgot what it was like to try to sandbag someone who would fight back. (Imagine if Kerry has responded to the Swifites with this sort of fire!)

Hmm... I just caught the tail end of Wallace on Fox with Brit Hume and the gang. Wallace lifts two quotations from Clarke's book - the second one could be used to criticize Clinton's critics, but is used to criticize only Clinton. (I’ll try to get some more links up later.)

Almost all of them talk about how "touchy" Clinton was, and speculate it's because he's "sensitive" about his legacy. No one points out that Clinton was sandbagged, with Wallace misrepresenting the interview before hand! NPR’s Juan Williams and Mara Liasson make a few points, but they know what Fox is paying them for - and again, why the hell do you have non-partisan, neutral reporters representing the left on a talk show? Hume trots out some standard GOP talking points about Clinton after cutting him a little slack - basically, he and the other GOP folk acknowledge Clinton was dealt a tough hand, but also imply had he been a real man he'd still have done precisely what they were arguing against him to do at the time!

This is Fox News’ typical seasonal offering for imminent elections; same BS as usual, but piled higher and deeper. Fox News is the McLobster of journalism — if you dig through it you can find “flecks” of real news in there, but overall, it’s an over-processed, artificial sham that’ll have you rushing for the toilet.

(crossposted at The Blue Herald)

Rightwing Revisionism from the House of the Mouse

(crossposted at The Blue Herald)


The more I hear about ABC's upcoming "documdrama" The Path to 9/11 (Al Franken had David Brock of Media Matters on this morning) the more infuriated I get. It is propaganda. It not just a hack job, it is a hatchet job. I would not object so much if it was appearing in movie theaters, where viewers could attend or ignore it as they wished, but it is appearing on ABC and claims to be based on the 9/11 Commission Report, yet directly contradicts that same report on key issues in order to smear Clinton and his team while ignoring and whitewashing the Report's findings (and subsequent findings) on Bush and his team's performance. What's appalling is that when CBS was going to show The Reagans, a TV-made biopic of the famous couple, conservatives were outraged over Ronald Reagan being depicted as being callous and indifferent to the plight of gays with AIDS, with the line, "Let those who live in sin die in sin." While I despised Reagan's politics and the immense harm his policies inflicted, and it's fair to say he was callously slow to address the AIDS crisis (as he likely would not have been had its victims not been mostly gay men), I agree with the criticism that that line of dialogue was unfair. (I still question, though, how much weight anyone should or would give to most TV biopics, since most are godawful.) However, let us now see the double standard in the "liberal" media. Conservatives can complain about a single line in a TV biopic, but it's fine to re-write history while simultaneously presenting it as fact. ABC's docudrama is being presented as honest, true, accurate, and serious. As such, the standards for it are much higher, and perhaps an extremely conservative, personal friend of Rush Limbaugh's is not the best person to be making such a piece. Perhaps when conservative activists, bloggers and pundits are given advance copies to talk it up, and liberal and non-partisan sources have been largely banned from seeing it, something stinks to high heaven. What the hell is wrong with ABC and Disney? How can Harvey Keitel be involved in this?

This is not a trivial issue. This is exactly the sort of crap that has influenced the past two presidential elections, and the reason why so many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. ABC has chosen to pander to the far right at the expense of truth. And why, or why, make such a horrendous pander right before a crucial midterm election? It's not as if there are no mildly conservative, responsible filmmakers out there. This was heavily reviewed and approved. And how can Thomas Kean, always shy about critiquing Bush, have any credibility anymore if he signed off on this as an advisor, when he knows it cites his work to promote outright lies?

Here's the ABC site for "The Path to 9/11" ("Keeping it honest" is a hoot). Editor & Publisher managed to obtain a copy of the piece and gives a summary here . Media Matters has a piece here. Firedoglake has so much coverage on this you'd best just hit the site and scroll back through, but expert researcher and bullshit detector Sheldon Rampton outlines some of the basics here, Jennifer Nix poses a great list of questions here, and Jane Hamsher provides some links to take action here.