ABC’s This Week just couldn’t stand the thought that fair and balanced Fox News was being picked on by the White House. So it invited “Foxy” (is she Ms. April, or July?) Laura Ingraham to balance out a center-right panel that still allows George Will to appear without a truth squad.
That’s right, Paul Krugman wasn’t there, because it’s unfair to embarrass ABC and George Will when he’s exposed as a fraud, and it unbalances the panel with too many facts.
Laura wasted no time. First on health reform and the public option, she dismissed the Washington Post/ABC poll that found, as numerous polls before it have for months, that a strong majority of the American people supports a public option. We can ignore the results of these scientific polls, she explained, because callers into her show are all worried about what Fox tells them to worry about, like government takeover of health care, Obama’s deficit spending, and so on. So she managed to dismiss numerous scientific poll findings and replace them with Fox “reality” in one sentence. Wasn’t that the White House’s point?
She castigated Charlie Gibson for not echoing all the Fox self-manufactured hype about Acorn — which she reminded us, Obama “cut his teeth on,” while Will proclaimed that no Administration in history had less reason to complain about media coverage. No one blinked as that whopper flew by. Is it possible George Will has never watched Fox News?
Then Laura proved why it was so critical to have Fox always represented on other media panels when she used most of her time defending Dick Cheney’s abandonment of Afghanistan. At this point, I turned off the sound (so I missed Will “dithering” Cheney), but given the Fox reality, I can imagine the reason Dick did that was so that we could drive al Qaeda from Iraq so bin Laden wouldn’t get his hands on Iraq’s WMD. Last I checked, that strategy has succeeded beyond our wildest nightmares, since al Qaeda is now in Pakistan which doesn’t have too many WMD — just a few nukes guarded on some base by our reliable allies, the Pakistan Army. Ah, but we’re not focused on strategic blunders of the century This Week.
So ABC invites a Fox News Princess of Propaganda onto its show, and she promptly proves the White House point that Fox is not a news organization but rather a propaganda wing of the conservative movement waging a permanent vendetta on any Democratic President, but especially this “happy Negro,” (or is he just a whitey-hating racist?) all liberals, liberal activist groups and liberal values — like making sure everyone gets decent health care. And nobody blinks.
But hey, it’s all fair and balanced and now we get to watch it on ABC and get just as many insights as we’d get watching the Fox All Stars.
37 Comments
Spotlight
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About The Seminal
Advanced search
“We are all Fox News now!”? Solidarity!
No one listens. They are all thinking about the next point they are going to make. Maybe?
I heard Max Blumenthal refer to Laura Ingraham as “the female Ann Coulter.”
If it’s a war why doesn’t Obama drop a couple two thousand pounders on Fox and get it over with. After all they don’t seem to be human enough to worry about.
It’s preety hard to defend the gutter slime that resides there.
Even Faux-er was Geo. Will insisting that NYT and MSNBC were political opinion masquerading as news… which successfully defeated any attempt to extract an answer from him to the question of whether that describes Faux.
As the previous thread also showed, the media are lurching and sputtering off into incoherence. The media are circling the drain but too self-important and self-involved to notice.
Yup, they’re all part of the GOP/Media Complex that has existed for several decades now. FOX is just the most blatant about it, pushing the themes the other networks then rush to adopt.
And no one thought to note that if Will were correct, shouldn’t Frank Rich and/or Rachel Maddow be on anytime he and/or Laura are on?
The Washington Post, for which Will opines, is of course beyond suspicion.
Probably, like so much else worth considering, never crossed his mind.
You’re being too kind. Scarecrow is right, when Krugman is there he embarrasses the other panelists with his reality based arguments. Without him their bullshit goes completely unchallenged.
What are the ratings for these Crimes Against One’s Sanity?
Ten, fifteen years ago, people watched these shows. Now???
I just can’t imagine anyone who gets up on Sunday morning and is looking forward to a welcome day of FOOTBALL [like moi] flips the tube on to watch these dolts.
Seriously, does anyone know what their ratings are? I would think MSNBC’s loop tapes of “Lockdown” could beat them. That, or a ShamWow marathon.
There was also a suggestion that Obama is attacking Fox News to shore up his support among progressives. I suppose given the absence of any tangible progressive advocacy from the WH there might be a grain of truth in that.
If the Obama administration made a mistake in singling out FOX “news” as a Republican propaganda outlet, the mistake was in not painting with a broad enough brush. Anyone recall the fictitious Road to 9-11? That ‘documentary’ was produced at ABC. Anyone ever watch Lou Dobbs, John King or Wolf Blitzer at CNN? The framing of every issue is pure Republican Talking Points™ – one suspects that Blitzer’s earpiece is wired directly to Karl Rove’s brain.
This is not something that simply evolved naturally as a consequence of concentrated corporate ownership. In fact that concentration was part of a three-pronged attack on reality by the Repugs in response to Nixon’s downfall at the hands of Woodwards and Bernstein. The prongs were:
1) Buy up as much of the media, especially broadcast, as allowed (and change the rules to allow more) – Accomplished under Reagan and Bush Sr.
2) Get rid of the fairness doctrine. – Accomplished under Reagan. Bush Sr. vetoed multiple attempts to restore it.
3) Make legal precedent establishing that news organizations have the guaranteed first amendment RIGHT to LIE to the public. – accomplished with the Akre-Wilson case in 2003.
The result, the intended result on which hundreds of millions of dollars was spent, is that the US population now lives immersed in a cesspool of reight-wing propaganda.
And Obama might gain a grain of support for this action. That’s about all.
“This Week” is really doing a poor job with its roundtable segment. Why haven’t they retired George Will yet? And why do they keep dragging Sam & Cokie out of retirement to fill in on the slow weeks? Do they really consider Tavis Smiley and Laura Ingraham to be new blood the show so desperately needs? Jeez.
If you read the comment threads at TPM and elsewhere he still has pretty significant amount of support. Apparently, judging from the WH and other sources, being critical of any Obama policies is what defines us as the EXTREME left. Oh well, I’ve been called worse.
I kept waiting for the 23 examples of faux news clips that media matters put together. Then I remembered that I was watching This Week where it’s host frequently appears on Sean Hannity’s show where he took a question Hannity posed Stehpie ask Obama regarding William Ayers in the debate. And we all remember the rest. Stephie is trying to get the wingnuts to check out his show by appearing on fox. I guess even he’s aware that no one watches fox news’ Chris Wallace show on Sundays so, why not try and peal off some of the losers who still do!
It’s beginning to sound a bit incestuous – they’re all appearing on each other’s shows and being interviewed by other media outlets. Maybe they really are just talking to each other and no one else is listening.
It’s a shame ABC didn’t bring on Michelle Bachmann and Peggy Noonan. What I wouldn’t give to see a Bachmann, Will, Noonan sandwich.
I’ll take Laura vs. Katrina V. myself.
Rachel is great, but non-confrontational. Katrina doesn’t mind sinking her teeth into someone.
Make that the whole hour, and I’m in for pay-per-view.
What I wouldn’t give to see a Bachmann, Will, Noonan sandwich.
ewwwww…
No thank you.
Mainstream media a s a whole has become this massive right wing propaganda machine . It doesn’t matter if you’re talking Fox CNN ABC or the NYT WAPO or others . They basically repeat the right wing talking points and don’t seem all that concerned in placing their reports in the right context An example would be a WAPO article I read earlier the writer referenced the recent AHIP hatchet job study to bolster critics arguments against reform but failed to report that the AHIP study was largely discredited. This is just one small example of the bias I see in MSM everyday .
I read the blogs because they are the only places I can find the truth, MSM is too concerned with ratings and profits .
What I wouldn’t give to see a Bachmann, Will, Noonan sandwich.
ewwwww…
On second thought, I’m sorry!
You want to see a shit sandwich?
They are all trying to cover up the same thing.
Who dubbed these AH’S as experts.
Maybe we get serious about bringing back (or creating something like) the Fairness Doctrine…
We can haz a shit sandwich?
ABC has been staunchly pro-republic for many, many years, not just the tv network, but the radio network.
This isn’t news. It the norm with ABC, the American Bullshit Corporation.
My old man when He was a kid when with his dad to work the fields. When lunch came the old man handed dad a half a limburger sandwich, to eat. When He got home He told His mother dad fed me a shit sandwich for lunch.
So shit sandwiches are nothing new.
That’s not something you should wish even on Fox News. We’re better than that.
WAna Bet.
The hell….
Yeah, why watch the ABC striptease when you can get the full monty at Fux News.
ABC’s “This Week” has always had batcrap crazies as comic relief – that’s part of their programming mix strategy for panelists.
If it’s not wild-eyed nut cases like Liz Cheney, Michelle Malkin or Laura Ingrahm, they use the old weekly standbys of Geo. Will and/or Peggy Noonan.
You kinda have to admit that trying to defend ClusterFOX “News” or the “Big Dick” Cheney is a real joke. What’s even funnier is that ABC doesn’t even realize that they have made themselves part of the gag too.
Can’t wait for Michelle Bachmann or best of all “Failin Palin”. Now I’d spend money to see that if Lawerence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow were on that same broadcast as well!
I sure don’t know if we watched the same “This Week” program. I thought George Will came out as close as he could to insulting Faux. I took notes but do not have them with me. While they were discussing whether the Obama administration should spend the time dismissing or paying attention to Faux. Will’s response was basically why waste your time on responding to non news outlets. I thought he slapped Faux down.
What I wanted to ask all of them was what the hell is the Obama administration should do when demons like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh stir the hate mongrels up? What do you do when Obama is receiving 400 more death threats than any other President and Beck and Limbaugh are stirring up the hate.
Will also smacked Cheney down by saying that he appreciated that the OBama administration was “dithering” in regard to deciding whether to send in more troops to Afghanistan. Will basically smacked the Bush administration upside the head for the false pre war intelligence and the invasion of Iraq based on a “pack of lies”
Then Will basically said that marijuana should be legalized and taxed.
Were we watching the same program?
Ingram was a horse’s ass and everyone knew it.
When it comes to contentious battles between the media and the White House, i think the majority of people are on the side of the white house, and i think that is a universal opinion among left and right. I applaud the Obama administration for taking on FOX.