The Rise and Fall of a Fox News Fraud Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-fox-news-fraud-20160126#ixzz3yqFjPxM9 Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Wayne Simmons' mug shot for his arrest in Annapolis
in 2007. Annapolis Police Department

By the time Wayne Simmons went on Fox News last March for what would end up being his final appearance, viewers knew what to expect. "This president clearly has absolutely no idea what he is talking about," Simmons said of President Obama's handling of ISIS. Simmons had made guest appearances on Fox more than a hundred times as a "former CIA operative," and certainly looked the part: white mustache, neck bulging out of his dress shirt, a handshake "so hard, he can crush you with it," as one Fox host put it. Beyond offering his expertise as an intelligence officer, he had become particularly adept at serving up hawkish red meat to the network's audience. "We could end this in a week," he went on, suggesting that the United States run "thousands of sorties" against ISIS. "They would all be dead."

Simmons was largely anonymous when he first appeared on Fox, in 2002, but he soon became a regular face on the network, alongside a cast of retired military officers who, like Simmons, had been recruited into the Pentagon's "military-analysts program." The initiative invited retired officers who had made names for themselves as television-news commentators to attend regular briefings from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and to make trips to Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. In 2009, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its report on how the Pentagon used the analysts to build public support for the war in Iraq. The program disbanded, and many of those involved tried to distance themselves from it. But Simmons boasted of his connection as a way to bolster his bona fides, even mentioning it in his Amazon author biography. In 2012, Simmons co-wrote The Natanz Directive, a novel about a retired CIA agent called back for one last op. When the book was published, Rumsfeld contributed a blurb: "Wayne Simmons doesn't just write it. He's lived it."
But according to prosecutors, Simmons was living a lie.  READ MORE

Brit Hume Attacks Obama's Criticism Of Fox While Continuing Their Poor-Shaming

You've got to hand it to these talking heads over on Faux "news." They're able to lie with a straight face to their audience about what that same audience likely watches day after day, and week after week on their network when it comes to their race baiting and shaming of anyone in the United States who is unfortunate enough to be living in poverty, while simultaneously making excuses for their poor-shaming and attacking the President of the United States for calling them out for it.

That's exactly what the audience was treated to on this Sunday's Media Buzz on Fox, where host Howard Kurtz and his guest Brit Hume continued the network's week-long whine-fest over President Obama's remarks about how Fox constantly berates those living in poverty as lazy, just wanting to live off of the government dole and proud of it.

KURTZ: That brings me to that odd phraseology where President Obama says he wants a different kind of reporting so he can change the minds of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. What does that say to you?

HUME: Well, first of all, a big part of the job of a president is to find a way to work with people who disagree with him and try to get something done. He's especially bad at this.
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Fiorina's Presidential Plan To Save The Economy: Stop Lazy Workers From 'Watching Porn All Day Long'

Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who is expected to announce a campaign for president, said over the weekend that she could improve the economy by cutting federal worker pay because they were "watching porn all day long."

In a Sunday interview with Fox News host Chris Wallace, Fiorina said that there was a "higher than 90 percent" chance that she would become a Republican presidential candidate.

The former HP CEO explained that she would make a formidable candidate "because I understand technology: a transformational tool, because I understand bureaucracies, how they work and how you need to change them. And our government is a huge bureaucracy."

According to Fiorina, the United States was "destroying more businesses than we are creating" for the first time in U.S. history under President Barack Obama's administration. READ MORE

Watch This Fox Host Realize Gohmert Is Bonkers As He Unveils His 'Plan' To Bomb Iran

Possible Republican presidential candidate Louie Gohmert shocked Fox News host Arthel Neville with what she said was a "dangerous" and "volatile" plan to bomb Iran's nuclear sites. During an interview on Sunday, Gohmert argued that President Barack Obama negotiations with Iran had already failed because he was "already allowing them to go full-blown nuclear." The Texas Republican said that he had another solution for dealing with Iran: "You step up the sanctions full-blown, and I think that it's time to look at a plan to go in and bomb them." But Neville immediately saw a downside to effectively declaring war on Iran. "If the U.S. bombs Iran's nuclear facilities, do you think Russia is going to stand by and let that happen?" she asked. "I don't think Russia is in a position to do anything," Gohmert opined. "They're bogged down too many places." READ MORE

Geraldo Rivera Says Hip Hop is Worse for Blacks Than Racism; Blames Russell Simmons (Watch)

*Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera took aim at rap culture during a half-hour Q&A on his stint with NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice.”

“Hip-hop has done more damage to black and brown people than racism in the last 10 years,” Rivera said during a chat with HuffPost Live host Josh Zepps. “When you find the youngster — a Puerto Rican from the South Bronx or a black kid from Harlem who has succeeded in life other than being the one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent that make it in the music business — that’s been a success in life walking around with his pants around his ass and with visible tattoos…it is this whole ethos,” he said.

And with no prompting, Rivera then singled out Def Jam records co-founder Russell Simmons. READ MORE

Canada's 'Fox News North' Goes Off The Air

The right wing, low budget network failed to attract much love north of the border.
via The Canadian Press

The Sun News Network is shutting down Friday morning after negotiations to sell the troubled television network were apparently unsuccessful.
...
Sun News Network hit the airwaves in April 2011 with heightened expectations and the watchful eyes of media observers who nicknamed the channel “Fox News North.”

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France and England Teach America How to Take Down Fox

Fair and Balanced??? Guess what he says about that!

Ever since October 7, 1996, American journalism has been slowly dragged down into the highly partisan, opinion based, no need to fact check, false equivalency, lowest common denominator, racist swamp that is Fox "News." Americans have been subjected to almost two decades of their lies, and as Leonard Pitts Jr. suggests in his blog "Why serious people discount Fox News" we have perhaps accepted numbly that they are just a normal part of the journalistic landscape.

READ MORE

SEE   Pitts: Why serious people discount Fox News

ALSO:

French TV Show Laughs At The Credibility Of "The Fox News Clowns"

Earlier this week Fox News hosted Steven Emerson, an alleged terrorism expert, who claimed that the entire city of Birmingham, England was occupied by radical Muslims and was inaccessible to anyone else. His remarks were widely ridiculed, including by David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, who called Emerson an "idiot." Emerson later recanted and apologized for his "terrible error." But Fox wasn't done embarrassing itself with false tales of horror.

Over at Fox & Friends, Elisabeth Hasselbeck interviewed a former Air Force pilot who claimed to have personal knowledge of the deterioration of French society. Nolan Peterson said that there were "741 no-go zones throughout France." Peterson described his adventures in the wilds of Paris saying that...

"It was pretty scary. I've been to Afghanistan and Iraq and Kashmir, India, and at times it felt like that - those places in these no-go zones. [...and that...] You see young men wearing Osama Bin Laden t-shirts in a hookah shop."

Really? This veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq was scared of Paris? The segment was seen by Yann Barthès, the host of the French television program "Le Petit Journal." His response was to mercilessly flog Fox and Peterson while exposing the glaring errors in their analysis. For instance, Fox made reference to a poll that said that 16% of the French people had a favorable view of ISIS. However, that poll was debunked by the Washington Post, a point that Barthès noted.
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Bill Maher And Eliot Spitzer Take On Fox News

The War of the Words - Glenn Beck vs Eliot Spitzer

The GOP's Lost Year In the Fox News Bubble

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America

31 December 12

uffering an election hangover after having been told by Fox News that Mitt Romney's victory was a sure thing (a "landslide" predicted by Dick Morris), some Republicans have promised to break their addiction to the right-wing news channel in the coming year. Vowing to venture beyond the comforts of the Fox News bubble, strategists insist it's crucial that the party address its "choir-preaching problem."

Good luck.

This grand experiment of marrying a political movement around a cable TV channel was a grand failure in 2012. But there's little indication that enough Republicans will have the courage, or even the desire, to break free from Fox's firm grip on branding the party.

For Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the network's slash-and-burn formula worked wonders in terms of catering a hardcore, hard-right audience of several million viewers. (Fox News is poised to post $1 billion in profits this year.) But in terms of supporting a national campaign and hosting a nationwide conversation about the country's future, Fox's work this year was a marked failure.

And that failure helped sink any hopes the GOP had of winning the White House.

From the farcical, underwhelming GOP primary that Fox News sponsored, through the general election campaign, it seemed that at every juncture where Romney suffered a major misstep, Fox misinformation hovered nearby. Again and again, Romney damaged his presidential hopes when he embraced the Fox News rhetoric; when he ran as the Fox News Candidate.    READ MORE

Republicans: Don’t Trust Fox News!

How the news network failed the GOP.

By Allison Benedikt|Posted Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012, at 4:34 PM ET

For liberals like me, Fox News was the channel to watch last night. As it became clear early on that Obama was going to take this thing, my household quickly switched the channel from CNN to Fox, eager to see the network’s massive breakdown play out in real time. After all, if the job of Fox News these past four years was to make Obama a one-term president, a goal the network not-incidentally shared with the Republican Party, Fox News super-duper seriously failed.

In 2009, White House communications director Anita Dunn called Fox News "either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” I don’t know about the “or” part. With massive funds and infinite air time, Roger Ailes’ little network that could spent the past four years demonizing president Obama (after a year of demonizing candidate Obama), and obsessively churning up non-news to scare the shit out of white guys and feed into the GOP bloodstream: from the Black Panthers’ remarkable rise to political power to that thing about the guns and Mexico named after an awesome Vin Diesel movie to the multifront war on Christmas/Christians/Christ to The Great Benghazi Conspiracy of 2012.

And what do they have to show for it? Not a Republican president. Not a Republican Senate. Not a repealed health care law. Adding insult to Tuesday’s injury, Eric Holder is still a free man.

Yes, ratings. Yes, money. I hear you. But if Fox News has any actual interest in helping the Republican Party or the conservative cause—and you can want to do this and make money, just like the GOP!—the network really flubbed it. So what happened, other than the mainstream media oppressors shutting down the truth once again and polling places letting Hispanics in?    READ MORE

 

'Noble' O'Reilly: Fox Couldn't Succeed if It Was Dishonest

By David Neiwert



Bill O'Reilly tried to make a "liberal media" punching bag out of Ted Koppel last night on his Fox News show, and found out that sometimes the punching bag can punch back hard.

O'REILLY: You think that we have corrupted the sanctity of fair news coverage.
KOPPEL: I think --

O'REILLY: That's what I think.

KOPPEL: I think that ideological coverage of the news, be it of the right or be it of the left, has created a political reality in this country which is bad for America. I think it's made it difficult if not impossible for decent men and women in Congress, on Capitol Hill to reach across the aisle and find compromise.

And if we can't -- and if we can't do that, Bill, we're going to be in -- and -- and we have been, I think, for the last few years, in a terrible situation in this country where politically we can't make deals anymore.

Now, you know that one hurt, because O'Reilly really can't deny that what Fox does is propaganda (well, he can try, and does, but it's empty blather) -- and that is has effectively altered the fabric of reality for a whole nation of right-wingers. And that the public discourse is worse off for it, because so much of it is now predicated on Fox-generated falsehoods. READ MORE

Mike Huckabee Accidentally Tells The Truth About Fox News

By karoli



Oops! This slipup by Mike Huckabee accidentally reveals the truth about our favorite non-news channel. In this clip, he declares that the nation would think Barack Obama was doing just fine if it weren't for Fox News. Boy howdy, I'll bet he feels like a weight has lifted from his shoulders after that confession.
Raw Story:

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R) had an oops moment on his radio show Monday, and this one’s going to leave a mark.Speaking about America’s media landscape in general, Huckabee suggested that without Fox News acting as a counterweight to “mainstream media,” most Americans “will assume that Obama really is just doing a great job and he just can’t get those crazy Republicans to help him out.”

  READ MORE

Weird: How Fox News Finds its "Pretty People"

Roger Ailes

There's a rather strange Mike Allen pieceat Politico today about Fox News that opens with the scoop that Roger Ailes keeps his network all buffed up and on the cutting edge by holding "marathon critique" sessions where the brass watches its product for many hours on end. I shudder at the very thought, but then guess I'm not "fair and balanced."

 The closest thing to an actual insight into the Fox M.O. was offered by this snippet on Ailes' talent recruitment habits:

In hotel rooms when he’s traveling, Ailes sometimes scouts talent by watching the local news with the sound off. “One of Roger’s ideas is you watch TV with the sound down,” [Fox VP Bill] Shine said. “If that screen or that person on that screen is so compelling that you want to put the sound up, that show or that person is doing something right.”  READ MORE

Jerry Springer calls out Fox News’s perpetual Obama bashing

By Stephen C. Webster
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Appearing on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends on Wednesday, former Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer, notorious for his low-brow talk show, criticized host Gretchen Carlson for pretending to be fair when it comes to matters of presidential politics.
Speaking about the recent Newsweek cover story by blogger Andrew Sullivan, Springer complemented the author and agreed with its overall message. “He’s saying that the critics are dumb — obviously that’s a headline to grab your attention — but it’s not really that the people are dumb, it’s that they’re missing a point of how he’s been successful in a very difficult time.”   READ MORE

Fox Panel Pushes for Privatizing the United States Post Office

Posted: 23 Oct 2011 03:00 PM PDT From this Saturday's Forbes on Fox, more attacks on labor unions and calls to privatize the United States Postal Service. Host David Asman opened the segment talking about the postal union's decision to hire Ron Bloom, one of the advisers that helped steer the auto industry out of bankruptcy. That was followed by a call from panel member Dennis Kneale to just shut down the whole Post Office and allow FexEx and UPS to buy it and in his words to “chop it up.” Fellow panel member Victoria Barret, while disagreeing with Kneale that it's not possible to just “junk the whole Post Office” and said she still likes sending Christmas cards, but of course thought that the union contracts need to be ripped up. Here was host David Asman's response to that: ASMAN: Well Steve, you can send Christmas cards for free on the Internet now! I mean the Internet changes everything, doesn't it? To which Barret and Forbes responded, “It's not the same.” Well, no it's not but how about someone reminding Asman that the Internet is not free? Forbes continued with the fearmongering that if the Post Office is not privatized, tax payers are going to be on the hook for their pension funds and finally one of their panelists actually pointed out the real problem the Post Office is facing right now, which is that Congress has forced them to over fund their pensions to the tune of $75 billion and if some of that money was returned, it would solve their problems immediately. READ MORE