Tag Archives: Fox News Channel

national news

Abortion-ban law blowback: a big surprise

I have to admit to being quite surprised at much of the response to the Alabama Legislature’s decision to ban virtually all abortion in that state.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed the bill into law. Democratic/progressive response has been predictable: Alabama has launched an assault against women’s reproductive rights, the lefties are saying . . . correctly, in my view.

But then there’s been a negative response from the Republican/conservative movement.

Get a load of this from Tomi Lahren, a right-wing commentator and contributor to the Fox News Channel. Lahren calls herself a “pro-choice” conservative who favors limited government involvement in people’s lives. She wrote: “I’m . . . someone that loves the Constitution, I’m someone that’s for limited government. So I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say ‘I’m for limited government, but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies.'”

Televangelist Pat Robertson said the law is too harsh, too “extreme.” Lahren said it won’t save any lives because it “forces women into more dangerous methods, other states or countries.”

This debate is causing my head to spin. I used to think the abortion divide fell along certain partisan and ideological lines.

The Alabama law has just blurred those differences beyond my ability to recognize them.

national news

Still miffed that Sen. Warren has stiffed Fox News

I’m still peeved at Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts U.S. senator and Democratic Party primary candidate for president of the United States.

She got an invitation to appear on a Fox News Channel town hall event. Fox News, which is not normally friendly to progressive such as Sen. Warren, was offering her a forum, a platform from which she could offer Fox News viewers the reasons why they should endorse her for president.

She turned Fox down! She said Fox uses its outreach to preach “hate” and she would have none of it.

Sen. Warren has made a big mistake. I believe she should have accepted Fox News’s invitation. She should have shown up. She should have taken questions from the audience and from the commentators who would moderate the event.

But she chose to stiff the network.

I agree with her about Fox News, that it is a “hate for profit” organization. Still, she should make her case even in front of a media outlet she opposes.

I believe that would be more of an American course than the one Sen. Warren has taken.

national news

Sen. Warren errs in turning down Fox News town hall invitation

Let me try to sort this out.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has turned down an invitation to participate in a presidential campaign town hall session sponsored by the Fox News Channel. She contends that Fox — Donald Trump’s favorite cable network — peddles in hate, bigotry and falsehoods. She won’t take part because Fox operates a “hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists.”

So, the Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination, is turning down the chance to grab a “megaphone” and challenge the network? Is that what she is doing here?

That is a bad call, Sen. Warren. It is self-defeating. It’s also an act of political cowardice.

I happen to agree with her about the manner in which Fox presents its view of “news.” I rarely watch the network. I cannot stomach the opinions expressed by its cadre of right-wingers.

However, I am not a candidate for president of the United States. Sen. Warren, a Massachusetts lawmaker, is among the 20-plus Democrats seeking their party’s 2020 nomination.

“It’s designed to turn us against each other, risking life and death consequences, to provide cover for the corruption that’s rotting our government and hollowing out our middle class,” she wrote in explaining her decision to stay away from the Fox town hall.

Good grief, senator! Stand up and speak your piece. Tell the public why it should reject the Fox world view. Tell us why the president is unfit for the office he holds.

What’s more, she ought to face the tough questions that would come from a Fox-sponsored town hall audience were she to stand before it.

That’s what presidential candidates — let alone presidents of the United States — should do.

media news

Fox & Friends turns ‘big loss’ into a ‘big win,’ go figure

If you had any doubt at all — which is impossible, of course — about why Donald Trump loves the Fox News Channel, you ought to get a load of some of the commentary that came from the co-hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the network’s morning gab show.

The New York Times published a report chronicling how Trump lost more than $1 billion for a decade leading up to 1994; for eight of those years he didn’t pay any federal income taxes. The report has been seen generally by political, business and media analysts as a big-time embarrassment for the self-proclaimed deal making genius.

Oh, but then the “Fox & Friends” sycophants weighed in the other morning. Ainsley Earhardt gushed to her “Friends” colleagues Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade that the losses show what an “impressive” risk-taker Trump was at the time. “If anything, you read this and you’re like ‘wow, it’s pretty impressive, all the things that he’s done in his life,'” Earnhardt gushed.

No, it’s not impressive, Ms. Earnhardt. It reveals that Trump has been lying through his teeth at Americans about his business acumen.

That won’t dissuade the president’s amen chorus at Fox. They love the guy. They give him a pass on all the hideous behavior he has exhibited during his brief time in politics. One of FNC’s more egregious examples of pro-Trump obsequiousness occurred when commentator Sean Hannity acted as an emcee at a Trump political rally.

So it’s no surprise that “Fox & Friends” would grovel at Trump’s feet when a major American newspaper blows the lid off the president’s miserable business failures.

Hey, I believe we ought to call the “Fox & Friends” critique what it is: fake news!

media news

Media are ‘all Democrats, all liberals’? Eh?

Joseph DiGenova is sounding like a crackpot.

The former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia is a frequent contributor to the Fox News Channel, the conservative-leaning cable network that gives Donald Trump all the support it can muster.

DiGenova is right at home with the network.

Yet he goes on the air and declares there’s a “civil war” commencing in the United States. Then, in a fit of hilarious irony, he declares that the media are “all Democrat” and “all liberal.” He claims the media are hell bent on destroying Donald Trump and his presidency.

Do you see the irony?

DiGenova is a contributor to a key player in what conservatives like to call “the mainstream media.” Yep, I consider Fox to be part of the media “mainstream,” given the network’s popularity among a large segment of Americans.

So, why is DiGenova blathering about the media being “all Democrat”?

No, sir. They are not!

media news

‘Fair and balanced’? Sure thing

They call themselves the “Fox ‘News’ Channel.” It’s a conservative-leaning cable network that has purported to present the “news” in a “fair and balanced” manner.

Well, check out the caption under the TV image that flashed on the Fox “News” Channel. It parrots the epithet that Donald J. Trump has used to disparage U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who has just announced the formation of an exploratory committee to help her decide to run for president in 2020.

The “Pocahontas” label, of course, is Trump’s way of ridiculing Warren’s contention that she has some Native American blood in her background. The president has decided Warren’s claim is without merit, so he has hung that label on her.

Fox has glommed onto it as well.

Is that how one might define a mainstream “news” network’s “fair and balanced” coverage of a still-developing presidential campaign?

Imagine what political conservatives might think — and say — if CNN or MSNBC broadcast an image of Donald Trump with the caption that read “Cadet Bone Spur,” or “Liar in Chief,” or, well . . . you get the idea.

The Fox “News” Channel simply demonstrates yet again that it is neither “fair” or “balanced.” It serves instead as a de facto presidential mouthpiece.

Disgraceful.

media news

‘Poorer’ and ‘dirtier,’ eh, Tucker Carlson?

Tucker Carlson fancies himself as a provocative commentator for the Fox News cable network.

His provocativeness is now costing his employers some serious dough. Sixteen advertisers have pulled out of supporting his nightly talk show on the Fox News Channel because of some remarkably intolerant remarks he made about immigrants.

He made some anti-immigrant remarks this past week without apparently qualifying them. He wasn’t talking about illegal immigrants. I guess he meant all of them.

Hmm. Strange, don’t you think? I wonder where Carlson’s forebears came from? Were they here when the Pilgrims landed? Or when Columbus landed ashore? Or when the Vikings were terrorizing the upper east coast in the 12th century? Um, probably not.

The advertisers are hitting Fox where it hurts, in its corporate pocket book.

I am not a fan of boycotts. As a rule, I don’t believe they work.

I wonder, though, whether these advertisers are going to teach Carlson — a youngish conservative firebrand — a lesson that sticks.

Finally, as the grandson of immigrants to this country, I take huge personal offense at any suggestion that my grandparents made this country dirtier and poorer when they came here in pursuit of a better life.

International news

Is this one of ‘the best people’?

Remember this name: Heather Nauert.

She is Donald J. Trump’s latest incarnation of the “best people” he has vowed to hire to help him “make America great again.”

Oh, but who is she? She is the president’s nominee to be our nation’s ambassador to the United Nations. Nauert will succeed Nikki Haley, who is leaving government at the end of the year, possibly to pursue other political ambitions.

OK, what about her credentials to speak for the United States of America in the body aimed at keeping the worldwide peace and working around the globe?

She has zero foreign policy experience. Nauert has limited government experience of any kind; she joined the Trump administration in April 2017, becoming a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who then slammed the door shut on Nauert. Tillerson managed to get fired and his successor, Mike Pompeo, has welcomed Nauert into State’s inner circle.

But . . . this must be what put Nauert into the hunt for the UN job: She was a top news correspondent for Fox News and served for a time as a co-host on the president’s favorite “news” and gab show, “Fox & Friends.” These are the folks who never ask him tough questions, fearing, I suppose, that they would be lumped in with those other “fake news” outlets. We can’t have it, right, ladies and gents?

So, there you have it. The president of the United States has handed the UN envoy job to someone who has not a single thing to show her fellow diplomats that she knows anything about the world around us. Indeed, she has only a little less government experience than the man who nominated her, Donald Trump.

Hey, she appears to be the perfect pick for the president, who defines “best people” in ways I cannot possibly fathom.

media news

The cat’s out of the bag, Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity isn’t a journalist. He’s a talking head with lots of opinions. He works for the Fox News Channel and has a radio show on which he gets to bloviate and bellow his right-wing screeds.

I don’t begrudge him that privilege. He’s even won some awards for his on-air work. He also has earned some condemnation for his promoting of false conspiracies, aka “fake news.”

Oh, but now we know that his defense of Donald J. Trump and his relentless attack on the FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer’s office has a qualifier that, um, should have been disclosed when Hannity began unloading on the FBI. Hannity and Michael Cohen, the lawyer in question, have a professional relationship.

Cohen also represents Trump. He paid out $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to keep the porn queen quiet about a tryst she had with Trump in 2006. The FBI is looking for more information relating to that payoff. So, it obtained a search warrant from a federal judge and seized some documents.

Hannity has gone ballistic over it.

But don’t you think viewers and listeners deserve to know about Hannity’s particular interest in this matter? The tenets of full disclosure require it. Journalists know it.

According to The Hill: Hannity downplayed his interactions with Cohen, asserting that he’d never formally represented him in legal proceedings.

“I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective,” Hannity tweeted, adding that those conversations “dealt almost exclusively about real estate.”

Fine, young man. Any dealings with a lawyer in the news — let alone one who is involved in a sleazy, tawdry controversy involving the president of the United States — need to be disclosed to ensure that viewers and listeners can put what they’re hearing in a more complete context.

Not that it likely would matter to Sean Hannity’s fans in TV and Radio Land.

But, still …

media news, national news

Hypocrisy infects the media, too

Media critics, pundits and commentators love to blast politicians for their hypocrisy. Goodness, there’s so much of it out there.

But a stunning compilation of criticism and commentary began making the rounds on social media not long after Donald J. Trump announced his intention to meet with Kim Jong Un, the brutal dictator of North Korea.

It comes from the Fox News Channel.

Fox paraded a number of commentators and “contributors” who were simply aghast — aghast, I tell ya — that Barack Obama said he would be willing to meet with the enemies of the United States.

How could a U.S. president say such a thing? How could he want to meet with Kim Jong Un? Doesn’t he know what kind of monster Kim Jong Un is, how he treats his people, how he denies them the rights that should be afforded to all human beings?

That was the sum of the Fox News commentary at the beginning of the Obama presidency.

Take a look at it here.

Ah, but then Donald Trump announces that he has accepted Kim’s invitation to meet. He wants to elevate “Little Rocket Man” to the same level as the Leader of the Free World.

How did that go down in the Fox News Channel newsroom? Hey, it’s a show of statesmanship. It’s an act of boldness. Trump is exhibiting international leadership.

That’s how the Fox team assesses a U.S.-North Korea summit now.

Hypocrisy? Certainly!

I believe the Fox News Channel needs to be, um, more circumspect when it considers whether to unload on politicians for their own hypocritical displays.