“Fair and balanced” is the mantra over at FOX News. The station that, for the last fifteen years, has paraded around far-right-wing political feces to combat a “growing liberal bias” in the media (you know, the bias that doesn’t exist), considers themselves the middle ground in the world of news. They consider their network to be objective and fair, and their talking heads will never admit on air that FOX actively and deceptively pushes an agenda. The agenda in question is the neo-conservative movement, a political movement that has managed to keep middle-class Americans voting against their own best interests for years, and instead has kept them voting in the interests of the military industrial complex, big government and the major corporations.
Nowhere has FOX’s inability to present a story in an objective fashion been more obvious than with the recent News of the World hacking scandal. Courtesy of News Hounds (YouTube link), FOX and Friends host Steve Doocy talked with PR man, Ed Dillenschneider, about the scandal and really got to the brass tacks of the issue. The conclusion they drew is that the media was spending too much time and energy on the topic. In addition, they decided that the problem isn’t the fact that News of the World employees hacked into peoples’ phones; it’s actually the epidemic of hacking that’s the problem. That’s where we should take the fight. Never mind the fact that the hacking attack they reference in their argument (the Pentagon attack) involved outsiders targeting the Pentagon, whereas the News of the World hacking scandal involved News of the World employees hacking citizens’ devices. That’s not important. This issue about hacking being a big problem; that’s important.
What kind of self-serving, smug and repugnant a**hole would spout some stupid bull like that? Why, Steve Doocy, of course. But why? I think Keith Olbermann might have an answer for that. In this video, Keith Olbermann details how Rupert Murdoch blackmailed and fired him for doing his job and being a journalist, even after Murdoch’s own PR man said that the story Olbermann was investigating (the rumored sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers) had the green light. (Off-topic – This kind of corporate bullying and blackmailing is the sort of thing WikiLeaks was made for.)
The reality of the situation is that the can of worms is already opened for News Corp. and there’s no putting the lid back on. So long as a full and proper investigation is done in this matter, I’d expect even more skeletons to be shaken out of Murdoch’s closet.
