The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz turns in a profile of Glenn Beck today (3/15/10) that includes a few interesting anecdotes. He reports that "Fox staffers note that veteran producer Gresham Striegel left the network after clashing with Beck and say the host has surrounded himself with loyalists" from his own radio company, and that "a vice president was assigned 'to help keep an eye on that program' and review its content in advance--a full-time job."

Kurtz also notes that some Fox reporters aren't crazy about what his new fame is doing to them:

Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists, some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility.

Yes, Beck is somehow undermining Fox's credibility in a way that that Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Geraldo Rivera and Brit Hume hadn't managed to do yet.

Fox has always been conservative-- it was founded on an explicitly political agenda, after all--albeit one that Fox anchors and personalities would occasionally try to argue was merely a myth cooked up by the liberal media.

So what these Fox reporters are really saying is that Beck's presence on Fox makes it more difficult to fool people.

Sasha Issenberg reports in the Boston Globe (3/2/10) that Fortune magazine Washington bureau chief and Fox News pundit Nina Easton advised Republican Mitt Romney on his recent book No Apology. Easton told the Globe that she "offered some writer's advice on things like structure and how to better tease out themes in his writing."

This isn't the first time Easton has had conflict-of-interest issues; her husband was a media consultant to Romney's 2008 presidential campaign, and earlier worked for John McCain's bid, entanglements that Easton dealt with by avoiding writing about her spouse's boss (L.A. Times, 3/19/07). As Issenberg notes:

Many news organizations have policies explicitly forbidding reporters and editors from offering any support for political figures or their campaigns. A spokesman for Time Inc., which owns Fortune, did not respond to a request for comment on Easton's role.

Presumably Fox News Channel doesn't mind this sort of thing, but what's Time/Fortune going to do?

Sarah Palin's highly anticipated visit to Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor saw the famously tough-as-nails host ask the tough questions of the right-wing leader:

O'REILLY: OK. The latest poll has you with a 23 percent favorable, 37 percent don't know. You do the math, OK. And you're up at 60 percent of people who could like you. You are the biggest threat because you are a star, media star, whereas you're the only Republican. There aren't any other Republicans who are media stars but you. Now, that's why they're attacking you so vehemently. Do you know that?

In other words, "You could be really popular some day, and don't know you know how that makes liberals crazy?"

Nothing but the tough questions from that guy.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, commenting on a tax increase in California:

That could happen on the federal level. Already Nancy Pelosi and her far-left crew want to raise the top federal tax rate to 45 percent. That's not capitalism. That's Fidel Castro stuff, confiscating wages that people honestly earn.

Setting aside the truth of the charge against Pelosi, Fidel Castro must have been the president of the United States in 1982-86, when the top rate was 50 percent. Or maybe all of the 1970s, when it was 70 percent. Or from 1950-63, when it was 91 percent.

Once you've given up trying to defend the idea that Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan can be understood as anything other than irony, the fallback position is generally that everyone else is just as biased.  Or as the headline over John Harwood's piece in the New York Times (11/2/09) puts it, "If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone."

To back up this assertion, Harwood--who's the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, and host of the New York Times Special Edition on MSNBC--relies on surveys by Scarborough Research that asked about the partisan identification of the audiences of cable channels.  These surveys, Harwood asserts, reveal the "partisan fragmentation" of TV news audiences: If Fox viewers are 51 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat (in 2004-05), so what--CNN viewers are 50 percent Democrat and only 29 percent Republican, and MSNBC's are 54/27 Democratic/Republican (in 2008-09; for some reason, Harwood doesn't provide the most recent data for Fox's audience).

A mirror image, right?  Well, maybe a funhouse mirror.  What Harwood crucially neglects to mention is that a lot more people in the U.S. public  identify as Democrats than Republicans; if you average a large number of polls on party identification, as Pollster.com does, you come up with Democrats being about 35 percent of all adults and Republicans at 22 percent.  You would expect a channel that was equally attractive to Democrats and Republicans, then, to have about 1.6 Democratic viewers for every Republican.

Now, CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats--about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there's no comparison to the slant of Fox's audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican.  Look at it this way: If each channel's current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans to achieve partisan parity; MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. Fox News, on the other hand, would have to find 51 more Democrats; for every Republican now watching, there's a "missing" Democrat.

In other words--Fox News is not the same kind of animal as either CNN or MSNBC, despite Harwood's efforts to pretend that it is.

Dick Morris was on the O'Reilly Factor the other night (10/28/09) advocating a troop escalation in Afghanistan--and his argument was characteristically peculiar:

Listen, terrorist gangs like Al-Qaeda are like HIV virus. They swim in your bloodstream. They don't make you sick. When they latch on to a cell, a nation state, and they use the DNA of that cell, they then become a threat. When they use the accoutrements of nationhood--secure boundaries, a diplomatic corps, an export and import trade, and air force and navy, a tax
system, a conscript population--then they can knockdown the World Trade Center. We have got to stop Al-Qaeda from taking over Afghanistan. And that means stopping the Taliban.

It's hard to say what exactly Afghanistan's diplomatic corps, let alone the landlocked nation's navy, had to do with the September 11 attacks, which were largely planned and executed by Saudi Arabian students based in Germany and the United States. But you have to give Morris credit for being loopy enough to make the case that occupying Afghanistan is necessary to prevent terrorism in the United States; generally corporate media pundits consider that assumption to be self-evident, and don't bother to explain it.

When Fox News Channel was developing Sean Hannity's TV show, it was known as Hannity & Liberal To Be Determined. That liberal turned out to be Alan Colmes, who would eventually leave the gig after doing his part by playing the Washington Generals to Hannity's Harlem Globetrotters. It hardly mattered who sat in the "left" chair--they were there to get roughed up by the home team.

Until recently, professor Jane Hall was a regular guest on the O'Reilly Factor, debating conservative Bernie Goldberg. She's left Fox, and as she explained to CNN's Howard Kurtz (10/25/09), she never considered herself a liberal anyway:

KURTZ: When you appeared regularly on O'Reilly, were you there as a token from the dreaded MSM?

HALL: Well, I was there as a defender of the MSM. And you wouldn't believe how many famous journalists I talked to, who said better you than me. Let me tell you my side of the story. They didn't want to come on. It is hard to do, because it was like, when did you quit beating your wife? That was usually the question. But I felt it was worth doing.

KURTZ: Do you consider yourself a liberal?

HALL: No.

KURTZ: You were paired with Bernie Goldberg, the conservative point of view, who wrote a book about the media's slobbering love affair with Barack Obama?

HALL: Right.

KURTZ: So was that a fair pairing, to have someone who has that point of view, and you? You consider yourself a journalist.

HALL: I consider myself a journalist. I'm now able to say opinions because I'm a professor. I consider myself a moderate. In that universe, I was probably considered a wacky professor by O'Reilly. He would sort of pat me on the head and say, now, Jane, I know you liberals feel this way. And I'd say, I'm not really a liberal. So, yes, there's not necessarily a left/right comparison on there.

The White House's beef with Fox News Channel continues, as do the right-wing cable channel's bizarre attempts to defend their journalistic integrity. Take this example from today's New York Times (10/22/09). Obviously the White House is most offended by the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck; this is unfair, according to Fox:

But Michael Clemente, senior vice president for news and editorial programming at Fox, said the White House was conflating the network’s commentary with its news coverage. That, Mr. Clemente said, "would be like Fox News blaming the White House senior staff for the Washington Redskins' losing record."

Last time I checked, there were no White House staffers moonlighting in the Redskins' front office. Beck and Hannity, on the other hand, actually work at Fox News Channel--and were put there by Fox bosses. The analogy makes no sense, but then again it's hard to imagine a better defense for Fox's behavior.

Politico (10/14/09) published a list of top topics on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, based on a search of Nexis transcripts since the show's January 2009 debut. It's instructive to look at the placement of some individuals, groups and places in the news as an indication of Beck's sense of whom and what his audience should be informed about:

ACORN: 1,224

Van Jones: 267

SEIU: 259

Afghanistan: 97

Iraq: 95

Valerie Jarrett: 52

Mark Lloyd: 50

Al-Qaeda: 50

Bill Ayers: 46

John Holdren: 43

Jeremiah Wright: 42

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 41

Osama Bin Laden: 40

Taliban: 38

In a 2001 study, FAIR found that in its regular one-on-one interviews, Fox News' flagship news show Special Report With Brit Hume favored Republican guests over Democrats by a greater than 8-to-1 ratio. After the FAIR report, Hume told the New York Times (7/2/01) that if the data warranted, he  would rectify the bias: "If it is a reasonable question, and we find that there is some imbalance, then we’ll correct it." A 2002 follow-up study (Extra!, 7-8/02) showed some improvement--a mere 3-to-2 bias in favor of GOP over Democratic guests--but by 2004, FAIR showed, the ratio had crept back up to a 5-to-1 advantage for Republicans.

Last night, in an attempt to rebut White House communications director Anita Dunn's recent claim that Fox News "often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party," Fox News' Bill O’Reilly brought on Brit Hume as an expert on media bias (O'Reilly Factor, 10/12/09).

Hume claimed that Fox doesn’t feature "very many people who are down-the-line advocates for whatever the Republican party is up to," and that "the Republican party takes a fair amount of fairly sharp criticism on Fox News and has for a long time." Hume offered no evidence and ignored the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

And, though it is beside the point of whether or not Fox News is an arm of the GOP, Hume wheeled out Fox's old attack on the rest of the corporate media. Citing his pre-Fox career at outlets like ABC News, Hume told O’Reilly: "It wasn't that I couldn't report the news in the way that I saw fit. It was that I often had to argue for doing it a different way than the headlines on the front page of the New York Times seemed to direct the network coverage."

With bias experts like Hume, one might wonder if Fox would feature the Unabomber as an expert on domestic terrorism. Certainly no one can say that Hume didn't get to report the news the way he "saw fit" at Fox.

Michael Moore says he won't appear on Glenn Beck's or Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show to promote his new film Capitalism: A Love Story because there's too much hate speech on those shows. Last night, O'Reilly strengthened Moore's argument in a segment in which he discussed Michael Moore's body language with regular guest Tonya Reimer:

O'REILLY: Right. Would it be wrong if I slapped him?

REIMAN: We'll have to let him judge that.

O'REILLY: You just want....

REIMAN: Not a big fan, are we?

O'REILLY: You know, it's an interesting question. I admire his entrepreneurship. I admire his creativity. But there's just something about him, you know.

Add to this that Glenn Beck once fantasized about killing Moore with his bare hands (not to mention seeing Dennis Kucinich burned alive), and you have a network whose two leading hosts have expressed a desire to physically attack Moore for expressing beliefs with which they disapprove.

Naturally, O'Reilly whined during the same segment that Moore refused to appear on his show:  "I might remind everybody Michael Moore would not come on the program. Even though he's got a dopey belief to publicize, he's too afraid." Maybe with good reason.

The folks at Fox News, so quick to denounce dissent as unpatriotic during the George W. Bush era, have now moved from generally hoping for the failure of the Obama government to wishing another September 11 upon a country too slow to violence for their taste. Mark Howard of News Corpse (7/1/09) gives us video and a transcript of Glenn Beck & Co.'s

suggestion for a remedy for our diseased nation that is so far gone now that there is only one solution: Another 9/11....

[guest Michael] Scheuer: ...The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grassroots, bottom-up pressure, because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. Only--it's an absurd situation. Again, only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently and with as much violence as necessary.

Beck: Which is why I was thinking this weekend if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

While "sure Bin Laden appreciates Beck's advice," Howard still thinks it's "a bit shocking that Beck's counsel to Bin Laden is to refrain from attacking the U.S. because it would benefit the country by motivating Americans to demand protection against such an attack"--which means, Howard explains, that Beck "actually believes that the slaughter of untold thousands of innocent Americans is not only beneficial, but is 'the only chance we have.'"

Jonathan Hiskes of Grist--who recently exposed "The NYT's Favorite 'Climate Change Denier'"--has now (5/13/09) caught Fox News giving airtime to Marc Morano's charge of Al Gore "profiting off global warming campaign" :

Say you're a harried cable news producer with 24 gaping hours to fill with finished material every day of the week. Say you're constantly in need of articulate guests to offer a diversity of viewpoints. How do you do it?

One way is to take up offers like this one from the PR folks representing Marc Morano. Refresher: Morano was formerly an aid to climate-change-denier-in-chief James Inhofe (GOP senator from Oklahoma), now heads misinformation clearinghouse ClimateDepot.com, and is still the chief supplier of talking points to the climate-denial camp.

Hiskes' quotes from the PR release are enlightening for how skillfully they play into the false balance so key to corporate reportage:

Here’s your anti-Gore Global Warming Expert who offers the science to counteract partisan and ideologically driven Environmental entities and issues....

If you believe most, or all, of the global warming dogma, you may use Marc as your "counter guest" to offer a lively, fair and balanced discussion to your audience. If you are a skeptic of the current doctrine, Marc can aid your program by clearing up the deception with the facts.

The really troubling part comes in the release's list of news organizations that have fallen for this nonsense, boasting that Morano "has made international news" on "CNN, Fox News Channel's the O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes, BBC TV, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post."

See FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias: Creating Controversy Where Science Finds Consensus" (11-12/04) by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff

Just one highlight in Brad Jacobson's wide-ranging interview of Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell (Media Bloodhound, 5/5/09) is Mitchell's scorn for "media coverage of the anti-tax tea parties":

Greg Mitchell: Most amazing was that they tended to treat it like protests in the past. There have been national abortion rights protests and immigration rights protests and of course anti-war protests and everything spread out around the country. But never, that I'm aware of, has there ever been protests like this that were essentially promoted by a major news organization, that is Fox, who were actually promoting it, not just saying we're going to cover this. And so it was almost like the mainstream media was afraid to sort of say, "Look, this is not just grassrootsy or even sponsored by a national organization." It was also promoted by talk radio and promoted by the leading cable news network, which makes it a completely different thing than local activists who want to speak out. They're going to a rally to see Glenn Beck. It's a whole different thing.

Well worth reading, the interview also hits upon coverage of the McCain/Palin ticket, Internet media's effect on for-profit journalism and Jon Stewart's "boiling point." Also listen to any of Mitchell's CounterSpin appearances--on topics as varied as media presentations of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, friendly fire-victim Pat Tillman and the New York Times' mea culpa for pre-Iraq War misreportage.

Blogging on "Greta Van Susteren's defensive response" to reports "saying that one of the reasons that Sarah Palin has been caught up in a 'series of public relations gaffes' is because she is 'taking advice from Greta and her husband,'" major GOP booster John Coale, the Huffington Post's Geoffrey Dunn (3/29/09) thinks the Fox News host "Doth Protest Too Much":

Let me give Van Susteren her due. This is a serious charge of direct professional misconduct, and there should have been more than a throwaway line from an unnamed source to back it up. The allegation begs further questioning.

But what Van Susteren does acknowledge in her "brief" on the subject is equally troubling:

1. She acknowledges that her husband, John Coale, has been advising Palin, that they are in weekly contact, and that he played a central role in the formation of her national political action committee, SarahPAC--all while she has been covering Palin for Fox News.
2. She acknowledges that her husband met Palin through Van Susteren's media contacts with the governor. In short, he used his wife's journalistic access to Palin to gain his own political access.

At least one thing is obvious to Dunn: "There are some serious journalistic conflicts of interest taking place here, and Van Susteren is either being duplicitous or disingenuous to characterize them as 'silly.'"