Mark Howard of News Corpse (9/3/09) has a look at a September 2 Fox News "sermon" in which Glenn Beck "has used his divine vision to reveal the evidence of Satan's secret seeds" in the form of "paintings and sculptures and other works by history’s subversives--the artists!"

As Beck "associates the evil artists with their patron, Rockefeller," Howard notes that, "unfortunately, he doesn't specify which one. In fact, he jumps around to several of them without making any distinction":

Beck begins his unveiling with a denouncement of a relief at the entrance to Rockefeller Center. The work shows two men on either side of the doors. Beck tells us that one is holding a hammer, and the other a sickle. Ergo communism! It's right there in plain sight. Except that the first man is actually holding a shovel, according to the historians curating the Center's artwork. The figures were meant to represent the strength of America's industry and agriculture, which I'm sure Beck views as treasonous.

Then Beck focuses on a bas relief carving by Italian-American sculptor Attilio Piccirilli called Youth Leading Industry. Beck's interpretation of this work centers on his theory that the artist, and thus the work, were avowedly fascist. Beck asserts that a strong male figure in the piece is Mussolini. Whether or not that's true, and there is some debate, it is illustrative of Beck's dementia that he can jump from warnings about progressives being communists to progressives being fascists without taking a breath.

"In the real world," meanwhile, Howard explains the historical fact that "Mussolini was a bitter foe of Stalin and vice versa." See the recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

Eva Paterson (Huffington Post, 8/28/09),  president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, has a response to Glenn Beck's assertion that "I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts" after having been "smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show."

Being "the person who first hired Van Jones," Paterson finds herself "in a unique position to know the truth." And falling squarely in the fabulously unsurprising category is that "the truth is: Beck is fabricating his facts":

For instance: several times on his show, Beck has said or implied that Van went to prison for taking part in the Rodney King riots....

This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week after the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police...stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people--including all the legal monitors.

The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).

So the unwarranted arrest at a peaceful march--for which the charges were dropped and for which Van was financially compensated--is the sole basis for the smear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal.

Paterson reminds you that "you don't have to take my word for it," since "arrests and convictions are all a matter of public record." And of course, FAIR followers know all too well that "Beck is at best relying on Internet rumors or even inventing claims to boost his ratings."

Read a recent article from FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

Think Progress' Matt Corley (8/19/09) has the depressing, if predictable, news that recent polling shows "'all the misinformation out there' about health care reform proposals in Congress is taking root with many Americans."

Corley is discouraged to see that, "for instance, 45 percent believe the false claim that legislation includes 'death panels' while 55 percent believe the false claim that coverage will be extended to illegal immigrants"--and an MSNBC passage says that, in particular,

self-identified viewers of Fox News are disproportionately misinformed":

In our poll, 72 percent of self-identified Fox News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79 percent of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69 percent think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75 percent believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly....

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, Fox News regularly distorts the truth about health care reform.

In fact, just "last week, Media Matters found that over a two day period opponents of health care reform outnumbered supporters by a 6-to-1 margin on Fox." Hear a strong corrective to all this deceit on FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Trudy Lieberman on Health Care Reform" (8/14/09).

Laura Northrup of Consumerist.com (8/15/09) reports that, after 40 years at the Hartford Courant, consumer affairs columnist George Gombossy now says he "'was fired for doing [his] job,' after his last column exposed the bedbug-infested mattresses sold by a major Courant advertiser."

The Connecticut paper killed Gombossy's account of an Attorney General investigation into Sleepy's--though it has published a stock defense that "our advertisers have no influence on what we report, including stories that may include them."

Gombossy exposes "some issues of credibility" when responding to the Courant's further claim that he "knew his job was being eliminated while we moved to a Courant-Fox 61 newly-defined consumer reporter position. He did not express interest in the position":

I wasn’t asked to apply for the job, nor was it offered to me, and it was set at a significant amount less than my salary....

I have been waiting for Courant management to get around to explaining to its staff why I was no longer there after 40 years--especially since management told everyone how they loved my column and blog until the first advertiser complaint came in May....

The new Courant policy which was instituted in May as the result of a complaint against me by Aiello, required me and all reporters and columnists to notify [VP and director of content] Jeff Levine or [editor] Naedine Hazell of any stories or columns that even had a negative tinge about a key advertiser. Naedine knows that, she must think she can just gloss over that little fact.

Those stories and columns would get special attention--Just like the Sleepy’s column did.

Former TV Newser Brian Stelter's article (New York Times, 8/7/09) about MSNBC and Fox News having "resumed their long-running feud this week after the New York Times reported that their parent companies, General Electric and the News Corporation, had struck a deal to stop each other's televised personal attacks" states that "the deal extends beyond the prime-time hour that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O'Reilly occupy," reporting that "employees of daytime programs on MSNBC were specifically told by executives not to mention Fox hosts in segments critical of conservative media figures, according to two staff members."

While GE's official line is that, "while both companies agreed that the tone should be more civil, no one at GE told anyone at NBC News or MSNBC how to report the news," Stelter quotes unnamed Fox employees who "said they were told in June and July not to flagrantly criticize General Electric." Stelter gives more room to Fox management denials--"We've never suppressed any stories about NBC or GE"--before getting to "some watchdog groups" pointing out how

the months-long cease-fire challenged the claims that the two media companies did not interfere in their on-air content.

The advocacy group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting asked its supporters on Friday to contact GE, urging it to renounce the agreement with Fox.

Jeff Cohen, the founder of the group, said the deal between the two networks’ parent companies was a reason to be wary of corporate-owned TV news.

"It should remind news consumers of who calls the tune and pays the bills--and that TV reporters and even loud-mouthed commentators have corporate bosses whose interests are often not about unbridled journalism," Mr. Cohen said.

Salon editor Joan Walsh weighs in too, about how "it appeared that 'the owners of two large news organizations colluded to make sure their audience got less, not more, information, and to promote their business interests, not the public interest.'"

Read FAIR's new Action Alert: "Did GE Stifle Keith Olbermann?: Fox and MSNBC's Gentlemen's Agreement" (8/7/09).

The anti-racism Color of Change organization has sent out an email blast (8/30/09) warning that "more and more, right-wing talkshow hosts are bringing race-based fear mongering into the mainstream."

Still, they claim that "Fox's Glenn Beck just took it to another level" with his July 28 statement that "this president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people.... This guy is, I believe, a racist."

It's part of a larger argument Beck has been making: that President Obama is using the White House to serve the needs of black communities at white people's expense. This kind of talk stirs up fear, hate and it can lead to violence....

Glenn Beck is appealing to the worst in America. Of course, some people refuse to accept the fact that our president is black or the idea that he could truly serve all Americans. We know that. The only way these views will fade away is if they're not reinforced by mainstream society. Instead, folks like Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh are exploiting racism and race-based fear to bump their ratings, stirring up racial discord in the process.

The dangers of these tactics are real. We saw the same dynamic during the presidential race: By the end, the McCain/Palin campaign was unable to control the violent energy whipped up by their race-baiting. The result was an unprecedented number of threats on Obama's life, a rise in the number of hate groups and an increase in the number of threats and crimes against immigrants and black people.

Fully aware that "Fox has had a long history of race-baiting and racism on its shows," Color of Change insists that "Glenn Beck appears to be taking the network to an even lower standard. He's trying to divide and distract America when we should be coming together and talking about issues that really matter--like healthcare and the economy."

See the recent FAIR magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

In a previous post "showing Fox News' tendency to mislabel badly behaving Republicans as Democrats," one of Canadian blogger Joey deVilla's commenters has pointed out "this map of the Middle East shown on a Fox News in segment where Neil Cavuto interviewed John Bolton."

Noting a problem with the country marked "Egypt"--"that’s not Egypt, that's Iraq!"--deVilla provides (Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, 7/28/09) a helpfully "real map of the Middle East," and puts it pretty mildly when stating that "you'd think that with their obsessions with terror, Muslims and safeguarding the nation, not to mention the presence of a former representative to the U.N. present, they'd know where Iraq was."

Writing that "the swine flu outbreak that wrecked Mexico's economy this spring, and that the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic last month, may become a case study in reckless journalism," Miami Herald Latin America correspondent Andres Oppenheimer (7/8/09) admits that he "had taken it for granted that the disease had started in Mexico" since "that's what most press reports said."

But he "recently found myself scratching my head" over a "Pan American Health Organization press release that 'the new virus, which emerged in Mexico and the United States in April,' has spread to 74 countries." Follow-up questions put to one of the organization's spokespeople brought the reply that "it's not clear that this pandemic started in Mexico.... We may never know in which country it started."

But none of this stopped the usual crowd of hyperventilating anti-immigration--or rather, anti-Hispanic immigration--radio and cable television hotheads from pointing at Mexico as the unequivocal origin of the disease.

According to the Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group, conservative-nationalist radio talk show host Michael Savage said on April 24, "Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico."

In another example of irresponsible journalism cited by the watchdog group, Fox's contributor Michelle Malkin wrote in her blog on April 25, "Hey, maybe we'll finally get serious about borders now." She added, "I've blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration."

On April 27, CNN's Lou Dobbs started his nightly show saying, "We begin with dire new warnings about the worsening outbreak of swine flu. This outbreak is spreading from Mexico to the United States and around the world."

Indeed, Oppenheimer gives us the charming fact that "some radio and cable-television presenters called it the 'Mexican flu.'"

The Herald reporter doesn't claim to "have an answer for how this story should have been reported early on," but he posits that, "just as scientists are looking into the history of the H1N1 outbreak to learn how to better handle future pandemics, we in the media should look at how to handle these kinds of stories more responsibly in the future"--and, crucially, "expose reckless charlatans for what they are."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Bart Laws on Swine Flu" (5/8/09).

News Corpse blogger Mark Howard (7/8/09) has linked to a London Guardian "story that simply must be read":

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Cautioning that "the rest of the story just gets more lurid," Howard then updates with what he deems a "shocking look into the way that Murdoch and his accomplices operate" on this side of the Atlantic--namely, through absolutely shameless toadyism:

Rupert Murdoch appeared on his own Fox Business Network today where Stuart Varney, who is notorious for aggressively challenging (i.e., interrupting) liberals, attempted to ask him a question:

Varney: The story that is really buzzing all around the country, and certainly right here in New York, is that the News of the World, a News Corporation newspaper in Britain…
Murdoch: No, I'm not talking about that issue at all today.
Varney: OK. No worries, Mr. Chairman. That's fine with me.

The Houston Chronicle's Susan Carroll (6/30/09) reports that Fox News celebrity journalist Geraldo Rivera "was touched" by the televised statement of a daughter mourning her law enforcement father who "was killed last week by a suspected illegal immigrant," but also stepped up to speak to the truth larger than divisive media coverage of the matter:

"We all deplore violent crime, but what has happened is that with these anecdotal tragedies, we have demonized an entire race of people in this country," Rivera said. "Immigrant and nonimmigrant alike. Citizen and noncitizen alike."...

Rivera...said the tone of the immigration debate has had serious consequences for Hispanics.

"We have created a slanderous condition and environment in our country, where the 46 million of us who have Latino roots now feel beleaguered, now feel besieged, now feel as if we are 'the other,'" he said.

Now, Rivera does regularly come down on the right side of this issue--albeit often in a typically bombastic cable news kind of way--but it still really speaks to the depths of Fox that this man is the network's voice of journalistic conscience. But then I suppose good sense that actually makes the corporate news should be welcome from any quarter: "Rivera called for President Barack Obama to end work site enforcement raids. He also said the Obama administration should better define guidelines for the federal government's 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as immigration agents."

Read more on the "slanderous condition" of immigration coverage in the featured content of a recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Media Patrol the Border" (6/09).

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.'"

Gawker blogger The Cajun Boy (6/24/09) is agog at "How Fox News Educates Its Viewers":

Last night Glenn Beck made crude drawings on a chalkboard, and tonight he and Bill O'Reilly used Barbie dolls to explain ACORN.

In the course of explaining how Nancy Pelosi is trying to stop noble Republicans from stopping ACORN from destroying America, Beck reached under the table and pulled out a Barbie kit. Now, we watched this demonstration twice and actually don't get what Beck is trying to convey, so either we're stupider than even the basest Fox viewer or our elitists brains just can't process anything that comes spewing from the mouths of these clowns. Maybe you'll have better luck.

While Beck's demonstration really doesn't make any sense in itself, another reason for the confusion generated is surely that his and O'Reilly's whole take on ACORN is nonsensical in its entirety; see the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "CNN, Fox Hype ACORN Threat" (12/08) by Daniel Ward.

Doling out "a little positive reinforcement" when Fox News "actually gets something right," Mark Howard of News Corpse (6/18/09) agrees with Sean Hannity's declaration of "the death of journalism"--though disagreeing with the context of Fox's pronouncement, being their assertion that a scheduled ABC News broadcast "that would delve into the pros and cons of the president's policy" on healthcare amounts to "an infomercial for Obama's plan. They assert that nothing like this has ever happened before":

Once again, Fox News is either pathetically ignorant or desperately dishonest. (Yeah, I know. It's both.) Last year Fox News broadcast a special from the Bush White House they called Fighting to the Finish. And there was also their highly promoted exclusive, Dick Cheney: No Retreat. These are just two blatant examples of hypocrisy by Fox. There are many more incidents of Fox serving as the PR agency for the Republican Party. But somehow, ABC having a town hall, where they assert that multiple views will be discussed, is an abomination that (finally) heralds the end of journalism.

In the end, Howard bemoans how "I guess that I should just be satisfied that they are acknowledging something close to reality at all. Even though they don't grasp their own role in journalism's demise."

Political Animal blogger Steve Benen (6/11/09) has a look at the remarkable occurrence of Fox News' Shep Smith "reminding the viewing audience, shortly after the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, of the DHS report that warned of potentially violent radicals" and "talking about the emails he's seen from Fox News viewers" he calls "amped up and so angry for reasons that are absolutely wrong, ridiculous, preposterous":

Smith, with good reason, seemed genuinely concerned about the severity of the right-wing rage. Just as important, he seemed to realize that these increasingly agitated conservatives are incensed, not because of justified concerns, but because of "ridiculous" developments that have been cooked up in the far-right imagination.

But here's the kicker: soon after Smith had signed off for the day, his Fox News colleague, Glenn Beck told his national television audience "the Germans" during Hitler's rise "were an awful lot like we are now."

Benen dares to suggest that "the reason the emails to Fox News have become 'more and more frightening'" and "'out there'" is largely "because of deranged demagogues like Beck telling confused conservatives they have reason to be enraged, reality notwithstanding." Read the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He’s Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

Washington Monthly contributing editor Art Levine has a piece for In These Times (5/31/09) reporting on economist Anne Layne-Farrar's recent congressional appearance in which she

warned about the horrendous impact of the Employee Free Choice Act. Its potential to increase union membership from between five and 10 percent, she said, 'would result in an increase in the unemployment of around one and a half to three percentage points.'

Levine tells us how "Fox 'Fair and Balanced' News, naturally, in its TV report neglected to mention that her 'research' was funded by the corporate-friendly, anti-union 'Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs,'" and directly takes on Layne-Farrar's estimate "that 600,000 jobs would be lost in the first year after the EFCA became law":

Layne-Farrar massages the data using a complex "regression analysis" to connect the dots between card check, higher unionization rates and more unemployment, putting the loss at between 600,000 and 2.6 million new American jobs in the first year.

"That's bullshit," says Canadian labor economist Charlotte Yates, now the Dean of Social Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. "I don’t know of any credible economists who say [now] there is a direct correlation between unionization and the rise in unemployment."

Despite being so flawed as to elicit such strong exclamations from prominent academic economists, "since the report's publication in March, this statistic has circulated through the media, showing up on MSNBC, CBS News, the Wall Street Journal and, in spades, Fox News." For more on corporate media coverage of EFCA, read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (2/09) by Janine Jackson.