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).

Amanda Terkel of Think Progress (6/18/09) has posted video and transcript of an MSNBC segment in which Joe Scarborough asked CNBC's Jim Cramer about "a stunning poll the New York Times has this morning suggesting that Americans are more concerned about deficits than stimulus":

Cramer claimed that Americans aren't buying into healthcare reform right now because "it just means tax increases, and there's got to be someone who pays for it." According to Cramer, the solution that "everybody" wants is for Obama to "go away": "But until we get the economy moving again, I think everybody wishes that Obama would just kind of go away for a little bit."

If Cramer looked closer at the poll, it also shows that 57 percent of the American public approve of what Obama is doing on the economy overall. Of course, Cramer is someone who claimed that Obama's policies have resulted in “the most, greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president” and is known for his irresponsible financial cheerleading (e.g., “Bear Stearns is not in trouble“).

Terkel has to wonder if, in actuality, "maybe it's not Obama who Americans want to 'just kind of go away for a little bit.'”

Reading Wall Street Journal reporter Gary Fields' "point that a family making slightly over $250,000 doesn’t necessarily feel all that 'rich' when it comes to facing a tax hike from Barack Obama," Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress, 4/17/09) dubs his story "The Not-So-Compelling Plight of the Somewhat Rich" and notes that "what the story doesn't do is put this issue in the appropriate context of what an increase in the marginal rate really implies":

If you raise taxes on "people making over $250,000," that means an increase only in the 250,001st dollar and onward. It's not, in other words, as if a guy earning $249,999 and a guy earning $250,001 will be paying radically different amounts of taxes. In other words, though if you're earning $5 million a year, Obama's plan really will saddle you with a big tax increase, a person who's earning $260,000 and feels that he's facing a basically middle-class economic situation is only going to be facing a very small tax increase. And however much our $260,000 a year guy may feel not so rich, surely he can agree that $260,000 is a lot more than $130,000 or $65,000 so it's hardly absurd that he might pay a slightly higher rate.

After writing that, "even if you grant the premise of the story there's no actual problem here," Yglesias goes on to suggest ideas no career-minded corporate reporter would dare print:

That said, I wouldn't have a problem with launching a new, slightly higher rate, starting at $500,000 and a higher one starting at $1 million and another at $2 million another at $4 million another at $8 million and another at $16 million. I don’t see any reason to think that the progressivity of the scale should max out at $250,000 when obviously there's a huge difference between someone earning that much money and someone earning 10 times that amount.

While big media generally are terrified at the thought of such policies, a Gallup poll from this April 6-9 has 60 percent of respondents considering that "Upper-income people" are "paying too little" federal taxes. (Fully 67 percent said the same of "Corporations.")

For more on corporate media having difficulty with the concept of marginal tax rates, see FAIR Action Alert: "CBS Cheats on Tax Coverage" (9/22/08).

Last night (3/23/08) Bill O'Reilly aired the results of his stalking expedition against Think Progress blogger Amanda Terkel, who had dared to question (3/1/09) the appropriateness of O'Reilly speaking at a fundraiser for a foundation for rape survivors in light of his suggestion (Radio Factor, 8/2/06) that a "moronic" rape/murder victim had invited assault by her drinking and the way she was dressed.

In the segment, O'Reilly presents the controversy sparked by his speaking a dinner for the Alexa Foundation as a conspiracy masterminded by "elements at NBC News" led by NBC president Jeff Zucker, whom O'Reilly refers to with more than a whiff of paranoia as "the man behind the curtain." But the person O'Reilly went after directly was Terkel, who the segment referred to as a "a villain" and "just dishonest" and accused of producing "perhaps the worst garbage" about O'Reilly's suitability as an anti-rape advocate.

O'Reilly's chief stalker, Jesse Watters, apparently followed a vacationing Terkel for two hours before badgering her to explain "the Mel Gibson component to Bill's analysis"--the context that O'Reilly's remarks about "moronic" murder victim Jennifer Moore had supposedly been yanked from. The blogger did not immediately recall this aspect of the three-year-old broadcast, but when she subsequently looked it up, she discovered the connection that O'Reilly drew between the actor's anti-Semitic tirade and the murder victim's death (Think Progress, 3/24/09):

I think it's safe to say that if Mel Gibson didn't get drunk, he wouldn't be in this terrible situation he finds himself in. And if a young woman, 18-year-old Jennifer Moore of Harrington Park, N.J., didn’t get drunk, she’d be alive today.

Hateful as O'Reilly's blame-the-victim rhetoric about Moore was, O'Reilly has stooped even lower, suggesting that an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped and molested over a four-year period didn't escape his abductor because he enjoyed his captivity (O'Reilly Factor, 1/15/07):

And the question is, why didn't [Shawn Hornbeck] escape when he could have?... The Stockholm syndrome thing, I don't buy it.... The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents. He didn't have to go to school. He could run around and do whatever he wanted...I think when it all comes down, what's going to happen is, there was an element here that this kid liked about his circumstances.

Women invite assault by the way they dress; kids like to be raped. To quote Bill O'Reilly out of context: "It doesn't get much more evil than that."

It takes a special kind of person to send stalkers out after a woman because she wrote a blog post criticizing you for blaming a victim of rape and murder for wearing the wrong sort of clothing.

The folks at Think Progress recently brought us "a report showing that, in the debate over the House economic recovery bill on the five cable news networks, Republican members of Congress outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of 2 to 1." Now that the legislation "passed the House last week with zero Republican votes, shifting the focus to the Senate," a subsequent survey (2/6/09) finds that "though the venue has changed, the debate on cable has not improved much":

In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that Republican lawmakers outnumbered Democratic lawmakers 75 to 41 on cable news interviews by members of Congress (from 6am on Monday 2/2 through 11pm on Thursday 2/5)....

Though the imbalance is already stark, the tilt of the coverage would have been even more lopsided if the analysis had been broken down into whether a lawmaker who appeared on TV was a supporter or a critic of the economic recovery plan. Some of the most frequent Democratic guests this week were outspoken critics of the proposed stimulus plans, such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Found to be "particularly egregious" this week was CNBC, which "had more than twice as many conservatives, with 14 Republicans and six Democrats. Fox Business was even worse, hosting 20 Republicans for just four Democrats." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Dean Baker on Stimulus Package" (1/30/09)