When “WTF” Means What the Fox!

This is a joint piece with DC MEDIA GIRL.  We first met while being interviewed by Robert Greenwald for his documentary, OUTFOXED.  DC Media Girl and I had worked in different capacities at the Fox News Channel–she was a producer and I was “news analyst.”  We came out of the closet and spoke candidly about our respective experiences in watching Fox twist the news and propagandize on behalf of the Bush Administration.  We have been and remain tough critics of Fox and neither of us would be welcomed at their broadcast studio at 400 North Capitol.  Which is why we are both stunned to be writing the following:

When it comes to election coverage of the presidential contest between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama, Fox News is more “fair and balanced” than either MSNBC or CNN.  Damn!  How did that happen?

DC Media Girl notes: How many surprises are left in this election?  Like Alice, we’ve gone through the looking glass and found ourselves discombobulated.  Like the Red Queen, who advocated verdict first and trial later, we now have Democratic “leaders”  who want to get the nomination out of the way before figuring out a way for the voters in Florida and Michigan to have the their voices heard.  We have the party that was publicly and royally screwed out of an election victory in 2000, whose mantra was “count all the votes”, telling voters of that same state to go fuck itself. We have a loudmouth documentary film producer who made a fortune bringing the injustices of said robbery in 2000 to light now keeping his very big mouth shut despite the fact that this fresh 2008 outrage affects his home state.  We have party leaders demanding the withdrawal of a viable candidate even before reaching the halfway mark in the voting.  We have usually reasonable people giving a candidate’s militant preacher a pass because yes, he may be a bit nutty, but “he’s done good things for the community” (hey, the Nation of Islam does quite a bit of outreach in the prisons, but I don’t see anyone handing Louis Farrakhan a Nobel Peace Prize. At least not yet).

So given all these oddities, is it so strange to realize that the most “fair and balanced” coverage of Election 2008 has been emanating from the Murdoch Death Star, a.k.a. Fox News Channel?

Larry Johnson:

Want proof?  Read what Pennsylvania Governor Rendell had to say on the matter to Time’s Karen Tumulty:

In a recent appearance on Fox News—not exactly considered friendly territory for the Democrats—he congratulated the network for having done “the fairest job [and] remained the most objective of all the cable networks.” In an interview with me, the governor was again in media-critic mode. “It took Saturday Night Live to bring some fairness to this election,” Rendell said, referring to the show’s now famous skit lampooning the media’s crush on Obama. “It’s stunning. Does Keith Olbermann get checks from the Obama campaign?”

The sycophancy of the media is fully exposed when the “Murdoch Death Star” (I love DC Media Girl’s phrase) is delivering the most balanced election coverage.  As one of the people who called for the Democrats to not participate in a televised debate hosted by Fox last year let me (Larry Johnson) state for the record–I was wrong.  W*T*F, over.