Since my last blog entry some of my conservative friends (yeah I got a few) have challenged my views on Fox News contending that Fox is a response to the rest of the liberal media and all views need to be heard. I try to stay open minded and consider all sides but I just can not bring myself to consider this to be news. Fox is spewing propaganda and now it is explicitly racist in their coverage of Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. The conservative network is working as a vehicle for the Republican Party and their claims of leveling the playing field have gone too far as just in the past three weeks Fox News has had to acknowledge, on three different occasions, how inappropriate the references to Obama were.
Most recently, Fox News refers to Michelle Obama as “Obama’s baby mama”. A graphic with the words "Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama's Baby Mama!" ran during an interview in which Fox was discussing if Michelle Obama has been under attack unfairly by critics. This description was a blatent racial slur in the context they were using it and it should not be tolerated from any media outlets regardless of the bias of their owners and their audience. “Where do you even start when criticizing Fox's slur? Do you try to explain that 'baby mama' is slang for the unmarried mother of a man's child, and not his wife, or even a girlfriend?" Joan Walsh wrote on Salon.com, which spotted the graphic. Fox did eventually issue a partial apology for the remarks.
Fox News anchor E.D. Hill also had to apologize for referring to the Obama’s nomination winning victory fist pump in St. Paul as a “terrorist fist jab”. She later claimed she was just repeating a media characterization of the gesture. What she didn't explain was where exactly the characterization came from. The liberal media watchdog web group, Media Matters, is calling for a real apology. On their site you can sign a petition demanding an apology and the site also provides contact information so you can call or email CEO Roger Ailes and E.D. Hill to tell them what you would like to see done differently in the future. Media Matters also adds that while making your calls or emails to please remain polite and professional. All other reports of the hand gesture were positive and good natured. The Boston Globe wrote: "The Obamas are proposing that the fist bump ... is the public-display-of-affection of change, the pucker-up of the future. And this, as much as anything Obama has espoused, is something of a mini-revolution."
A few weeks before that, another Fox News analyst Liz Trotta made a reference that it was unfortunate Osama Bin Laden and Barack Obama couldn't both be assassinated. She later is forced to apologize, “I am so sorry about what happened yesterday in that lame attempt at humor. I sincerely regret it and apologize to anybody I’ve offended. It’s a very colorful political season, and many of us are making mistakes and saying things that we wish that we hadn’t said". “Clarification noted,” replied Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer.
With the increase in attacks like these, a huge outcry heard in new media outets all over the web is forcing Fox to respond. The site Fox Attacks offers petitions you can sign, demanding the media "reject FOX's smears of Barack Obama" as well as offering continued support of Obama's refusal to appear on FOX. This organization of web groups is making a difference by being led by the people instead of the media and the readers of fox attacks were sucessful in leading a boycott of a primary democratic debate co-sponsered by Fox News and the Nevada Democractic Party. This boycott was later extended to all Fox News debates and caused CNN to be the most watched cable news network for the first time in six years untill FOX took over the number one spot once again at the end of the primaries.
4 comments:
Wow, I don't really watch TV, but after looking the clips I must say that the things they said are quite inappropriate.
This post is effective at bringing attention to several different incidents that you then are able to link together to make your larger argument about Fox News here. Putting the videos into the post itself is very useful in allowing your readers to see them firsthand. As with the last post though, I would like to see a bit more of your own argument running through this post - one interesting thing that comes to mind are whether these kinds of incidents are also indicative of the ways that 24 news networks in general often blur "fact" and "opinion" by placing the objective news and commentary by pundits in such close proximity to each other. The apology on the "terrorist fist jab" issue seems to be exactly along these lines - the anchor saying she was only expressing the opinions of others, etc. That is just one idea for how you might bring some elements of an original argument in here more centrally.
Jennifer, great job on this post. At work, I greet many of my colleages with the fist-jab. It's an everyday thing for many people, this FOX woman is clueless. Shame on those journalists who mix fact and fiction. Good work.
I like the way E.D. Hill apologized, she didn’t seem too sincere about it but I guess that’s a way of to lessen importance to her comments.
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