Tag Results for Fox News

I was surfcasting for Nantucket bluefish over the weekend, so thankfully I missed most of the handwringing about Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial.

I caught up a bit watching Howie Kurtz's "Reliable Sources" on the web, but his discussion with media critic Jane Hall, former Calif. Democratic Party chairman Bill Press, and conservative blogger Matt Lewis devolved into a debate about whether it was appropriate to talk about God at the Lincoln Memorial. Not exactly riveting television.

On the other hand, I thought the St. Petersburg Times' Eric Deggans (via Huffington Post) had an interesting media take on the rally.

... by creating such a massively controversial event on a typically slow news day, Beck also pushed his competitors into a corner. If CNN wanted to serve its brand as an unbiased news source, it had to cover his rally significantly, despite the fact that it also gave significant, complimentary face time to one of its own biggest competitors.

Indeed, as the rally was unfolding Saturday, C-SPAN (which aired the rally uninterrupted) and CNN covered the rally more than Fox News, which stuck with its originally scheduled programming rather than present continuous coverage.

You can read the rest of Deggans' column here.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. gave a cool $1 million to the Republicans in June, but zilch to the Democrats. With his Fox News network salivating over every primary election return leading up to and including this November's mid-terms, some say the Aussie mogul has managed to rip away whatever tattered shards of "fair & balanced" cred Fox had left. Others are shrugging, though, saying it's just the way the news business - like any other business - does business.

At exactly 8:43 last night, there was a fascinating experiment in news-making on the three cable news networks:

-MSNBC was covering the last U.S. combat troops exiting Iraq - complete with live shots from Richard Engel on the ground with the troops. Rachel Maddow was in Baghdad, and Lawrence O'Donnell was in-studio with Keith Olbermann.

-On Fox News, Bill O'Reilly was wrapping up an interview with Ann Coulter by talking about "anchor babies."

-And CNN, like MSNBC, was covering the exit of combat troops - albeit in a far more political way: correspondent Jessica Yellin was in-studio with anchor Rick Sanchez discussing Iraq's fallout for Obama.

So what was the top new story last night?

A quick check back in the 10 p.m. hour found that MSNBC was still working the Iraq story, Greta Van Susteren was talking to Ken Starr about illegal immigration and his new job at Baylor University, and CNN was discussing the fallout from Laura Schlessinger's use of the "N" word (with guests D. L. Hughley and Al Sharpton).

Were some channels broadcasting real news and others promoting sideshows? Who determines what's a sideshow and what qualifies as genuine, bonafide news?

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage suggested on "Charlie Rose" recently that American news has a tempest-in-a-teapot fixation, often covering the minuscule over the major, the insignificant over the important. Armitage said he gets almost all his news from foreign sources - the BBC, for example - which covers such exotic events as wars in Africa and elections in Europe.

Indeed the right-left bifurcation in our coverage (Fox vs. MSNBC) may be eclipsed in importance by the stunning insignificance of what cable channels so often choose to cover. Was the resignation of Laura Schlesinger one of the world's top stories yesterday? Or the threat of women rushing over the U.S. border to give birth? The end of combat troops came closest, but MSNBC rarely gives that sort of in-depth coverage to Afghanistan, an ongoing war. Moreover, would any cable news channel offer prolonged coverage of a serious war - in the Congo, say - that didn't involve Americans?

In this news climate, I doubt it.

This post also appears on the Culture Club blog on Boston.com.

Two years ago, the Phoenix newspapers bestowed one of their annual Muzzle Awards on Comcast for firing Barry Nolan (photo), the Boston-based host of "Backstage," which appeared locally on CN8.

Nolan's apparent offense: speaking out against a decision by the National Academy of Arts & Sciences to present a coveted Governors Award to Fox News blowhard Bill O'Reilly. Nolan showed up at the Boston Emmy Awards to protest the choice.

"I got fired for saying demonstrably true things in a roomful of news people that people agreed with," Nolan told me at the time. "Which tells you more, I think, about the times we live in than about the idiosyncrasies of somebody at Comcast."

Now, at long last, Nolan's story — and his $1.2 million wrongful-termination suit against Comcast — is getting a full airing. Earlier this week, the Columbia Journalism Review posted on its website a 2,700-word story by veteran Boston journalist Terry Ann Knopf. The chief revelation: a "carefully worded, lawyerly letter" from O'Reilly to Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts in which O'Reilly said he considered Nolan's one-man crusade to be "outrageous behavior" and "a disturbing situation." O'Reilly wrote:

We at "The O’Reilly Factor" have always considered Comcast to be an excellent business partner and I believe the same holds true for the entire Fox News Channel. Therefore, it was puzzling to see a Comcast employee, Barry Nolan, use Comcast corporate assets to attack me and FNC.

Now, it's true that Nolan publicly referred to O'Reilly as "a mental case." But the fact that O'Reilly would reach out to crush a critic who was in no position to do him any real harm only serves to underscore his reputation for bullying people. It's even more disturbing that Comcast, which is now trying to acquire NBC, would cave.

(Click "continue" to keep reading.)

Former President Bill Clinton? Grip-n-grinning it up with the brass at the right-wing news organization Newsmax?

Now we've seen everything. Keep in mind, Newsmax founder Chris Ruddy is no tame conservative; he was an ardent proponent of the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Clinton aide Vince Foster, and had to retract a story that then-First lady Hillary Clinton had refused to meet with a group of Gold Star Mothers.

But apparently, all is forgiven since Ruddy has become a backer of the Clinton Foundation.

I throw it open to you, sage BTP blog visitors -- is this an example of gracious conciliation, or unforgivable surrender to the enemy...by either man?

And what's next -- President Obama teeing it up on the Vineyard with Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Roger Ailes of Fox News?

As a general point of compassion and human decency, I almost never recommend that anyone pay attention to those cable news word wars about who's got it right and who's go it wrong, who's got ratings and who doesn't. Life is too short.

But I'll make an exception here. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has engaged Fox News' Bill O'Reilly on Fox's treatment of race-related stories like Van Jones, ACORN, the New Black Panther Party, and Shirley Sherrod. Maddow and others have accused Fox of pursuing its own Southern strategy to pad its viewer base with scared white people who believe African Americans (and immigrants) and their president are trying to take away their money and freedom.

O'Reilly, in turn, has accused Maddow of being a lefty conspiracist who doesn't have the evidence to back up her assertions. But Maddow says she's got the goods, courtesy of Bill, according to this video.

Did Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly put the smackdown on Fox contributor and New York Post columnist Kirsten Powers about the now-infamous 2008 New Black Panther Party voter intimidation incident in Philadelphia, or did she just embarass herself? It depends on who you ask. The case, which was downgraded by the Justice Department in what Fox, right-wing pundits, and a self-proclaimed DOJ whistleblower claim is a policy of coddling black defendants, is either a scandal or the latest fad fodder for the conservative echo machine.

I can’t say I’ve ever watched Campbell Brown’s program (photo) on CNN. In fact, I almost never have the TV on at 8 p.m. So this has nothing to do with what she is offering viewers.

Instead, I want to ask a question about her announcement that she is leaving because she concluded her non-partisan program couldn’t compete for ratings with the opinion-driven talk shows hosted by Bill O’Reilly on the Fox News Channel and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

Simply put: Why?

CNN executives keep telling us that they alone are offering news, while Fox and MSNBC are just talk stations. They also keep telling us that CNN is very profitable. Given those two pieces of information, why should they see Fox and MSNBC as their principal competitors any more than they worry about TLC or the Food Network?

There’s a real disconnect here, and CNN honchos had better figure it out as they go about retooling their ratings-challenged prime-time line-up.

"Beat the Press" panelists sound off on their rants and raves of the week: Newsweek goes on sale; CBS chief Les Moonves makes millions after a round of cuts; President Obama calls for diversity of opinion in news consumption, but is he practicing what he preaches?; and the Supreme Court considers whether public records should remain public.

Some interesting tidbits from the media landscape:

- Ayla Brown (the daughter of Senator Scott Brown) premiered her first contribution to the CBS Early Show on Thursday. The nicely-done piece shows Ayla taking on Michelle Obama's brother, Craig Robinson, on the basketball court.

Brown says that Robinson "believes you can tell a lot about a person's character by watching them play basketball," and, indeed, he "promised his sister Michelle he'd evaluate the character of her new love interest, Barack Obama, in a game of pick-up basketball."

For her part, Brown pushes to make shots whenever she can: "I know you're 6' 7"," she tells Robinson, "but I don't care."