But that Fox News bias lost on Trumpeters…as they seem to believe whatever Fox & the rest of the echo tell them. That has caused that conservative crowd to believe in false facts from an alternate universe, to where the American public as a whole can’t even agree around basic truths. It’s become very dangerous when that echo-crowd believe the lies that can literally undermine our democracy, especially when they become convinced this current demagogue president is some kind of tribal hero! More on that Fox News bias is revealed in commentaries & articles further below, but first let’s discuss how the prez is directly attacking our democracy.
The prez has been even more combative with the media since the election, being extremely rude & abrasive. And Trump is actually bragging about purging the FBI of those he views as not completely loyal to him, which is running roughshod over the independent nature of the bureau. Trump wants to turn our security agencies into his own Americanized gestapo, where he can order them to do his bidding by unleashing their explicit power to go after his political opponents. Along with installing Whitaker as acting AG & putting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, the battle lines are being drawn & Trump is inserting the right pieces to build his authoritarian dream! This all signals a potential slippery slope into a fascist dictatorship & as I keep warning, don’t think it couldn’t happen here. The one institution of power Trump won’t have control over is a Dem-controlled House, so let’s hope & pray they will be able to rein in this president’s unabashed power grab & assault on our constitutional democracy. And fortunately, the majority of the American people are still on the side of a free democracy.
Trump Inspires these Worldwide Threats
Trump is part of a dangerous international trend attacking journalists as a way to suppress dissent & usurp unauthorized power: trump-acosta-attack-journalism-spreading-around-world. If his Trumpeter base were to grow past 50% instead of the approximately 40% it is now, our free democracy might cease to exist, as the slide into fascism could become a stark reality: after-the-midterms-americas-slide-into-pseudo-democracy-continues. As seen in a paragraph here from americas-descent-into-total-oligarchy-was-stopped-for-now, without a Dem-House to try stopping him, America would indeed be in big trouble! It’s an off-the-charts great thing the election results starting in January give the Dems the House majority!:
More than that, though, the Democratic House will stand up to Trump’s effort to undermine Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election, and any crimes associated with that interference. Mueller has stayed in the shadows lately, likely waiting for the midterms to pass, but with them behind us, we expect to hear more from him very soon. The Mueller investigation has already netted guilty pleas from four of Trump’s top advisers, and Trump’s frantic tweets on the subject suggest that he is worried that he and his children will be connected to obstruction, collusion, and/or financial crimes. His wildly careening press conference the day after the election, followed by his abrupt firing of Jeff Sessions, suggests that he feels the walls closing in. The loss of the House has made Trump desperate.
The Best & Worst of Fox
Some of their shows give the real news, while some are pure Fox News bias! Fox viewers need to know which shows do not present the real news, using propagandists instead of real journalists. Especially the prime-time lineup, they function as more an Americanized version of state-sponsored North Korea TV, serving as a mouthpiece for their omnipotent & infallible leader by consistently serving up grandiose praise in their direction. Two of the very worst show hosts serving as shameless sycophants are seen here in a posting from inside fox-newss-sean-hannity-proud-to-be-a-trump-operative:
And with that, the Fox News hosts continued an ongoing project. They have been campaigning for Trump for quite some time. If there’s a prominent critic of Trump, that critic will come in for a battering from Hannity and Pirro. If there’s an argument that Trump wants to float, Hannity and Pirro will take care of that formality. And if there’s an entire group of people that Trump wants to discredit — such as the mainstream U.S. media — he’s assured of help on that front as well. Appearing before a cheering throng, however, brings greater transparency to the relationship. In the 2016 campaign, for instance, Hannity served as an informal adviser to candidate Trump; he helped fly a vice presidential candidate to meet with Trump; and he even gave a 32-second testimonial in an eight-minute video promotion for Trump on the topic of Second Amendment rights.
Insanity Hannity
He goes beyond Fox News bias, it’s really insane psychopathy! The real Hannity is revealed in this entire article posted from hannitys-trump-rally-appearance-fox-staffers-think-he-crossed-a-line, as he serves as Trump’s #1 cheerleader no matter how far he needs to stray from the truth to excuse/glorify everything the prez says or does:
Sean Hannity is a choleric far-right hack who has spent nearly every weeknight of the past three years stumping hard for Donald Trump on Fox News. Night after night, segment after segment, Hannity has woven a fabric of omissions and misrepresentations designed to give cover to Trump’s character and presidency. Instead, he has tried to transfer all the president’s sins onto the Democratic Party, whose members he routinely derides as immoral liars who are working to bring America down from the inside. I am not exaggerating here; Hannity has literally told his audiences that “all Democrats are lying to you.” For his efforts on behalf of the president he has been rewarded with high ratings and a direct line to Trump. They’re now phone buddies. So it should have surprised no one when, on Monday night, Hannity appeared onstage as a featured speaker at a Trump campaign rally in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Though Hannity had come to Missouri under the pretense of covering the rally for Fox News, he did not demur when Trump asked him to say a few words to the crowd. After maligning the reporters in the rear of the auditorium as “fake news,” Hannity went on to fulsomely praise the president, who was standing a few feet to his right. “The one thing that has defined your presidency more than anything else: Promises made, promises kept,” said Hannity at the rally, speaking from behind a rostrum bedecked with the presidential seal. (Hannity’s colleague Jeanine Pirro, perhaps the one Fox host with even less journalistic credibility than Hannity, also spoke at the rally.)
In so doing, many livid Fox News staffers later told CNN Business, Hannity crossed a line. An opinion journalist like Hannity can have a preferred candidate, and can make that preferred candidate known, for sure, but volunteering for campaigns and speaking at political rallies is a clear violation of journalistic ethics. Most journalists would never, ever think of doing so, because they know that directly advocating for a political candidate can serve to damage not just the individual journalist’s credibility but the credibility of the news organization for which the journalist works. Hannity’s colleagues are pissed in part because his decision to speak at Trump’s rally will make it harder for the rest of them to do their jobs. At Fox News, there is an internal split between the news division and the opinion division. The members of the news division are there to do journalism; the opinion staffers are there to get ratings and help elect Republicans. The news-division staffers get upset when their opinion-side counterparts undermine their work. But the truth is that Hannity undermines his colleagues every single weeknight—and the only difference on Monday was the venue. A typical Hannity episode is 30 percent conspiratorial rantings, 30 percent hypocrisy policing, 30 percent unabashed Trump-stumping, and 10 percent Sebastian Gorka.
In an hour’s worth of bluster, Hannity can undo a day’s worth of work by his colleagues. Though he sits at a news desk like a journalist, shuffles papers like a journalist, and works for a network that has “News” in its name, Hannity is not a journalist in the slightest—for years he even said so, until he changed his mind. He is a partisan shill cosplaying as a newscaster, and no one paying attention could seriously think otherwise. Hannity’s upset colleagues know this, and they’re clearly using the Trump rally incident as an excuse to vent some of the steam that has been building for years. “I’m aghast, as are a number of other people,” an anonymous Fox staffer told CNN Business. “People throughout the company think a new line was crossed,” said another. The line in question is the one that separates journalism from political advocacy, commentary from sycophancy, and real news from fake news. I completely understand why Hannity’s colleagues are upset, but I really doubt any of them are surprised. Sean Hannity and many of his fellow Fox opinion hosts crossed that line a long time ago.
Excellent Article on Fox News Bias!
Make no mistake, Fox has become very dangerous since they constantly put lies into their viewers’ minds while offering up undying support to a demagogue leader. I skipped over the intro to this article about events from a coffee shop, but the rest of it is all posted below from fox-news-midterms-reaction-sessions-resigns-steve-doocy-shep-smith-neil-cavuto, since it paints a very accurate picture of Fox News. PLEASE READ & SHARE!!! Yes, their viewers do need to know who the real journalists are from the ones who are deceptive/disingenuous charlatans & shills for the prez:
“Really?” Cheryl replied, sounding incredulous. “Is this Fox News? Are you new here?” And the whole restaurant, Doocy included, fell into gales of laughter. I give you Fox & Friends, where jocular ignorance is always on the menu, and sometimes bad coffee, too. I have been thinking of this exchange all day, ever since I first watched it. It crystallizes so much about the role Fox News plays and will continue to play in propping up the Trump administration while subverting fact-based discourse. You’ve got a woman who knew enough about Fox News to know that the network would never really support bipartisan congressional cooperation, but who was nevertheless unaware that Republicans had lost the House. Maybe she was just tired and really did need some coffee, but it felt to me like Doocy’s subject had internalized the tone of modern politics while remaining blissfully ignorant of civics and policy. This makes her an avatar for millions of Fox News viewers all across America. Fox is a network for low-information, high-dudgeon viewers, people who don’t know what they don’t know and have little interest in filling that knowledge gap.
Though Fox News did not create modern dogmatic sound-bite conservatism, the network has been its primary exponent since taking the air back in 1996. Far from seeking to educate its audience, or even to apprise it of the state of things as they are, Fox News is committed to presenting a picture of the world as the Republican Party would like it to be. Today’s Republican Party is controlled by Donald Trump, and thus Fox News is wholly on board with the president’s divisive and retributive agenda. For the past two years, the network has advanced this agenda by withholding relevant information on the president’s flaws and failures from viewers, twisting the words and actions of the president’s political opponents, and distracting its audience with endless reporting on irrelevancies like the Uranium One story, the migrant caravan, and NFL players’ purported lack of patriotism.
We can expect much more of these tactics in the coming weeks and months, as the newly Democratic House is sworn in and Trump inevitably responds by acting badly. Fox will give its viewers nothing relevant about the inevitable Democratic House investigations of Trumpworld, instead framing them as obstructionist persecutions from lying liberals out to destroy a successful and popular president. The network will increase its alarmist coverage of liberal bogeymen such as Maxine Waters, Adam Schiff, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Hillary Clinton, distorting their words and actions as a means of distracting from the president’s personality defects. It will continue to tout the horrors of illegal immigration as the biggest problem facing America, and will find a new “caravan” to misrepresent as soon as the current one dissipates. Most critically, the network will do its utmost to aid the president’s efforts to question the credibility of the Mueller investigation. The present of Fox is also the future of Fox.
A major caveat: Though Fox News is, on balance, a de facto appendage of the Republican Party, it’s important to realize that the network is not a monolithic entity. There are plenty of people at Fox who are basically fine. Neil Cavuto is fine. Bret Baier is fine. Shep Smith is better than fine; he’s actually very good. Chris Wallace, Melissa Francis, Bill Hemmer, Sandra Smith, many of the network’s reporters and correspondents—all basically fine. Though they might hold conservative opinions, none is actively working to undermine American democracy. They are fine. They are also largely irrelevant to the network’s aims. Even though they are fine, they can still be used as tools of the Trump agenda. Fox News is comprised of many parts, each of which plays a different, propagandistic role. The Fox & Friends dimwits get America off on the wrong foot each morning with a chipper dose of lightweight fascism. Fox’s marquee opinion hosts—Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham–work to corrode their viewers’ trust in liberal democracy and inflame their resentment of the so-called elite through a glib embrace of conspiracy, sophistry, and contempt.
Others on the network—even some of the personalities who are fine—mislead by omission, and it is very hard, when you’re in the middle of watching Fox News, to recognize all the things that you are not being told. This happened to me Tuesday night, while I was watching the network’s coverage of the midterm election returns. The prognostications of certain idiot panelists notwithstanding, I thought that Fox News did a pretty good and straightforward job of reporting the election. It wasn’t until this morning that I realized how, though the network made clear that a Democratic House would likely open numerous investigations into the Trump administration, it said little about the substance of those investigations, or why they were important, or what the president is said to have done wrong. By simply leaving it at “the Democrats will investigate the president,” the network empowers people like Diner Cheryl to presume that the Democrats are persecuting him for no reason.
This strategy will continue into the immediate future—and probably become even more pronounced with time. The network’s coverage of Wednesday’s midday, forced resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the subsequent announcement that Justice Department staffer Matt Whitaker would serve as Sessions’ interim replacement, is a good example of the game plan. As luck would have it, the Sessions-Whitaker announcement landed right as Shepard Smith was about to begin his daily, best-in-class Fox News program. For an hour, Smith and his guests did a conscientious job with the story. Former judge Andrew Napolitano, who was on all hour with Smith, made very clear his opinion that the dismissal of Sessions and appointment of Whitaker—going by previous statements Whitaker had made—was likely an attempt by Trump to subvert the Mueller investigation and thus grounds for potential obstruction-of-justice charges against Trump.
Then Smith’s show ended, and Fox began its daily long, slow slide back toward partisan idiocy. “Stop and think,” historian and former GOP operative Doug Wead told Neil Cavuto during Your World With Neil Cavuto. “You’re president of the United States, and you don’t have a Justice Department. How you gonna run the country without a Justice Department? They’re accountable to CNN. That’s not in the Constitution.” (Cavuto did not push back on this stupid point. He did, however, end the segment soon thereafter.) Later on the show, Cavuto welcomed outgoing Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who noted that “incoming chairman [of the House Judiciary Committee] Jerry Nadler has a long-standing grudge with the president. He’s made it clear that impeachment is a goal. And that makes his investigations very suspect.” As for the Mueller investigation, Issa argued, “the reality is that if Mueller cannot come up with a single indictable event that went on in this administration during the campaign by any of its high-ranking people in the next few months, then his campaign to look for it should end. Two years is a long time to look for a crime you can’t prove.”
I am finishing this column around 5:15 p.m. on Wednesday night, long before Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham will go on air, but I can already predict roughly what they are going to say. It is the same thing they’ve been saying for a while, and will continue to say long after Donald Trump leaves office. They’ll call the Sessions resignation a nonstory, and argue that Trump was well within his rights to ask for it. They’ll say that the president acted decisively and note the historical precedent for presidents firing Cabinet members after midterm losses. They’ll pick up Darrell Issa’s line of argument about how long the Mueller investigation has lasted, how fruitless it has been, and how it should end very soon for the good of the country. They’ll blame Democrats for persecuting the president. They’ll argue that liberal hypocrisy is the real crime. They will say whatever is most expedient to the goals of the Republican Party at the time. They will work to keep their viewers angry and uninformed. They’ll cloud the issue until the cloud becomes the issue. And then tomorrow they’ll do it all over again.
Even Worse than Fox News Bias, Some Hosts are actually Helping Run the Country!
The cozy relationship between the White House & Fox News has some of those most subservient show hosts going beyond just being Trumpian cheerleaders, they are actually top advisers to the president. And they finally won the day by convincing Trump to abuse his power by usurping control over the Justice Dept. Together as a team, Trump & his Fox surrogates are trampling on the rule of law & defiling our Constitution, working together in a virtual coup to blur & obliterate our institutional balance of power. If successful, it would allow Trump to rise above his potential crimes & set up their utopian vision of an autocratic dictatorship. But Fox viewers are seeing none of this through their rose-colored glasses, since they’re mesmerized by the perfect picture these hosts are always painting of our prez. So this situation becomes incredibly perilous, when at a time our constitutional democracy is under assault, millions in the Fox audience are being assured there’s nothing to worry about here. In fact, most of that audience have long ago jumped on the crazy train! They’re being taken for a ride. All these points are brought home from this last part of the article from fox-news-was-made-moment:
Whitaker’s opinion of the probe is no secret. In an August 2017 piece for CNN.com before he joined the administration, he called for Rosenstein to “limit the scope” of the investigation and prevent Mueller from looking into Trump’s finances. Appearing on CNN the previous month, he mused about a scenario in which Sessions was replaced by someone who “doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” Now he will have the opportunity to do that himself. The ultimate cause for Trump ousting Sessions is the president’s authoritarian view of law enforcement as a tool to enforce his own will, wedded to a Fox News propaganda apparatus that encourages that twisted perspective. Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro have led Fox’s effort to lay the groundwork for the president to finally follow through on an authoritarian solution to the Mueller problem. All are vocal propagandists with close ties to Trump who regularly call for purges of the Justice Department and FBI in order to remove elements they view as insufficiently loyal to him.
Night after night, the hosts have been telling the same unified story of the Mueller probe’s illegitimacy, enlisting a small circle of discredited journalists, Trumpist lawmakers, and hack lawyers to bellow about the smear of the day. Meanwhile, the president has been paying attention. He has watched their shows, tweeted about segments he enjoyed, sought their private counsel, and sometimes taken their advice on the probe, creating a durable feedback loop that drives Fox’s anti-Mueller conspiracy theories into the rest of the news cycle. Every high-level law enforcement official involved in the Russia investigation has come under Fox figures’ scrutiny at one time or another. But Sessions has been a special focus for their invective. A replacement who is more willing to comply with Trump’s wishes could strangle the probe, ensuring that it doesn’t get closer to the Oval Office. And so the members of the president’s Fox cabinet have been slamming Sessions and accusing him of “betray[ing] the president.” Pirro, Dobbs, and Gregg Jarrett have all called for his removal.
Trump, at long last, has taken their advice. Now, he’s counting on them to help him get away with what he’s done. Bill Shine former top Fox executive and current White House deputy chief of staff for communications, is the perfect fit to lead a disinformation campaign aimed at weaponizing the right-wing echo chamber to defend the president. And in Fox, Shine will have an eager network willing to carry water for this administration because that’s what Fox was designed to do. When President Richard Nixon resigned from office in disgrace, his acolytes blamed the media. Roger Ailes, who served as an advisor on Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and helped sell him to the American people, founded Fox almost three decades later with the slogan “fair and balanced,” a not-so-subtle jab at the “liberal” press that had hounded his boss from the White House. As the years passed, Fox grew in power and influence, becoming the communications arm of the Republican Party and a dominant force in the party’s internal debates. The network has been an incubator for GOP talking points, a steady paycheck for former and current party officials, a launching pad for right-wing movements, and the battleground for the party’s presidential primaries.
And now, with Trump in complete control of the GOP and shaping it in his own image, Fox has become a powerful propaganda tool, ready and willing to protect the president at all costs. “Nixon didn’t have Fox News in his corner,” The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote in April. “President Trump does — and that might make all the difference if he were to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein or even special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The pro-Trump media, led by Fox, would give cover, and huge swaths of Americans would be encouraged to believe that the action was not only justified but absolutely necessary.” The same is true for Sessions’ removal, which puts Mueller’s probe in similar jeopardy. The president is betting that Fox’s support will be enough to help him survive a move that likely ends with the crippling of Mueller’s investigation. We’re about to find out if he’s right.
Yes, here’s more Proof our President is a real Jackass!
His response to a question on Friday morning was like that of a subhuman jerk! He personally verbally berated a reporter, from which we’ve seen a clear pattern African-American women reporters in particular bring out his ire: trump-rips-reporter-for-stupid-question-on-mueller-probe & also trump-calls-april-ryan-a-loser-threatens-to-revoke-more-press. As seen inside this link trump-attacks-cnn-apos-jim & the opening below from trump-blows-up-after-cnns-jim-acosta-asks-about-migrant-caravan-you-are-a-rude-terrible-person, Trump was over-the-top contentious in his press conference on Wednesday, sounding like a mob-boss thug. It may have been deliberate to set the tone for the Sessions-Whitaker switcheroo right afterwards. But the more we see of this president, it shows what we’ve known even before he got elected, he doesn’t have the right temperament or moral judgement to be our president!:
President Donald Trump accused CNN reporter Jim Acosta of being a “rude, terrible person” during a press conference on the day after Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives. The exchange between Trump and Acosta was initially testy when the reporter asked about the president’s characterization of a Central American migrant caravan as an “invasion” and began to challenge whether that description was appropriate. After Trump attempted to move on to another questioner, Acosta refused to give up the microphone and began asking about the possibility of indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller, prompting a tense exchange between the two men. “Put down the mic!” Trump barked at Acosta. After Acosta gave up his microphone, Trump began to berate him. “CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them,” Trump told Acosta. “You are a rude, terrible person who should not be working for CNN.” He later added, “When you report fake news, which CNN does a lot, you are the enemy of the people.” Peter Alexander of NBC News soon came to Acosta’s defense. “In Jim’s defense, I’ve traveled with him and watched him, he’s a diligent reporter who busts his butt like the rest of us,” Alexander told Trump before asking his question. “Well I’m not a big fan of yours either,” Trump shot back.
Attacking Our First Amendment Right to a Free Press!
When their White House correspondent was then banned from the White House grounds that same day, CNN didn’t take this lying down as found inside cnn-fires-back-at-wh-suspending-acostas-credentials-this-unprecedented-decision-is-a-threat-to-our-democracy. The president is once again making a direct attack on our First Amendment & the right to a free press! Erik Wemple says of Jim Acosta having his press pass revoked & this whole surreal scene surrounding that combative press conference, as seen in the last line from erik-wemple/wp/2018/11/07/white-house-goes-authoritarian-on-cnns-jim-acosta: There is nothing comparable to this — on the issue of White House access and many, many other fronts. Trump is now out of control & beyond salvaging as his party looks the other way: trump-abandoned-civility-republican-party. Trump really is coming off as more & more deranged, seen inside trump-takes-aim-at-obama-clinton-judges-election-officials-reporters-and-a-host-of-others-before-leaving-the-country & also trumps-authoritarian-backlash-has-already-begun.
And His Lying Hits a New Low!
This is truly incredible! The White House stoops to what is likely the future of fake news, where the echo-world supports their lies & conspiracies with doctored videos. The Trumpian world used a doctored video to justify banning a CNN reporter from the White House, from which Trump denied it was doctored! But when we’re dealing with a pathological liar, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. See the story inside these links:
https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-jim-acosta-video-was-doctored-ap-expert-says-2018-11
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-jim-acosta-credential-cnn-auhtoritarian-regimes-2018-11
https://thinkprogress.org/white-house-doctored-video-jim-acosta-f51913c72344/
We Cannot Just Do Nothing!!!
There’s been over 300 mass shootings in America just this year! It’s happening nearly every day! Most of them hardly even make the headlines. That’s totally unacceptable, so we can’t just sit back & take it without trying to do something about it! Posted here is a paragraph from the-american-civil-war-didnt-end-and-trump-is-a-confederate-president highlighting stats why America has such a gun problem with mass shooters having become commonplace:
Another way to talk about the United States as a country at war is to note that the number of weapons in circulation is incompatible with peace. We have 5% of the world’s population and 35%-50% of the guns in civilian hands, more guns per capita than anywhere else – and more gun deaths, too. Is it any surprise that mass shootings – an almost entirely male and largely white phenomenon – are practically daily events? Many synagogues, Jewish community centers, black churches and public schools now engage in drills that are preparations for the gunman who might arrive, the gunman we’ve met in so many aftermath news stories, who is miserable, resentful, feels entitled to take lives and is well equipped to do so. The psychological impact of drills and fear, and the financial costs of security, are a tax on other people’s access to guns.
So are the deaths.
It’s become such a common occurrence, we must have a serious discussion! Whatever it takes, from background checks to mental health screenings/treatment & banning automatic rifles or devices turning guns into automatic weapons, the one thing we cannot accept is the status quo! We won’t stop them all, but we must stop as many of these mass shooters as possible! See the articles here commenting on this important topic:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/08/opinion/nra-mass-shootings-thousand-oaks.html
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/21/17028930/gun-violence-us-statistics-charts
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-mass-shootings-in-america-this-year-2018-2
https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-of-gun-deaths-2018-2
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