Somewhere, in the United States, hard-core leftists are branding Seth MacFarlane a traitor.
In the most recent episode of Family Guy, MacFarlane teams up with Rush Limbaugh to ridicule the extreme stereotypes the far left holds of conservatives.
Afer learning that Limbaugh is visiting Quahog, Brian first degenerates into sputtering nonsensical epithets (at one point even prompting Stewie to offer him a do-over). However, after reading one of Limbaugh's books, Brian becomes a full-out dittohead... at least for a time.
With Limbaugh's full support, Brian stops thinking for himself, and promptly believes everything that Limbaugh tells him to.
Naturally, in the end Brian returns to being what Lois describes as a "hard-core liberal". He was never a conservative at all, mostly because he never understood how to be.
Regardless of what some would-be conservatives have to say about it, torture is not a conservative value. Rather, quite the contrary. Conservatives believe in rule of law, and torture is contrary to the rule of law.
Having never been a conservative himself, all Brian can offer is the left-wing cariacture of conservatives.
If not for the participation of Limbaugh himself, many conservatives would likely be outraged. But with Limbaugh's cooperation, the episode instead becomes a parody of everything that the far left thinks about conservatives -- including about Fox News.
For example, Lois declares everything on Fox News to be lies. And even things previously true become a lie once mentioned on Fox. Sounds like the basic knee-jerk reaction that many leftists offer to anything appearing on Fox News.
The Limbaugh episode of Family Guy should offer clarity to the terms of the debate between left and right in the United States. Unfortunately, it probably won't. It will probably just leave the left branding Seth MacFarlane as a tratior.
It was only natural that, once Canadian conservatives started the work of forming a conservative news network, that Canadian leftists would blow a gasket.
While the mismanagement of the petition is extremely amusing, the involvement of George Soros' money is particularly illuminating.
In the United States, George Soros' money is currently funding another bid to derail a conservative news outlet. This time, the target is Fox News itself.
The campaign is Turn Off Fox. The basic idea is for participants to go to public places that play Fox News, feed them talking points about why they think it's bad, and complain until the manager agrees to turn it off.
A Whois.com domain lookup identifies the Turn Off Fox website as registered to Oakland, California's Citizen Engagement Laboratory. The Citizen Engagement Lab's website offers very little public attention about its activities.
The level of Soros' involvement is clearly debatable. After all, it isn't as if Soros is directly involved in the decisions made by all of the groups his organization funds.
It could simply be a case of the left hand not knowing what the other hand is doing.
Regardless, the presence of George Soros' money should remind any observers precisely what both of these campaigns -- the Avaaz petition against Sun TV and the Turn Off Fox campaign -- really are:
If any object has become a universal target of revulsion for the global left wing, FOX News fits that particular bill.
It isn't all that hard to see why the left wing hates FOX News -- describing itself as "fair and balanced", the network is actually unabashedly conservative.
Nobody should realistically question this. The network has employed a number of left-wingers within its organization, but as OutFOXed notes, they have tended to be particularly weak.
But aside from this, OutFOXed fails to answer one important question: why, precisely, does this matter?
OutFOXed closes with an argument in favour of something akin to the Fairness Doctrine -- the Fairness Doctrine if necessary, but not necessarily the Fairness Doctrine.
The Fairness Doctrine was a legislative framework that required media outlets to present equal time from each of the two predominant points of view (the conservative view and the liberal view).
They insist that such a framework is in the public interest.
But there is one lingering question that the producers do not answer:
Just how far should this extend? And just how far should the public interest extend?
Two of the principal supporters of OutFOXed are MoveOn.org and Media Matters for America. Like FOX News, Media Matters for America is unabashedly ideological -- in this case, they're a self-described progressive think tank, dedicated to researching conservative media bias.
If the public interest requires a fairness doctrine-esque framework in order to force balance into the news media, perhaps that same doctrine should foce balance of perspectives into think tanks -- like Media Matters for America, and its conservative alternative, NewsBusters.
Interestingly enough, now that MSNBC has made the same transition OutFOXed attributes to FOX News (attack dog to lap dog), one doesn't hear individuals like Robert Greenwald citing MSNBC as evidence that such a framework is needed.
Perhaps the producers of OutFOXed never had any such thing in mind. After all, if they curbed the unabashedly conservative FOX News just to curb MSNBC alongside it, they would just be outfoxing themselves.
Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart addressed the matter of the controversy surrounding the Obama administration and its recent comments on Fox News.
"What I think is fair to say about Fox -- and certainly it's the way we view it -- is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party," White House communications director Anita Dunn had told CNN. "They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is."
This, of course, has attracted a great deal of scrutiny regarding MSNBC and its cozy relationship with the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.
There's very little question in the minds of most people that MSNBC has been acting as the pro-Democrat version of Fox News. But some people want to pretend otherwise.
The Daily Show clip, featured only in part above (and more on this later) sheds some light on not only how Fox News has synergized its news and opinion reporting, but how many other news networks do as well.
As his case study, Stewart uses insipid the school song controversy that erupted last year.
The story was drug up months later by Matt Drudge, at which point Fox took up the issue.
The story was reported in the morning during the network's news cycle, then commented upon later by the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck (Alan Colmes was not available for comment).
The next news cycle -- back to reporting again -- would then report upon the commentary offered by the network's pundits.
Curiously enough, this is where the Media Matters video ends. But the segment continued after the portion that Media Matters chooses to show viewers, and what followed was every bit as enlightening -- about MSNBC -- as the rest was about Fox.
The segment continued with a CNN interview with White House advisor Valerie Jarret. When asked if Fox News was biased, Jarret explained that "of course Fox News is biased." But when asked about whether or not MSNBC was biased, Jarret began to soften up and back off. "I don't want to just generalize all Fox is biased or that another station is biased."
There may have been a reason why Jarret suddenly became so reluctant to declare any news network to be biased. After all, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow had recently met privately with US President Barack Obama. When challenged on this, Olbermann essentially defended the meeting as koscher because George W Bush had done the same thing with Fox News personalities.
Olbermann had previously criticized the cozy relationship between Fox News and the Bush administration.
Stewart suggested that Jarret should of said "of course MSNBC is biased, but they agree with us so we're not fighting with them."
When Jarret later suggested that the administration was going to "speak truth to power", Stewart could only muster an incredulous "what the fuck!?" (Watch it, Stewart, that's our bit. I'm looking at you too, Olbermann. -ed) It's almost as if the Obama administration doesn't understand that they're the power.
But there's a reason why Media Matters cut the clip before getting to this point. They decline to report on MSNBC's ideological excesses because they share MSNBC's bias.
One of the two mentions of Brewer from August 2009 -- when the incident occurred -- however, provides a telling point about Media Matters and their complaint that Fox News creates its own news.
In this particular sense, Fox News commentators don't just create Fox's news. They also create MSNBC's.
From a marketing perspective, this actually makes perfect sense. As Stewart notes, Fox News has news anchors, but nobody knows who they are. They aren't marketable. The real bread and butter of the Fox News network is their commentators.
So -- for good or ill -- this synergy is a natural extension of the for-profit news industry. News anchors report the news. Commentators offer their opinion. Then later news anchors, because the ad sales for highly-rated commentary shows are so lucrative, report on the commentary taking place to lure viewers back to watch the pundits offer their take.
MSNBC does the same thing -- commenting on Fox News' commentary, so their pundits can later offer their take on the matter, as they so often do during segments such as Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World".
But MSNBC creates its own news, too. Of course, MSNBC has different methods of creating the news. Returning to Brewer and her race-baiting episode, MSNBC concealed the race of the man in question (as mentioned previously, he was black) in order to mix it with sensationalist implication in order to insist that white racists were planning an armed insurrection or assassination attempt against the President.
When called to account for the incident, MSNBC didn't issue a mea culpa, but rather stated that Brewer was commenting not on the specific incident at hand, but rather on a general state of affairs.
For the record, here's Brewer once again, putting her news anchor-y on public display once more:
Because with the American economy in the midst of a full-on meltdown at the time (February 2009), the real story is the guy standing next to Rick Stantelli and whether or not he has a YouTube channel.
There's something comical about a reporter from FOX News, of all networks, complaining that someone on CNBC would allow political invective to go unchallenged.
But there's also something extremely comical about Janeane Garofalo. Recently she was confronted by Fox News' Griff Jenkins over her recent comments in which she insisted that all of those protesting Barack Obama's stimulus package with tea parties were motivated by racism alone.
When confronted by Jenkins, Garofalo put the rather dubious standard of evidence she used to reach that conclusion on display -- demanding to know where these individuals had been during the George W Bush Presidency when he was running the United States deeper into deficit and deeper into debt.
Although, one must point out, just as Sean Hannity does, that Bush was doing so at a quarter of the rate that Obama is now doing.
In actuality, this is actually stronger evidence in favour of suggesting that the Tea Parties were politically motivated out of partisan fervour -- a possibility that Garofalo herself previously rejected.
No. Apparently Garofalo's defining piece of evidence is a "What'chu talkin' about Willis?" sign held up by one of the protesters.
Yet Garofalo clearly overlooked the fact that "What'chu talkin' about Willis" is less a racial slur and more of a pop culture reference. For the uninitiated, Diff'rent Strokes was a show about black children being raised by a white family. For those familiar with Barack Obama's life story, the parallels are evident. Obama was raised by his mother -- a white woman -- who was aided by his grandparents -- who, also, are white.
It's generally uncouth to go after an elected official for the circumstances of their upbringing. But in terms of being evidentiary of racism, this sign is very thin gruel.
Garofalo actually backpedals when confronted, falling back to talking about the "racist element" at the Tea Party protests -- very different from labelling them all as racists, as she originally did -- only to backpedal on her own backpedalling.
One has to consider that these are actually the less inflammatory of her original comments -- her insistence that American conservatives are all mentally ill as a precondition of their political alignment is actually much more alarming.
Moreoever, they're clearly the kind of arguments formulated in an echo chamber, never intended to be defended. Garofalo's reaction to being challenged bear that particular observation out.
The utterly hilarious aspect of the entire affair is that, as a comedian, Janeane Garofalo has the ultimate back door out of the base stupidity of her original comments -- she could have just insisted she was joking.
But even if Garofalo were only joking, it still wasn't funny.
If there's anything everyone knows about Fox News personalities, it's that they know how to keep things classy.
When they aren't berating their guests and cutting off their microphones, they tend to indulge themselves in the kinds of shit shows seen on Greg Gutfeld's Red Eye recently, wherein Gutfeld and his guests mocked the Canadiam armed forces.
While Canadians mourned the loss of another four soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Gutfeld and his guests took to poking fun at the idea that the Canadian forces may need to take an operation sabbatical from the region.
"Once their Afghan mission winds down sometime in 2011, certain members of the Canadian military are looking to take a much-deserved break. And by certain members I mean all of them," Gutfeld said. "Meaning, the Canadian military wants to take a breather to do some yoga, paint landscapes, run on the beach in gorgeous white Capri pants."
North of the border, no one has found Gutfeld and his ignorant cohorts funny. And rightfully so.
"It's crass, it's insensitive, it's in fact disgusting given the timing where Canada is just receiving back four fallen heroes here at CFB Trenton," MacKay fumed. "There should be an apology -- to the families in particular, and to the Canadian Forces and to Canada generally -- given the sacrifice and the commitment that we've demonstrated in Afghanistan."
"What could anybody with common sense say about his kind of trash? It's ignorant, it's inappropriate, it's insulting," added Conservative strategist Geoff Norquay. "It's insulting to the 116 Canadian troops who have given their lives and paid the supreme sacrifice while we've been in Afghanistan."
Gutfeld has responded by issuing a less-than-heartfelt apology.
"I realize that my words may have been misunderstood," he wrote in a statement. "It was not my intent to disrespect the brave men, women and families of the Canadian military, and for that I apologize. Red Eye is a satirical take on the news, in which all topics are addressed in a lighthearted, humorous and ridiculous manner."
This follows an earlier twitter in which Gutfeld mused "My apologies to the Canadian military, they probably could at least beat the Belgians."
Gutfeld's apology has gotten a lukewarm response from some Canadians.
"I think it's very nice and all that they did apologize. It just goes to show you that they were just a bit reckless, I guess," said Jim Davis, the father of slain soldier Corporal Paul Davis, and a man who has worked tirelessly to help drum up support for the mission.
"It's a very solemn moment," Davis said of the arrival of Canada's most recent fallen. "When you look at the seriousness of that moment, and you look at the foolishness of those comedians, well, what a difference."
"It was total ignorance, poor taste and wasn't funny at all," Davis said about the comments themselves.
Getting an apology -- even a rather disengenuous one -- out of a Fox News personality is no short order. Canadians should feel at least some measure of satisfaction, although it's only a matter of time until some other idiot at Fox opens their mouth and says something stupid again.
Seed Newsvine
