Fox News thread of fine journalism

My, what a big icon they have…

I doubt the Russians care about distracting from Cohenfort. They are after the ‘divisive’ part of the illegal immigrant angle. I’m sure Fox welcomes the Russian help this time, because it does distract from Cohenfort.

Jesus, that image is twice as big in the preview box as on the actual page.

Derek Daly getting fired is ridiculous, but it’s not front page national news.

35 years? Someone must have wanted him out…

It was an overreaction and a total cluserfuck. Basically, Derek Daly is Irish, and was asked in an interview 35+ years ago what is what like being the only foreign driver on his American-owned racing team, and he responded with a slang phrase apparently common in Ireland at the time without thinking about it’s meaning/implication in the U.S… As soon as he understood the impact of what he’d said he said he was mortified and has supposedly never said anything like it again in a long career of both racing and broadcasting.

The only reason it came up again was a different broadcaster, long-time Indianapolis Colts radio personality Bob Lamey, was overheard by coworkers telling a story about an interview in the 1980’s where a driver made a racial slur on a live broadcast. Lamey, who is 80, was then “asked to retire”, and in his exit statements fingered Daly as the original source for his story. Problem is, Lamey never interviewed Daly, and Daly freely admits his mistake all those years ago and claims to have regretted it ever since. Many people in the racing community, including the reporter who actually interviewed Daly that day, and Willy T. Ribbs, the first African-American to drive in the Indy 500 and Daly’s friend for 40 years, have made statements supporting him.

Here’s an objective take on the story:

But of course FOX is playing it up like all white folks should be terrified of losing their jobs if anyone so much as accuses them of having said a racial slur at any point in their lives.

Well in this case, Fox isn’t entirely wrong. A lot is wrong with this particular scenario, but this is completely different from the Paula Deans, Papa Johns, and random police of the world who said these things like yesterday and repeatedly.

35 years… sheesh.

Daly was at Willy T.'s wedding like a week ago. The whole thing is bonkers.

Looks like they’ve edited the headline a bit:

By 2020 they’re just going to be rolling with headlines like “N***** WINS ELECTION IN SOUTH CAROLINA”.

I wouldn’t mind it if I saw “great grand son of slave owner wins election”

“Son of New York KKK leader elected to office of President”

Grandson of Draft-Dodger Becomes President, Is Also Draft-Dodger

My wife is South African so this Carlson faceplant caught my attention.

Carlson wants us to believe that he brought up the story because he wanted to denounce unfair treatment based on race. But he got almost the entire story wrong. Clearly he didn’t treat the story the way a journalist would, because if he had, he’d have known something about the history, about the current situation, about the false claims flying around, about the government’s rebuttal of those claims. Instead, he ran with the false story. And where does the false story come from? From white nationalists in South Africa and their kindred spirits in the US.

He got the story both wrong and stoked the fears of his older, white audience. Two birds with one story, or as Fox’s producers probably call it. . .a normal business day.

How do the authors prove their case? The most persuasive sections of the book concern case studies of stories that did, or did not, go viral in these politically disconnected universes. Consider two stories that emerged over the course of the 2016 Presidential campaign: in one, Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in acts of pedophilia, which included the abuse of Haitian refugee children and visits to an orgy island—preposterous claims for which there was no shred of evidence. In the other, Donald Trump supposedly raped a thirteen-year-old girl, in 1994—something that he was accused of in a lawsuit filed in 2016. At first, there was great interest on the left in the Trump story. There were five times as many Facebook shares of the most widely shared article about it (1.25 million) as of the most widely shared story about the imagined Clinton pedophilia. But all that chatter was followed by near silence in the liberal and mainstream media, as the story failed to survive the most basic fact-checking scrutiny. (Trump denied the allegations; the lawsuit was subsequently dropped, refiled, and dropped again.) As the authors write, “the presence and attention of both journalists and readers to diverse sites was enough to enforce a hard constraint on the ability to disseminate politically affirming falsehoods.”

The Clinton orgy-island story met a very different fate in the right-wing media, which pushed versions of it over the course of the campaign. (Fox News initially ran several segments that raised the topic of the “Lolita Express.”) The dynamic on the right, the authors found, “rewards the most popular and widely viewed channels at the very top of the media ecosystem for delivering stories, whether true or false, that protect the team, reinforce its beliefs, attack opponents, and refute any claims that might threaten ‘our’ team from outsiders.” Referring to the orgy-island story, the authors note that “not one right-wing outlet came out to criticize and expose this blatant lie for what it was. In the grip of the propaganda feedback loop, the right-wing media ecosystem had no mechanism for self-correction, and instead exhibited dynamics of self-reinforcement, confirmation, and repetition so that readers, viewers and listeners encountered multiple versions of the same story, over months, to the point that both recall and credibility were enhanced.”

Wait, so Trump didn’t rape that teenage model?

To be safe, should say that Trump didn’t rape that teenage model.

soul vs no soul

Too bad we ran off that totally nice and polite guy on the other side that could have assured us that this dogwhistling is simply anything BUT racism. The whole GOP can rot in hell, die in a fire, whatever. I’m sick of their bullshit.