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Saturday, October 24, 2009

So What's the Big Deal About Fox News?

Joe Klein's panties are in a wad.
Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

But I don't understand why the White House would give such poisonous helium balloons as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity the opportunity for still greater spasms of self-inflation by declaring war on Fox.

If the problem is that stories bloated far beyond their actual importance--ACORN's corruption, Van Jones's radical past--are in danger of leaching out of the Fox hothouse into the general media, then perhaps the Administration should be a bit more diligent about whom it hires and whom it funds.

If the problem is broader--that Fox News spreads seditious lies to its demographic sliver of an audience--the Administration should probably be stoic: the wingnuts will always be with us.

Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/10/23/outfoxed/#ixzz0UriKziNp
I think Joey needs to grab a couple of beers and watch some NFL this weekend. Joe goes on to advise the Administration to stop paying attention to Fox News, but it's couched in such enraged, distraught rhetoric that it's like he's screaming "there is no FIRE!" in a crowded theater.

What's the big deal here? I admit, I don't watch the news or read the newspapers any more, so I might be missing something, but from what little I've seen, I don't think that Fox is any more seditious or poisonous than anyone else. To give Joe some credit, he did put his finger on the real issue - Fox did, in fact, find some nuggets of truth. Van Jones was a racist kook and Anita Dunn really did find intellectual guidance in the greatest mass murderer of all time. In a world where the phrase "nappy-headed hos" is enough to temporarily trash a career, you'd think that showering praise on a guy who beat Hitler and Stalin going away would be something that would override little Joey's Wingnut Alarm-O-Meter.

I guess not. I guess that ideological purity beats real life. In the end, that's what Joe's spasms of rage against Fox seem like - proof to his "progressive" friends that he's just committed to The Cause as they are.

Maybe Joey needs to get a life.

1 comment:

  1. Joe Klein doesn't take words seriously. Sedition means advocating insurrection. In the context of our republic, it would be advocating the overthrow of the government and the replacement of our constitution extralegally. There is no sedition on Fox or any other network. Since Klein doesn't take words seriously, no one should take him seriously.

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