This article clearing points out how Fox News influenced the election of Bush in 2000 and since then have been a propaganda arm for the right since then.
Those people on the right who are so convinced that Fox has been telling the truth might be a bit horrified if they actually knew the truth, of how they were being manipulated in order to fulfill the maniacal dream of one man, whose entire purpose is to take down our current president.
It's a very long article, so if you don't want to read the whole thing, start at page 6 or 7, since the last half is the most fascinating.
How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory
What a crock of Bush stole the election BS written for people too stoopid to know which way the wind blows without having a weatherman tell them. RS and HC give Fox way too much credit.
The article has many other inaccuracies, but this seems to be the heart of it all. One of the reasons I canceled my RS subscription over 15 years ago.
From page 9 of the RS article:
But it was the election of George W. Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn't leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network's "decision desk" on election night - the consultant responsible for calling states for either Gore or Bush - was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush's first cousin. As a columnist at The Boston Globe, Ellis had recused himself from covering the campaign. "There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush's presidential campaign," he told his readers, "because in his case, my loyalty goes to him and not to you."
In any newsroom worthy of the name, such a conflict of interest would have immediately disqualified Ellis. But for Ailes, loyalty to Bush was an asset. "We at Fox News," he would later tell a House hearing, "do not discriminate against people because of their family connections." On Election Day, Ellis was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to declare Bush the winner - even though Florida was still rated too close to call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Hume announced Fox's call for Bush at 2:16 a.m. - a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to bush wins headlines in the morning papers.
"We'll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not," says Dan Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. "But when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical. Led by Fox, the narrative began to be that Bush had won the election."
Dwell on this for a moment: A "news" network controlled by a GOP operative who had spent decades shaping just such political narratives - including those that helped elect the candidate's father - declared George W. Bush the victor based on the analysis of a man who had proclaimed himself loyal to Bush over the facts. "Of everything that happened on election night, this was the most important in impact," Rep. Henry Waxman said at the time. "It immeasurably helped George Bush maintain the idea in people's minds that he was the man who won the election."
A behind-the-scenes look at the television networks' dismal performance on election night.
By Alicia C. Shepard Alicia C. Shepard, a former AJR senior writer, is National Public Radio's ombudsman.
Around 7:45 p.m., exit poll data, which began coming in at lunchtime, showed a 6.6 percent lead for Gore over Bush. But election analysts knew only a fool would call Florida for Gore based on exit poll information alone. As votes arrived from sample precincts carefully chosen to represent voters across the state, the model predicted a 5.4 percent lead for Gore. It indicated Gore needed a "critical value"—a statistical degree of certainty—of 2.6 or higher before any network could comfortably hand the vice president Florida. At 7:50 p.m., the "critical value" showed 3.2 for Gore. The Voter News Service model was more than 99.5 percent sure Gore would carry the state.
Under "status," at 7:50 p.m. the VNS screen said: "Call."
In the race to be first, NBC "won," jumping even before VNS at 7:49 p.m.
CBS waited one minute. Warren Mitofsky, who invented exit polls in 1967, has been in the race-calling business for 33 years. He ran CBS' election unit from 1972 until 1990 and is known for his caution. Mitofsky, working for CBS and CNN, had vote totals from 12 of 120 sample precincts and data from 38 exit poll precincts. Gore was doing so well that he concluded exit polls had been overstating Bush's numbers. "The real votes were telling us Gore was ahead," says Mitofsky. "The exit poll data gave us a slight lead for Gore, and the overlap of the two was telling us that the exit poll data should have given Gore more support."
There are three sources of data that VNS uses for its projections. Exit poll results, the least accurate of the three, come in three times during the day. They are only used to project winners. Once the polls close, raw votes from sample precincts are phoned in and measured against exit poll data. The tally that counts—the actual vote total—comes in throughout the evening.
At 7:50 p.m., Mitofsky and his partner, Joe Lenski, confidently instructed CBS and CNN to call Florida for Gore. Fox News Channel, in the presidential projection business for only the second time, followed suit at 7:52, joined by the Associated Press at 7:53 and CNN at 7:55. "The sad fact is that was a straightforward call," says Jonathan P. Wolman, AP's executive editor. "VNS' projection material provides a guidepost that warns you statistically if there's a bias in the material that might skew the results. In this case, that bias indicator said it might be underestimating Gore's advantage."
This article clearing points out how Fox News influenced the election of Bush in 2000 and since then have been a propaganda arm for the right since then.
Those people on the right who are so convinced that Fox has been telling the truth might be a bit horrified if they actually knew the truth, of how they were being manipulated in order to fulfill the maniacal dream of one man, whose entire purpose is to take down our current president.
It's a very long article, so if you don't want to read the whole thing, start at page 6 or 7, since the last half is the most fascinating.
Unreported (to the best of my knowledge) in either the left or right channels of the corporate media: a clause in Wisconsin's kill the union bill to allow Gov. Scott Walker to sell Wisconsin's state owned utilities in a no bid process. Some of you may be aware that the Koch brothers, who donated almost half a million directly or indirectly to Gov. Walker's campaign, have made billions consolidating energy companies.
Unreported (to the best of my knowledge) in either the left or right channels of the corporate media: a clause in Wisconsin's kill the union bill to allow Gov. Scott Walker to sell Wisconsin's state owned utilities in a no bid process. Some of you may be aware that the Koch brothers, who donated almost half a million directly or indirectly to Gov. Walker's campaign, have made billions consolidating energy companies.
Shocked. I am shocked.
The Koch brothers involving themselves in politics for personal gain? Shocking.
Unreported (to the best of my knowledge) in either the left or right channels of the corporate media: a clause in Wisconsin's kill the union bill to allow Gov. Scott Walker to sell Wisconsin's state owned utilities in a no bid process. Some of you may be aware that the Koch brothers, who donated almost half a million directly or indirectly to Gov. Walker's campaign, have made billions consolidating energy companies.
By JEREMY W. PETERS and VERNE G. KOPYTOFF, The New York Times
The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.
The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.
The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.
Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.
By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.
The deal has the potential to create an enterprise that could reach more than 100 million visitors in the United States each month. For The Huffington Post, which began as a liberal blog with a small staff but now draws some 25 million visitors every month, the sale represents an opportunity to reach new audiences. For AOL, which has been looking for ways to bring in new revenue as its dial-up Internet access business declines, the millions of Huffington Post readers represent millions in potential advertising dollars.
It will be interesting to see if this is another AOL deal that is poisonous for both sides or whether AOL becomes the Fox News of the left.
March 8, 2012:
Arianna Huffington announced today that she was purchasing the Huffington Post and related properties from the creditors of the bankrupt AOL. Final terms were not announced but the purchase price was expected to be in the neighborhood of $2.5M.
By JEREMY W. PETERS and VERNE G. KOPYTOFF, The New York Times
The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.
The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.
The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.
Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.
By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.
The deal has the potential to create an enterprise that could reach more than 100 million visitors in the United States each month. For The Huffington Post, which began as a liberal blog with a small staff but now draws some 25 million visitors every month, the sale represents an opportunity to reach new audiences. For AOL, which has been looking for ways to bring in new revenue as its dial-up Internet access business declines, the millions of Huffington Post readers represent millions in potential advertising dollars.
There is a curfew in effect in Egypt, but thousands of protesters remain in the streets in Cairo, Suez, Alexandria and across the rest of the country. President Hosni Mubarak is expected to speak soon. Police might've fired tear gas at praying demonstrators. And Fox reported on how ICE arrested some immigrant sex offenders in Virginia.
Fox, CNN and MSNBC are all acquitting themselves better than they did the day Tunisia's government collapsed. All of them have reporters in Cairo, and are airing footage of the demonstrations on the streets. But none of them are reporting on the situation as compellingly as Al Jazeera English, which has reporters across the country. And if you're in the United States, you can probably only see Al Jazeera English online. If you're watching Al Jazeera, you're seeing uninterrupted live video of the demonstrations, along with reporting from people actually on the scene, and not "analysis" from people in a studio. The cops were threatening to knock down the door of one of its reporters minutes ago. Fox has moved on to anchor babies. CNN reports that the ruling party building is on fire, but Al Jazeera is showing the fire live.
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