Fox News: Palm Trees in Madison, WI

Last night Bill O'Reilly and Madison correspondent Mike Tobin were discussing the Wisconsin protesters.

According to the accompanying footage, things must really be heating up around the state capitol:

 

I know I've spent many a day sitting under the palm trees of Lake Fucking Mendota.

What a disgrace. Of course, they parse it in the graphic with a generic "union protests" so they can later claim they weren't trying to represent the Wisconsin protests.

 

Fox News has flipped on global warming! Suck it conservatives!

 

How many times has FNC "accidently" put a D on a disgraced politician's name? And even poor Ron Paul was the victim of one of FNC's purely-innocent-and-in-no-way-political mistakes when 2010 footage of him being booed at CPAC was used with a story about him winning the 2011 CPAC straw poll. Or gosh-it-was-an-honest-mistake reversed the results of poll that showed 61 percent of Americans didn't think Wisconsin should strip collective bargaining from public employees.

FNC must have some really shitty control room employees. Probably because they're unionized or something.

 

Not just the generic graphic, but when O'Reilly asked the reporter which organizations were bringing in out-of-state protesters, the guy said, "It would take to long to explain each and every organization that brought people in." What is that?

But the footage of some other protest? Shameless.

 

Translation: "I have no proof, but I know you'll let me slide, since this is Fox."

And of course there was the instance last week where they had poll numbers reversed re the Wisconsin collective bargaining issue.

Fox News: We distort; You're deceived.

 

As one of the board's most wingnut of liberals, I hate to drop a turd in this punch bowl...

BUT...

I have a good friend who spent 6-7 years inside the heart of Fox News, running control rooms of some of their biggest shows. He tells me that he was surrounded by interns and fresh-out-of-college kids who barely knew their head from their ass, but they were inexpensive and thus were employed by a notoriously cheap company. He says that almost all of the on-screen errors (lower thirds/chyrons and broll like from the clip above) can be traced back NOT to some conservative agenda on the part of the Fox employees, but more to their inexperience and inability while working under a notoriously tight and hectic deadline.

He said the line staff of the shows -- the bulk of the people responsible for what you actually see on air -- couldn't care less about the politics that the hosts were spouting. As an anecdotal example, he cited the huge stack of conservative magazines and newspapers that were regularly delivered to the newsroom and break rooms -- all of which sat unread, week after week.

Guests? Hosts? Senior producers? Network execs? Yep -- all very right wing. But the staff in general, not so much.

 

I believe that.

 

When you're paying your talent multi-millions, you've got to make up for it somewhere in your budget. Fox does it on line staff and overseas bureaus.

 

Fox News: We're not pursuing a sinister right-wing agenda, we're just incompetent!

 

Fox sucks Koch