fox news

Fairly unbalanced?

A newsroom memo informed Journal Sentinel staff Monday that David Paulsen will be joining the paper in a week to become breaking news editor. The memo added:

For the last five years David has run the evening and overnight operation at FoxNews.com in New York. At Fox he was in charge of a team very much like our Newshub, shaping its urgent response to national and international breaking news. He had responsibilities over story assigning and editing as well as production and news placement on the site.

Women journalists at the paper are not amused, especially since the paper continues its recent tradition of placing men in all the important editor jobs. The memo was leaked to blogging national media watchdog Jim Romenesko, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter now based in Evanston, Illinois. See link below for the full skinny.

Last February, while driving back to Milwaukee after protesting at the Capital in Madison, My fellow protesters and I stopped at the McDonalds in Lake Mills. The TV in McDonalds was tunes to Fox News, so I took it upon myself to change the channel to get some real news. To my dismay the McDonald's TV was programmed to only view Fox News. Thats right! No alternatives were even technically available. My fellow protesters were rightly upset but spent our time on other issues, such as the recall. This morning, March 8, 2012, my wife and I visited the McDonalds in Greenfield near Highway 100 and Layton. Again, over a year later at a McDonald's sixty miles from Lake Mills, only Fox news was available for viewing. My wife politely asked one of the workers to change the channel. She said that she could not, that Fox was the only channel available.

So I thought I was going to have another Jay Inslee story for y’all today, but it turns out that I’m going to have to do more research before we can “come to press” with that one.

But that’s OK, because the world’s been busy doing a lot of other things – and while many of them get media coverage, some don’t get a lot of notice at all. And of course, there are also those stories that look one way at first glance…but look a lot different when you dig a bit deeper.

We’ll hit a few of those today, have a bit of fun doing it, and get ready for what promises to be another busy week of strategically not doing things in Washington.

To make things even better, some of the stories will be real, and some won’t.

We’ll see if you can tell the difference.

In a segment saved at the URL below, Fox News wingnut/blowhard Bill O'Reilly discusses the allegedly chaotic and even violent Wisconsin rallies against the Walker power grab, while the show's producers run stock footage of angry, shoving and shouting demonstrators -- with no snow on the ground and palm trees in the background. I guess we really need to get to work on that global warming thing after all.

Of course, aside from Fox News buffoonery is the network's constant warping of truth, which has prompted Wisconsin protesters anywhere in sight of a Fox News crew to begin shouting, "Fox News lies!" The second link takes you to a Media Matters page that lists some of the more outrageous Fox misstatements on the Wisconsin situation:

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/510268/o%27reilly_misleads_...

Apparently Fox News did not relish the prospect of having a Democratic candidate debate that did not include any of the front-running candidates. Since Edwards, Clinton, and Obama refused to appear in the debates if held on Fox, it would have been an interesting evening. So they cancelled.

Fox says they are planning on rescheduling the debate, but it's hard to see what will change later on. This is not a "scheduling conflict" as the Congressional Black Caucus is saying, unless "nobody wants to come" counts as a scheduling conflict.

It is heartening to see some of the presidential candidates have enough spine to refuse to play in the court of the conservatives. Now if they would only consistently grow enough spine to stop appeasing the policies of the current administration in their campaign appearances, perhaps they could win back the good will of the majority of Americans who do not support the Bush administration.  And we could get on with the American way of life.