Fox News

There’s really no one who better represents the insidious nature of the Fox project than Kelly. Hannity and O’Reilly are packaged and sold as right-wing shouters. Kelly’s an “anchor” who professes to have no partisan bias of her own. And she could very well be telling the truth! She doesn’t need to personally believe the things she says, after all. When she casually refers to the tax burden on “the so-called rich” (so called because they are, generally), she’s just doing her job. When Kelly, in the midst of excoriating a Democrat, claims that Fox personalities don’t regularly compare liberals and Democrats to Nazis, everyone (besides some unknown non-savvy portion of her audience) knows we’re not supposed to take her seriously.

I imagine that perma-sneer, that disgusted look of disbelieving contempt that remains plastered on Kelly’s face during the entirety of “America Live,” disappears the minute the red light on top of the camera goes off, because Megyn Kelly doesn’t actually give a shit about the National Day of Prayer or seriously believe the New Black Panther Party represents a threat to democracy. She’s just happy to have a job doing something she loves: being a reliable bile-delivery system for a massive political messaging organization.

Recently, in an argument with some repulsive talk radio hack, Kelly defended not just her own paid maternity leave — the sort of professional perk that a high-powered attorney like herself would (justifiably!) feel totally entitled to — but went on to seemingly endorse European-style government-mandated paid leave for all, including fathers. The fact that a pre-leave Kelly had savagely mocked the idea of paternity leave is amusing but unsurprising. She’s a former attorney. Her primarily professional skill is convincingly making whatever argument you pay her to make. (She said as much to Rebecca Dana, in fact.) Which is so much worse and hackier than being a simple ideologue.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Her offhand claim that police pepper spray is “a food product, essentially,” which seems like a very rough first draft of a right-wing talking point that was not quite ready for standard use by the noise machine.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

If I were a libertarian, I’d be embarrassed by Stossel’s prominence. Sneering contempt for supposed liberal shibboleths is not actually a well-considered political philosophy. There’s nothing “libertarian,” for example, about not believing in climate change. That’s just tribal corporatism, totally disconnected from any economics-based belief about the superiority of market forces over government industrial policy.

Stossel rehashes received wisdom without truly understanding, let alone questioning, any of it, which is basically what conservatives think every leftist college student is doing. The limits of his conclusion-first mode of advocacy journalism are exposed when he’s forced to apologize for reporting his predetermined conclusions even when the evidence doesn’t bear them out, like when he attempted to report that organic produce (which hippies and liberals like) is more dangerous than conventional produce (which is grown and picked by the great free market god, who bestows his grace on giant agribusiness conglomerates), only for it to be revealed that his own tests showed no such thing.

Of course, it’s perfectly libertarian to profess not to see what exactly is unfair or exploitative about the widespread practice of unpaid internships, a system that provides profitable organizations with free labor while offering work experience only to college students privileged enough to devote significant amounts of time to unpaid internships. “I built my career on unpaid interns,” Mr. Stossel says, which does at least explain the quality of research that goes into his specials.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
In which Stossel plays a clip from the film “Gasland,” a documentary exposing the dangers of natural gas extraction for people living near the extraction sites, and then announces that it is perfectly normal for your tap water to contain highly flammable amounts of methane. “Weird stuff happens,” Stossel says. The fact that a peer-reviewed study showed that water wells close to natural gas mines had 17 times the levels of methane in the water than wells farther away from fracturing sites is just one of those nutty coincidences.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Fox has indulged its audience’s brief surges of affection for unelectable fringe candidates, from Trump through Cain, but the channel’s always been careful to remind the base that they may eventually have to hold their noses and vote for Romney. Karl Rove, who’s already running a shadow campaign against Obama, has made this point explicitly during his Fox appearances.

Romney went from trailing in the Fox News appearances list to getting more uninterrupted airtime over the last week than any other candidate. But Gingrich beat him in minutes the week before. And Newt was just on Hannity last night, where he seemed much more comfortable than Romney did in his earlier sit-down with Bret Baier, a tougher interviewer by any standard.

Watching Fox this morning, clips of Gingrich’s Hannity interview were replayed multiple times. Ron Paul’s devastating anti-Gingrich ad was excerpted for a minute, followed by a clip of Romney sounding like he believed in anthropogenic climate change.

The network seems, in other words, undecided at the moment, or at least willing to see if Gingrich can pull this out without humiliating himself like he always does. The Rovians may yet win the day, but for now Fox seems to be joining the GOP base in convincing itself that Gingrich is electable.

Ortega-Hernandez will soon be a minor historical footnote, like the guy who tried to crash a plane into Nixon’s White House, Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, the weird guy who may have been a part of a secret plot to kill or scare Jimmy Carter, John Hinkley, the guy who tried to crash an airplane into Bill Clinton’s White House, the guy who fired bullets at Bill Clinton’s White House and the guy who fired bullets at George W. Bush’s White House. What did all of these people have in common? Their motives were … slightly difficult for rational people to comprehend. They tended to be paranoid and disturbed and their stated reasons for wishing the president dead were usually fairly incoherent.

Ortega-Hernandez wanted to kill President Obama because Ortega-Hernandez thought himself the second coming of Jesus Christ and was convinced Barack Obama was the antichrist. It’d hard to make any sort of coherent political point out of that.

But because of a bad bit of reporting — bad but understandable — ABC initially said that police suspected Ortega-Hernandez had spent time at the Occupy DC encampment, before heading out to shoot the White House. Police may have suspected that, but there’s been no evidence whatsoever that it’s the case. (He seems to have more of a connection to Oprah than Occupy, but no one is calling him the “Oprah shooter.”)

The truth has not dissuaded Fox News from repeatedly referencing Ortega-Hernandez’s completely imaginary time spent at the Occupy camp. The NRA’s radio show did the same.

But the fact that it is now known that there has never been any evidence linking Ortega-Hernandez to any Occupy event anywhere has not stopped conservatives from … crying about liberal media bias against conservatives. John Nolte at Big Journalism says: “the MSM is working overtime to make sure no narrative is created from the suspected White House shooter’s connection to #OccupyDC.”

Right, because … there’s no connection. Except that some guy at Occupy San Diego said something stupid and regrettable about feeling sympathy for the crazy guy who shot at the White House. Which is, as “connections” go, a stretch!

So here we have a wholly invented right-wing meme based on fantasy and one out-of-context line from a now out-of-date news story, repeated endlessly in an attempt to unfairly smear a political movement they despise, and the fact that responsible media outlets aren’t repeating the smear is an example of the nefarious leftist media conspiracy. Sorry the New York Times isn’t repeating this particular lie, guys!

I for one wonder why the media ins’t investigating the shooter’s connections to the University of Texas College Republicans.