Where Right-Wing Extremists Get Their News

I was at the gym and forced to view Fox News on the giant HDTV in front of the treadmills.  I saw and heard one lie after another, to the point that I realized that people who only use Fox News as a news source have no clue about what is really going on in this country.  I knew that Fox delivered some misinformation, but I had never realized the extent of their propaganda until now.  Very few facts emerged from the broadcast.  Nearly all of it was opinion in the guise of news.

They even have their own set of “facts”. For instance, while today’s news said that unemployment claims were down, and lower than expected, the Fox News and Friends crew said that the “real” unemployment rate was 16.9%.  They admitted that they were not using government figures, but I say, why stop at 16.9%?  Why not make it 39%?  That sounds so much worse than a paltry 16.9%.

I wonder if they ever applied their “real unemployment” calculations to George W. Bush during the first recession while he was in office?  I think not.

When I got back from the gym, I decided to log on to www.FoxNation.com.  Let’s just say it was like viewing  a portal to an alternate reality.  When a person commenting on one of the stories said that they were being lied to by Fox this was the reply of one FoxNation user:

“NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC, and CBS have been bought and paid for by the left”, “Fox the wall Street Journal and a select few others are the only true journalism going right now”.

In case you did not know, the Wall Street Journal and Fox are both owned by Rupert Murdoch.  He has transformed the Wall Street Journal into a fact-free tabloid, with  extreme pro-Republican editorials almost every day.

I looked through the articles, and I saw one titled (emphasis mine),

“Second Quarter GDP Dropped 1 Percent, As Projected”

I knew that actually the GDP did not drop as much as had been predicted, so I started to read the article.  Here’s what the first paragraph said:

WASHINGTON — The economy shrank at an annual rate of 1 percent in the spring, a better-than-expected showing and more evidence that the recession is drawing to a close.

Do FoxNation.com readers not see the inconsistency between the “as projected” in the headline and the “better-than-expected showing” in the actual article.  Obviously, the “as projected” was added to the headline to take any shine off of the signs of an improving economy and avoid giving Obama and the stimulus package any credit.

Despite understanding the motive, it is important to remember that this is still lying.

I decided to take a screen-capture of the page, which in any other web site, would be considered a parody of a Republican web site.  However, it is not a parody, and it is both funny and frightening to see the biased and bigoted reporting taking place there.   It is only funny if you can make yourself not think about how many people are being outright deceived by Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party.

I took a screenshot of the FoxNation.com home page and made some annotations.  I noticed that they mix editorial content with supposedly factual news stories and never identify them as opinion pieces at all.  I highlighted the most blatantly political articles and added my own comments to the page.

This is the small image version of the FoxNation Home Page with annotations and may be hard to read.  You can click on the image itself to see a full size image.

(Click image to see larger view)