The Tea Party boycotted Fox News for the second time this month, saying the cable network is too liberal.
Tea Party members organized the second boycott of Fox News from Thursday, March 21 at 6 a.m. through Sunday, March 24 at 6 a.m. because they say the channel "turned Left," according to the blog Benghazi Truth.
The blog alleges that the Obama administration organized a media-supported "cover-up" of the events surrounding the 2012 attacks on an American diplomatic mission at Benghazi in Libya. ...
Stan Hjerleid of Fort Collins, Colo. posted a "Guest Daily Memo" on Benghazi Truth on Mar. 13 explaining why Tea Party supporters like himself are boycotting Fox News.
Hjerleid’s blog post alleges that media outlets are using techniques "used by Hitler" in order to "indoctrinate the masses." ...
Hjerleid writes that "we need to be careful what we see and hear" on the news.
"If we keep silent about (Fox News') shortcomings, then they can get away with shading their coverage further Left," Hjerleid writes. "I for one oppose that. They can make adjustments or I will get my news elsewhere."
Hmm,... you have to wonder where they're going to go to get their news with even more of a right-wing slant than Fox, don't you?
But I'll bet that Fox 'News' is loving this! I'm not kidding. Getting criticized for being too liberal just helps them pretend to be 'fair and balanced.' See, we must be right in the middle if we're being criticized from both sides.
And Benghazi Truth is loving the attention, of course. They note that "Newsweek, Salon and the like are sending many thousands of opinionated liberal readers here every day." (They also explain that they delete liberal comments, because, well,... liberals censor conservatives, too! Heh, heh.)
What they don't do is link to any of the articles written about them. Oh, they're very pleased with the attention, and they proudly note articles in Newsweek and other bastions of liberalism. They even show a very tiny section of a screenshot as their way of quoting an article.
But they don't provide a link to any of them. After all, they wouldn't want their readers tempted to step out of the right-wing echo chamber, would they?
And it's really a right-wing echo chamber, too. These people are still unrepentant Birthers, in fact. Yeah, President Obama's long-form birth certificate isn't going to fool them!
Sure, this is funny - hilarious, even - but it's not good news for sane people. As I noted, the very fact that Fox News is getting criticized for being too liberal will help them deceive ordinary Americans.
People who are completely clueless about this stuff - and there are a lot of those people in America - will see this as just confirming the lies Fox News says about itself, that it's actually 'fair and balanced.' Well, why else would they be getting criticism from both sides?
And note the recent Pew poll which found that a majority of Republicans don't think that the U.S. Supreme Court is conservative. Only 15% of Republicans think that the current Supreme Court is conservative - and less than half of Democrats, too! Incredible, isn't it?
As TPM points out, this Supreme Court is the most conservative we've seen since the 1930s:
The median justice during the Roberts Court is more conservative than at any time during the last 75 years, according to a statistical method developed by legal scholars Andrew Martin of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and Kevin Quinn of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
When he was appointed in 1975 by President Ford, Justice John Paul Stevens was considered one of the court’s more conservative members. By the time he retired in 2010, he was heralded as its liberal lion.
The high court’s rightward trajectory mirrors the broader national shift over the last several decades. President Bush sealed a five-member conservative majority by appointing Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
By contrast, justices appointed by Democratic presidents have grown less liberal, with President Obama’s two picks shifting the court further to the right, according to Martin and Quinn.
Five of the 10 most conservative justices since 1937 serve today, according to a separate 2008 study by judge Richard Posner and law professor William Landes.
Barack Obama's two picks have been more moderate than liberal, and that's only caused the court to become even more conservative on average. (Not that "average" counts much. Most decisions these days are 5 to 4, with the five right-wing Republicans on the court in the majority. In a case like that, I don't suppose it would matter how liberal the minority was.)
But no matter who Obama picks, Republicans scream about how liberal they are. And the media tend to report what 'both sides' say, without commenting on the reality of those claims. So claiming that the Supreme Court is liberal, even when that's laughably ridiculous, will convince many people that it must be, at least, moderate.
Most Americans simply don't pay much attention - and not at all, often enough, until a few weeks before election time. This has been disastrous for our country in the last few decades, as PR flaks have become better and better at using the vast sums of money flooding into our political system (even before Citizens United really opened the floodgates).
So, although I still laugh at stuff like this, it might actually benefit the right-wing. Sure, these people are obviously crazy. But, in comparison, that might make other crazy people on the right seem relatively sane.
They're not. And if we start thinking that Fox 'News' is in the middle, we'll really be in trouble. If we start thinking that the far-right loons on the Supreme Court are moderates, what's next (especially since today's Republicans can't stand moderates)?
It seems like our nation has lurched so far to the right that we can't even recognize the middle anymore. Now that's scary!
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