Wake Up: Fox News Is Right-Wing Propaganda

If you do not know by now that the Fox "News" Channel is in fact a outlet for right-wing propaganda, then you must either be living under a rock or watching the Fox "News" Channel.

Their first trick is to deceive their audience into thinking that they are not a right-wing propaganda outlet. After that, they can say whatever they want, and their audience will believe them because the audience thinks the propaganda is news.

While those of us who are realists have been denouncing the FNC for their right-wing bias, slant, propaganda, and tactics, the FNC and its audience has denied our claims, the traditional media has ignored our claims, and the majority of the public are too busy with their own lives to care.

Well, with a recent push by liberal and progressive blogs and entities, we are finally starting to gain some traction:

Republican Propaganda Is Not News

Over the past three weeks or so, the progressive movement – bloggers, Moveon.org, grassroots activists, filmmakers – pressured the Nevada Democratic Party to drop Fox News as the host of a presidential debate in August. In pursuing this short campaign, we made two basic arguments that were eventually accepted by party leaders.

First, we argued that Fox News is not a news channel, but a propaganda outlet that regularly distorts, spins, and falsifies information. Second, Fox News is heavily influenced or even controlled by the Republican Party itself. As such, we believe that Fox News on the whole functions as a surrogate operation for the GOP. Treating Fox as a legitimate news channel extends the Republican Party’s ability to swift-boat and discredit our candidates. In other words, Fox News is a direct pipeline of misinformation from the GOP leadership into the traditional press.

Thankfully, Fox News immediately proved our point with a press release after the debate cancellation that made the following remarkable claim: "News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic caucus which appears to be controlled by radical, fringe, out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party."

John Edwards had already decided not to participate in the debate before it was cancelled, and the FNC attacked him for doing so. Barack Obama had been attacked by them several times before he decided to freeze them out completely. These men have set bold and appropriate examples of how to deal with the FNC's unfair and unbalanced brand of "journalism".

More and more, as the examples pour in, liberal and progressive watchdog organizations (like Media Matters for America and News Hounds) and blogs are pointing out the FNC's flaws and blatant bias. Here are two recent posts from Crooks and Liars:

Crazy Fox Propaganda

Fair and Balanced Propaganda Pt.2The FNC are only part of the right-wing machine, but they are a large part. Sen. Clinton talked about another part of the machine recently:

Clinton: Right-Wing Conspiracy Is Back

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday described past Republican political malfeasance in New Hampshire as evidence of a ``vast, right-wing conspiracy.'' Clinton's barbed comments revived a term she coined for the partisan plotting during her husband's presidential tenure and echoed remarks she made last weekend in New Hampshire, which holds the nation's first primary.

[...]Clinton asserted on Tuesday that the conspiracy is alive and well, and cited as proof the Election Day 2002 case of phone jamming in New Hampshire, a case in which two Republican operatives pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and a third was convicted.

``To the New Hampshire Democratic Party's credit, they sued and the trail led all the way to the Republican National Committee,'' Clinton said.

``So if anybody tells you there is no vast, right-wing conspiracy, tell them that New Hampshire has proven it in court,'' she said.

The article's title is a bit misleading. The vast right-wing conspiracy never left, so it can't be "back".

The VWRC claim for which Sen. Clinton was ridiculed ten years ago was true then and it is true now. Whether the attacks come from

the well-documented efforts by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife to fund a network of anti-Clinton investigations.

, the FNC, or the dirty campaign tactics of Karl Rove, the VWRC is alive and well, and all Americans should work to ensure that our country is free from their lies, their deceit, and their propaganda.