beck, hannity and Fox (pretends to be) News

            Periodically, I force myself to visit Fox (I refuse to add the second word of their official title) and endure the pain of watching Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity (or O’Reilly, Palin, Gingrich, Malkin—pick your Fox fanatic) do what they do.  I do this, I suppose, on the theory that a little suffering is good for the soul, a carryover no doubt from my early days as a captive of Catholicism.

            A while back, Beck’s show happened to be the one I visited.  I got there in time to see the start of a video he had prepared, the title of which I believe was something like, The Puppet Master? (I remember the question mark—may have the words a little off).  With horror film like music playing forebodingly in the background while images of disasters dating back to the 1920’s were displayed, a voice track said—and I’m paraphrasing here, I couldn’t grab my audio recorder quickly enough—Eighty years ago, George Soros entered this world.  Little did the world know then that economies would collapse, world wars would ensue, countries would crumble.  And one billionaire would just happen to find himself in the middle of it all.”

            Beck would go on to accuse Soros of creating a “shadow government,” the purpose of which is the instigation of coups in countries like Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Georgia and a couple of others I don’t recall.  His evidence for this?  Well, there was none that anyone cognizant of the meaning of the word evidence would accept, but there was the “fact” Beck found interesting that Soros had plowed money into all of them. (What is a fact is that Soros has given money to his Open Society Foundation, which supports democracy movements in many countries.)

            He concluded this little spot with another “fact” he found interesting—that as a teenager in Hungary during WWII, Soros had essentially looted the estate of a fellow Jew who had been forced to flee Hungary.  What this had to do with Soros as a leader of a “shadow government” bent on taking over the world I’m not sure—unless it was to imply that a Jew who would take advantage of a fellow Jew’s misfortune was clearly capable of any level of malfeasance.

            My ears pricked up at that little bit because I had finished not too long before a well-researched and documented biography of Soros by Michael Kaufman in which he describes in detail how Soros, at 13, had been taken under the protection of a wealthy Christian family.  The scion of that family was ordered to inventory the estate of a wealthy Jewish aristocrat who had fled Hungary, and when he journeyed to carry out that order, he took Soros with him.  While his protector inventoried the estate (taking nothing from it), Soros wandered the grounds, rode one of the horses and generally kept himself out of the way.  He never took anything.  Something even the most elementary research on the subject of his segment would have revealed to Beck.

            I recount that story because it is indicative of what Beck and Hannity do regularly on their programs—lie.  Now that’s a strong word and a strong accusation I know.  And on the rare occasions it is actually applied by mainstream pundits to Beck or Hannity, they either jump immediately to the victim card—the liberal media is out to get them—or they loudly deny.  Or, on the couple of occasions that the media has stayed on them doggedly enough and proven conclusively that what they said wasn’t true,  they excuse themselves on the basis of ignorance.  They just didn’t know what they were saying was untrue.

            The question that begs of course is why didn’t they?  Their programs air on national TV.  Doesn’t that give them an obligation to be sure what they are saying is true before they say it?  One would think so, but that is coming from a progressive point of view where facts are still held in some esteem. A book chapter could be filled with examples of both Beck and Hannity using their cable platforms to spew out information they knew was false—or should have known unless they are truly too stupid to deserve a television platform.  In the interest of space, I’m going to include just one example from each person’s show

            Full disclosure first.  I’m not such a fan of the therapeutic value of suffering that I watch either Beck or Hannity religiously.  Both of the examples I’m about to recount are things I did see myself on at least one episode of their daily soap operas, but I’m using  an excellent book by John Amato and David Neiwert called Over the Cliff for the full details.

            Let’s do Beck first.  You may recall about 10 months or so into Obama’s presidency, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn was quoted in Time magazine as saying that what Fox offered was “opinion journalism masquerading as news.”  Not surprisingly, this hit Fox like raw meat in a piranha pool, and both Beck and Hannity were among the loudest decrying Ms. Dunn.  For Beck, getting Ms. Dunn became a mission.

            The first shot in that mission occurred on Oct. 15, when he aired a video of a commencement address Dunn had given at a high school earlier that year.  In it she said:
“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite philosophers: Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa—not often coupled with one another , but the two people I turn to most to deliver a simple point which is you’re going to make choices.”

            Dunn went to on to note how when Mao was reminded of how insurmountable the odds against being able to overcome the government were, he responded, “you fight your war, I’ll fight mine,”  meaning of course that he had the ability to choose a different way to accomplish his goal.  Mother Teresa, when asked to bring the magic she had done in Calcutta to another region, famously replied, “find your own Calcutta.”  Both people were suggesting that our obligation as humans is to make our own choices and find our own way.

            What grabbed Beck was the name Mao.  Beck had been engaged for a couple months in trying to prove that the Obama administration was replete with “closet Marxists” who were intent on invisibly subverting the American way of life.  That his communication director would quote Mao could only mean one thing—she was one of the closet Marxists.  (Had Beck been concerned about his homework, he would have noted that his hero, George W, fairly regularly quoted and referred to Mao.  Or perhaps he did do that homework, but didn’t find it convenient to attach the Marxist label to W)

            That rant apparently didn’t gain much traction, so on Oct. 19, Beck amped it up a bit.  (This was the episode I saw.)  Here, he edited the clip so that all the audience heard was “ Mao Tse-tung and Mother Teresa—not often coupled with one another but the two people I turn to most . . .”  In his typically aggrieved way, he emphasized the words “the two people I turn to most . . .”, then played the clip again and emphasized those words again.  Not to be outdone, Hannity played the same mutilated clip and emphasized the same seven words.

            Was Beck lying?  Not actually.  Was he telling the truth?  Far from it.  No where in that speech did Dunn say anything that a reasonable person could interpret as agreeing with Mao’s Marxist principles.  She was clearly using one statement of his to make a rather banal point about staying true to yourself and making your own choices.  What makes this example, in my mind at least, so egregious is that when the full text of what Dunn said didn’t cause any ripples, Beck had no problem of conscience with cherry-picking out the words he wanted and then interpreting them in a way he knew their author never intended.

            Let’s grab a quick example of Hannity similarly ignoring facts that were readily available.  Obama had appointed an openly gay man, Kevin Jennings, to be one of his education advisors.  In 1994, Jennings had written a book entitled One Teacher in Ten in which he described a situation where a male sophomore had come to him for counseling about his sexual relationship with an older man.  In his book, Jennings said, “I listened, sympathized, and offered advice.”  Hannity didn’t even do the original spade work on this one.  The Family Research Council (yes, James Dobson’s infamous group) cherry picked that incident and used it to conclude that Jennings was “a radical homosexual activist.”  On his Sept. 30 show (the one I saw), Hannity actually devoted most of his program to Jennings, during which he argued that “at the very least, statutory rape occurred.  And [Jennings] didn’t report it.”

            In Virginia, statutory rape occurs whenever someone 15 or younger is abused.  All Jennings said in his book was that the student was a sophomore, which meant he could have been as young as 14 or as old as 16.  One would think that before charging a presidential advisor with the crime of failing to report statutory rape, Hannity would have done a little homework and found out exactly how old the student was.  Instead, one of two things happened: he did the homework and chose to ignore what it revealed, or he didn’t bother to do the homework.  A few days later, Media Matters produced a birth certificate that showed the student was 16 at the time. 

            Fox quietly ran a correction to Hannity’s charge a few days later, but did so on its web site, not on air.  Nor did the truth get in Hannity’s way.  Over the next 10 days, Hannity ran 12 segments attacking Jennings, and while he didn’t use the words statutory rape in any of them, he didn’t retract his earlier use of them either.  Instead, he railed against Jennings’ impropriety in not making it clear to the student that what he was doing was wrong.

            Who was it (Harry Truman, Mark Twain?) who said there are lies and there are damn lies?  My question is how exactly does the first amendment give a television personality—or the network on which he appears—the right to knowingly prevaricate.  Every news organization gets things wrong now and then, but responsible ones quickly admit their mistake and take responsibility for it.  At Fox, Roger Ailes seems to have taken the position that his pundits can say whatever they want, however far from truth or reality it might be, because they are somehow separate from “the news side.”

            Even that fiction is hard to maintain, however, when you look at some of the things that have made it to the “news side.”  On Beck’s Oct. 23 show (another one I saw) he appeared on stage with a baseball bat which he waved about while engaging in a wandering rant about how the Obama administration’s desire to “get Fox” by limiting its access to administration officials was Chicago-style politics at its roughest.  To underscore his point, he played clips from the Kevin Costner/Robert deNiro film, The Untouchables, including one in which deNiro’s Al Capone character bashed in the head of an adversary with a bat that looked very similar to Beck’s. 

            Two days later, on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, surely part of  Fox’s news side, Wallace played one of the clips Beck had played—this one of Sean Connery saying “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.  He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of  his to the morgue.  That’s the Chicago way.”

            Wallace watched the clip, then intoned, “the latest chapter in the Chicago way was that the administration made an effort this week to use the White House pool—that’s the—all the five major networks—to try to exclude Fox from interviewing pay czar Ken Feinberg.”

            In fact,  Fox hadn’t been excluded—it had simply not requested to join the other pool reporters in the interview.  When Anita Dunn (yes, that one) was notified by pool members that Fox wasn’t on the list, she made sure that Major Garrett, Fox’s chief White House correspondent was put on the list.  Garret confirmed that Fox had not been excluded.  Somehow, Wallace never got around to correcting that little boo-boo on air.

            No one wants truth police scouring the airwaves (or bandwidths) for lies, distortions or propoganda.  ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN do everything they can to make sure what they say on air is accurate and to correct it when they do err.  Even MSNBC does a halfway decent job of self-policing.  Only Fox feels comfortable with bending, distorting, ignoring or simply denying facts that don’t suit its political agenda.  Perhaps the government should start charging Fox the going rate for info-mercials and let them say whatever they want.