Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Fox News’
April 15th, 2013 at 5:08 pm
Me on Fox About the Tea Parties

On Friday, Chris Stirewalt of Fox News, one of journalism’s true good guys, put me on his show, Power Play, to discuss the achievements and challenges of the Tea Party movement in their first four years, and where they go from here. Key takeaway: The Tea Parties are focusing more and more on state and local issues, and having some real success there.

 

February 9th, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Death of Deliberative Democracy?

If you’re someone who thinks that democracy works best when citizens and their representatives take time to deliberate (i.e. reason and think together), then a new Fox News/Bing collaboration will not excite you.

From Politico:

Bing is teaming up with Fox News to bring State of the Union viewers an interactive experience with real-time polling and social media aggregation.

The project is spearheaded by Microsoft’s Mark Penn, the Democratic strategist and pollster, and promises to meet the “growing need for up-to-the-minute political information and second-screen experiences that are a great companion to political broadcasts.”

Bing Pulse will allow anyone to vote every five seconds on their feelings about the address and the results will be shown live on the site and on Fox News Channel.

“We think this will be the largest live online poll in history,” Penn writes in an announcement of the project.

It’s also history’s most useless poll.  Allowing people “to vote every five seconds on their feelings” about a message as they’re hearing it would be great if we wanted to know people’s reactions to words instead of sentences.  It’s bad enough that most political dialogue has been reduced to competing sound bites.  But at least sound bites are designed to trigger reactions based on thoughts.  From Penn’s description, this new venture is tracking little more than raw emotion in five second intervals.

November 1st, 2012 at 8:18 am
Military Ballots Are Still a Problem

All over the country, there are reports of problems getting ballots to military personnel and contract civilians working abroad. This has been a problem for two years, largely because the Obama administration refuses to fully enforce the law requiring a certain set of procedures to help the ballots get there on time, etctera.

Last week, I was on local WKRG-TV to talk about this.

This continues my work on this; two years ago, I was on Fox News several times to discuss these problems.

This refusal/failure on the administration’s part is an outrage.

August 29th, 2012 at 2:47 pm
Teachers Union Spends $100,000 to Attack Fox News
Posted by Print

Now remember: they’re throughly nonpartisan and their main interest is the kids. From the Daily Caller:

A document the National Education Association filed with the U.S. Department of Labor in 2011 indicates that the teachers union donated $100,000 to Media Matters For America nearly two years ago, describing it as a payment for “public relations costs.” In the months that followed, Media Matters’ online coverage of teachers unions increased, focusing largely on attacking the Fox News Channel and other media outlets it considers “conservative” in nature.

… Since the date of the $100,000 payment, the liberal messaging group has published 41 separate articles online referring to the NEA and other teachers unions, each one staking out a position that’s favorable to organized labor and critical of a media outlet whose commentators disagree.

Almost universally, that media outlet has been the Fox News Channel. Of those 41 articles, 29 directly attacked Fox News or the name of a Fox host or contributor in their headlines. Many others attack Fox and its personnel more generally.

Remember this the next time the teachers unions plead hardship — they’ve still got six figures lying around to send to George Soros’ ankle-biters.

 

October 26th, 2011 at 10:03 pm
ACORN Joins the Group of Liberal Special Interests Backing Occupy Wall Street
Posted by Print

I’ve posted before on how the ‘Occupy’ protests — supposedly an outlet for the disenfranchised and underprivileged — have cast their lot with powerful left-wing special interests like the teachers unions. Now, according to Big Government, ACORN is getting in on the action:

Fox News reported earlier today that remnants of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the radical community organizing group that collapsed after its corruption was exposed by Big Government, are playing a “behind the scenes” role in organizing the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

The Fox News investigation followed Matthew Vadum’s report two weeks ago at Big Government that ACORN was paying people to attend the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York through the Working Families Party, an ACORN front group.

Now, Big Government has learned that in an email sent by Fithian to Occupy organizers and supporters on October 22, 2011, she reported that the “New Bottom Line”–an effort to move as much money out of major banks as possible on November 5th–is being led by several ACORN-linked organizations: “National People’s Action, National Pico Network, and Alliance for Just and Sustainable Economy and other key state groups like ACCE in CA, NYCC in NY, or MORE in St. Louis.”

I don’t begrudge these groups their ability to participate in these protests. That’s a natural consequence of the robust rights of free association present in a liberal society. What I do object to, however, is the ‘Occupy’ movement’s continued rhetorical claims to be a voice for the voiceless when it’s doing the bidding of some of the most powerful and well-heeled liberal special interests in the nation. This isn’t a left-wing revolution promoting “people power.” It’s just the same old tax-and-spend crowd, only this time on the sidewalks.

September 27th, 2011 at 4:08 pm
CFIF’s Quin Hillyer on Fox News: Obama DOJ Hiring Practices and Media Hypocrisy

CFIF Senior Fellow Quin Hillyer on Sunday appeared on Fox News  to discuss the extremely ideological and partisan hiring practices for career positions within the Obama Justice Department and the mainstream media’s virtual silence (read: hypocrisy) on the issue. 

In interviews with Fox News’ Shannon Bream (first on the America’s News Headquarters program, then during an extended discussion on Fox News’ Power Play), Hillyer recounted how the media, especially The New York Times and Washington Post,  relentlessly pursued allegations of conservative hiring practices in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department as an earth-shattering scandal, despite the fact that the Civil Rights Division of Bush’s DOJ  hired as many as two dozen known liberals for career positions.  But now, as Hillyer wrote in a piece on the issue several weeks ago, “Neither they nor any other establishment news organ seems the slightest bit perturbed now that, thanks to Pajamas Media, it is abundantly clear that the Obama Justice Department’s liberal hiring is far more politicized than anything the Bushies even dreamed of.”

Just how flagrant are the hiring practices in Obama’s DOJ?  As Hillyer wrote last month:

Now Pajamas Media has analyzed the hiring in five – count them, fivedifferent sections of DoJ. So far, those five sections in the Civil Rights Division have hired 70 lawyers. According to Pajamas, every single one – every single one, every single one, every single one – has boasted a resume full of ideologically leftist connections.

These people were members of groups like ‘Queer Resistance Front,’ ‘Intersex Society of North America,’ and of course People for the American Way.  Their published essays focused on issues such as ‘Genital Normalizing Surgery on Intersexed Infants’ and on arguing that providing material support for terrorism isn’t a war crime.  They, or those promoted, have histories of extracurricular activities that include getting arrested at a World Bank protest, going on a hunger strike while chaining oneself to an oak tree and doing advocacy work for ‘the rights of incarcerated native Hawaiians to dance the hula and perform Hawaiian chants and rituals in privately owned prisons in Arizona.’ A large number of them have donated significant campaign funds to Barack Obama, and some to other liberal candidates.

Not a single one has a single affiliation with any group seen as right of center. Actually, according to Pajamas, none is even apolitical. Instead, all are definitively liberal.

Hillyer goes on to point out that the issue isn’t merely a political matter, but one that has real-world policy consequences. 

Watch the FoxNews.com Power Play interview here

Watch the the America’s News Headquarters interview, care of our friends at Media Research Center, here.

October 28th, 2010 at 5:45 pm
DNC Chair is Nuts About His Party’s Situation

Tim Kaine, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the following during an interview that will air tonight on Fox News:

“I do think Democrats thinking that they can, you know, hold the Democratic label at arm’s length, I do think that’s nuts,” he said. “You put the label after your name, be proud of it.”

Kaine goes on to list legislation requiring equal pay for women and a taxpayer bailout of the auto industry as accomplishments that will resonate in “the reddest districts in America…”  If that’s the best the man in charge of Democratic fundraising can do to off-set the anger caused by ObamaCare, the Recovery Act and trillions in deficit spending it’s no wonder the politicians who actually have to face voters next Tuesday are throwing the liberal establishment under the bus.

They’d be nuts to do otherwise.

H/T: The Hill

March 24th, 2010 at 10:01 am
Fox News Poll: Nearly 80% of Americans Believe U.S. Economy Could Collapse

According to a recently released Fox News poll, nearly four out of every five voters (79%) feel the U.S. economy could collapse and that Washington has no credible plan to fix it.

That pessimism is not held by voters identifying with just one political party either.  72% of Democrats, 84% of Republicans and 80% of Independents share the pessimism about the economy, while just 18% of all voters surveyed think it’s “so big and strong it could never collapse.”

Before you go blaming those greedy Wall Street suits for the nation’s gloom, read this little nugget from FoxNews.com’s report on the poll:

78 percent of voters believe the federal government is ‘larger and more costly’ than it has ever been before, and by nearly three-to-one more voters think the national debt (65 percent) is a greater potential threat to the country’s future than terrorism (23 percent). …

“Three in 10 American voters (30 percent) say they are comfortable with the size and role of the federal government right now, while 65 percent say the government has become too big and ‘is restricting American freedoms.’”

October 24th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Even Joe Klein Thinks Obama Went Too Far

Thankfully, Joe Klein (almost) proves the adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day. As recently documented, Klein has an inability to set aside his partisan pom-poms and see the real issue in a news story. But not when it comes to the White House’s war on Fox News:

The problem with war is that it diverts attention from the actual news. The Administration has tried to pursue a sophisticated, difficult domestic and foreign policy. It doesn’t offer the quick-fix irresponsibility of a tax cut or an invasion. It needs space, time and patience to explain. This is an enervating, midstream moment. It’s not certain that the President’s efforts from health care to Afghanistan will succeed. We’ll know a lot more in a month, but I really hope the White House hasn’t launched this attack to fill the public space while the other issues are being sorted out. The long-term costs of stooping to Fox’s level are not just bad posture; they are diminution of the office and its primary occupant.”

Now, Klein has a few more hours to be right again.  The clock is ticking…