Jun 25, 2015

Jon Stewart Catches Fox News Being Hypocrites Towards The Left During The Charleston Shooting Debate


Jon Stewart catches the tabloid news channel, called Fox, blaming the liberals for their own repetitive behavior in accordance with their pro-racist political strategy they implement for the GOP;

Wack Flag - Fox News criticizes politicians on the left for using a racially charged shooting in South Carolina to advance their liberal narrative. (5:09);


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Jon Stewart calls out Fox News for Charleston hypocrisy: It’s only “politicizing a tragedy” if Fox doesn’t like it - Stewart recalls last December when Fox News used the killing of two NYPD officers to advance its own narrative

With last week’s Charleston, S.C. shooting still fresh on everyone’s mind, Jon Stewart used Monday’s “Daily Show” to examine some of the right-wing responses (yes, there are more) that have aimed to silence conversation about the state of race relations in America today.

In the days since Dylann Roof’s attack against the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Fox News and ringleader Sean Hannity, have been quick to point the finger at liberals for using the tragedy to “advance [their] narrative” — a “sickness,” others have called it.

“Yes, it’s a sickness, this rush to use tragedy to advance your narrative,” Stewart said on Monday’s program. “Combine that with an inability for self-examination, an almost comical degree of self-exculpatory rhetoric, flag pins, a little bit of leg, and a complete immunity to irony, you’ve got yourself a full-blown case of Foxabetes.”

Turning the tables on Fox News, Stewart revisited last year’s horrific revenge shooting of two N.Y.P.D. cops, asking exactly how much restraint the conservative network used in advancing their own narrative.

“Remind me what happened this past December this year when two New York City cops were tragically killed during a time when people were protesting police shootings against unarmed black men?” Stewart asked. “Talk to me about the restraint Fox used in not advancing their narrative.”




Related articles from Salon:

In the aftermath of the Charleston tragedy, "Fox & Friends" has descended to new and uncharted levels of idiocy
Fox News’ denial is pathological: Race, guns and the lies the network tells itself In the wake of the Charleston massacre, the network is laboring to offer a coherent explanation for the shootings




The GOP’s delusional Charleston outrage shows just how desperate it has become - From "n-word" handwringing to ludicrous complaints about "politicizing" a tragedy, Republicans have totally lost it

On Monday, the horrors of Charleston brought about a symbolic, but meaningful change: 
Republicans who had previously been unwilling to offend the neo-Confederate faction of their party took a deep breath and recommended the Confederate flag be removed from the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse. It had been flying on the grounds somewhere since the early 1960s when white political leaders all over the South suddenly had an overwhelming urge to officially celebrate their “heritage,” just as African Americans were agitating for civil rights. In South Carolina, it was recently moved from the capitol to the grounds as part of a  ”compromise,” and Republicans swore they’d been pushed to the brink and would move no further. But a massacre of nine people in a historic African American church by a white supremacist seems to have made them re-evaluate the value of their 50 year heritage of celebrating their resistance to civil rights.

That was the good news. The bad news is that they are now back in full “I know you are but what am I” mode, vacuously mirroring liberal arguments in ways that make no sense, and then high-fiving each other as if they’ve just won the national debate championship.


5 worst right-wing moments of the weeks — Fox News outslimes itself on Charleston - "America's newsroom" blames the shootings on diversity, while Jeb Bush commits an act of unspeakable cowardice


1. Fox gets Charleston shootings wrong in a wildly improbable way.

Fox Newsians might be given points for creativity if their views were not downright despicable. Their ability to deny the reality that is plainly in front of every sentient being in the universe continues to stagger. The poisonous mix of racism and guns that killed nine peaceful souls in a Charleston church is the elephant in the room that these toxicity and vapidity spewers are ever more at pains not to see.
This one comes to you from the Fox program, “America’s Newsroom,” hosted by Martha MacCallum. She was joined by guests Marjorie Clifton, former Obama campaign consultant, and journalist Mary Katherine Ham, who discussed whether the mass shooting might have to do with poor access to mental health, or maybe gun control laws. Easy access to guns? Naahh. D’yah think?
But MacCallum preferred a different explanation. Much as she had to grudgingly admit President Obama was right, that these horrors do happen more often here than in other countries, she parts company with him in explaining why.

“That may be because of the kind of society we are. We have a lot of different cultures living here together,” she said. “We’re a very unique society and that’s a very wonderful thing, in large part. But that may be a contributing factor here.”





Right out of the box, Doocy, Hasselbeck and Kilmeade, along with their guest, the right-wing nutjob Pastor E.W. Jackson, declared that the massacre was part of an obvious shooting war against Christians. All this while it was being widely reported that the alleged gunman, Dylann Storm Roof, had said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Did Doocy, Jackson and the panel think Roof was referring to Christians? While it’s true that Christians such as the Duggars, for example, have been up to some rather terrible things, Roof was clearly referring to black people, especially considering he killed eight of them.

Somehow, “Fox & Friends” discovered a way to stir the Charleston shooting into their broader “war on religion,” which has heretofore centered around “religious freedom” laws and same-sex marriage. So, now, we’re expected to believe that every time a person of faith is shot, even when the actual motive is perfectly clear, the shooting will be lumped into this Christian persecution complex.
(Incidentally, Jackson, appearing later on a far-right radio show, blamed the massacre on gays, academia, liberals and President Obama. This was the premiere go-to guest during the breaking news coverage of Charleston on “Fox & Friends.”)




Richard Fowler and Erick Erickson's conversation about race addressed every subject except for, well, race

On “Fox & Friends” Monday morning, host Steve Doocy spoke to Fox Contributor Erick Erickson and radio talk show host Richard Fowler about whether the whether racism is a mental health issue or just plain evil, and in so doing suggested that vast majority of Republicans couldn’t be racist because they’re neither mentally ill nor evil.

On Friday, Erickson published an essay in which he blamed the Charleston massacre on America’s inability to confront the fact that certain people — among them, Caitlyn Jenner — are mentally ill, and should be called out as such.

“A society that looks at a 65 year old male Olympian and, with a straight face, declares him a her and ‘a new normal’ cannot have a conversation about mental health or evil because that society no longer distinguishes normal from crazy and evil from good,” he wrote.

Doocy bounced off that idea, asking Erickon and Fowler whether “the real problem with our culture [is] that we cannot label mental health as an issue because we have accepted too many ‘eccentricities’ as normal.”

Erickson agreed, yet again equating transgender identity with evil, saying that “we can no longer label mental health issues, we can no longer label evil as ‘evil’ — we try to explain around that and immediately move to the political solution.” Erickson’s rearguard action on behalf of Republican presidential contenders — if questions of mental health and evil shouldn’t be politicized, after all, they surely shouldn’t be asked of potential GOP nominees — drew praise from both Doocy and Fowler, who said that Americans “need to have a conversation about how we deal with this formof racism.”


Howard Kurtz: Fox News is the real victim of the Charleston massacre - "We don't even know if Roof watched Fox News!" he said, rebutting an argument no one actually made {Editor: I made that argument on twitter}


Like frantic shoppers running down a last-minute list, Fox News talkers last week desperately tried to cobble together a inventory of reasons why racist gunman Dylann Roof may not have been primarily motivated by racism.

As the conservative media anxiously and collectively searched for political cover, Fox News hosts and guests offered up an array of illogical explanations: Maybe the Charleston, S.C. church killing was an attack on Christians. Maybe it was an attack on South Carolina. Maybe political correctness was to blame. Or “diversity.” Maybe pastors should be armed. (In any case, Fox Newsers agreed, President Obama was being very, very “divisive” regarding the matter.)

On and on, the alternative explanations were offered up in the face of overwhelming evidence that Roof had set out to kill as many black people as possible because he wanted to start a “race war.” Period. And the way Roof chose to do that was to open fire, and then reload, in the basement of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, killing the pastor and eight parishioners.



Fox News must be stopped: Why its Charleston coverage has finally gone too far Ridicule isn't enough. We need to call out the lies and rebut them accurately & loudly. This is more than a "story"

There has been some speculation as to whether Dylann Roof is insane, or was so at the time of the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Certainly the amount of premeditation that went into the mass murder he planned and perpetrated should make us wary about accepting too readily the assertion that he was crazy. But while we might wonder about Roof, there is no doubt at all that for its commentary on this horrific, hate-filled crime Fox News should be indicted in the court of public opinion for its role in this and other racist acts.  The network surely was conscious of what it was doing in aiding and abetting; it surely planned to furnish Roof with an alibi regarding the exact nature of his heinous crime.

Indeed, if Roof is convicted I suggest we regard Fox as an accessory after the fact: someone who assists another 1) who has committed a felony, 2) after the person has committed the felony, 3) with knowledge that the person committed the felony, and 4) with the intent to help the person avoid arrest or punishment. An accessory after the fact may be held liable for, inter alia, obstruction of justice.

I don’t care to debate whether the Fox commentators are sincere when they voice their corrosive ideas, or if it is simply a matter of a herd mentality that kicks in when more than one of them is in a room and the klieg lights are on, but there is no denying that they and Fox make money off this. This is a classic example of sensationalistic yellow journalism. And it’s worse, because it is also ideologically driven and it perpetuates a racist ideology.

How else could Steve Doocy opine on Fox News that it was “extraordinary” that the Charleston church shooting was called a hate crime? How else can Fox wonder if it had a racial element to it when Roof is on record as saying during the shooting that he wanted to kill black people because they are “taking over”?


Funny


A tale of two tweets: Conservatives try to punk Salon, end up getting pantsed by realityRight-wingers thought they were being so clever by juxtaposing these two tweets. They weren't



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