Faux 4: A News Channel That Shows No News

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"A bad two weeks for conservative media’s crusade to find Democratic scandals"

Quote

For the second time in two weeks, the conservative media has distorted and badly stretched the available evidence as it searches for a Democratic scandal. And for the second time in two weeks, significant additional evidence rebutting its claims has been met with a large-scale shrug from the supposed scandal’s many purveyors.

Two weeks ago, it was the idea that the Biden administration was sending crack pipes to addicts across the country — a claim which the Washington Free Beacon reported had been confirmed by an anonymous administration official. The claim was stated as fact by oodles of congressional Republicans and was even the subject of newly introduced legislation.

Except it turned out the official never actually confirmed pipes were being sent as part of harm-mitigation kits, as an editor at the publication acknowledged. To this day, though, the story still says the administration official confirmed the kits “will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine.”

The latest follows a strikingly similar pattern, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler summarizes. Special counsel John Durham had issued a filing with some intriguing allegations: that a tech executive tied to the Clinton campaign “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP” — that is, the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Durham said access to the data had been “exploited” “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

Numerous conservative outlets and lawmakers leaped to the conclusion that this meant the Clinton campaign had spied on Trump while he was in the White House. But even after it was noted Monday that Durham’s filing never actually said this and that the time period referenced appeared to be during the Obama administration — not Trump’s — they pressed forward. The culmination came late Thursday, when Durham issued a new filing implicitly acknowledging conservative media had butchered his allegation. A key figure cited was obviously from the Obama era.

Durham explained, in response to allegations from a defendant that his filing was misleading: “If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information.”

Indeed, this wasn’t terribly surprising. As far back as Monday — shortly after the allegation burst into the mainstream — evidence emerged that it wasn’t the Trump White House that was referenced. A person involved in the data analysis stated that the information collected, to his knowledge, “was nonprivate [domain name system] data from before Trump took office.” In other words: not “spying,” and also not the Trump White House.

Despite that, and despite the lack of Durham actually having said otherwise, the march to scandal resumed. It was repeatedly stated as fact — often not even qualified as a possibility or even a likelihood — that the Clinton campaign had spied on Trump’s White House. And there’s little sign of any walkback.

A headline from the Washington Examiner stated — and still states — “Durham says Democrat-allied tech executive spied on Trump’s White House office.”

The Daily Mail initially ran a headline stating that the Clinton campaign had “paid a firm to hack [Trump’s] White House servers.” it later changed the headline to state that the campaign had “paid a firm to hack his Trump Towers and White House servers.” (The idea would seem to be that “White House servers” might not in fact be “his” — Trump’s — but the story repeatedly suggests the White House was in fact “his” while summarizing Trump’s response.)

Fox News’s story continues to imply — without stating it directly — that this was the Trump White House. It says the servers targeted were those “belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House.” A former Trump spokesman played up that latter phrase, though such a timeline appears nowhere in Durham’s filing. (The same story also says Durham’s filing said the Clinton campaign paid someone to “infiltrate” Trump Tower and White House servers, but that word never appears in the filing.)

Perhaps nobody has gone further than Fox and its prime time lineup, though. On Sunday night, weekend host Steve Hilton stated, “After Trump became President, they hacked the White House.” Sean Hannity added Monday that “without a doubt, unequivocally, the Trump campaign — their campaign, their transition team, even the Trump White House … was spied on by the Clinton campaign.”

Despite Monday bringing both the New York Times fact-check and a filing from defendant Michael Sussman stating that the time period was in fact during Obama’s White House, the effort continued apace. Hannity declared Tuesday that the effort was to “mine from Trump Tower and even the Trump White House to smear Donald Trump.”

Former congressman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said on the same show, “It’s frightening, in the Trump Tower, into President Trump’s apartment and then when he’s in the White House.”

Tucker Carlson said Wednesday that “Hillary Clinton’s minions had spied on Donald Trump’s campaign and on Trump at the White House.” He added Thursday — the same night as the new Durham filing — that Clinton’s “campaign spied on Donald Trump in the White House.”

What comes next is utterly predictable. If they even acknowledge Durham debunked their claims — which is a big “if” given Durham did so somewhat indirectly — the argument will be that, okay, maybe there wasn’t spying on Trump in the White House, but what about collecting data on Trump Tower! (Nevermind that calling this “infiltrating” or “spying” or “hacking” is highly suspect, given the type of data collected.)

This is what happened with crack pipes. It was no longer that the government actually confirmed sending crack pipes, which it didn’t; it was that it was possible that it was about to do so, and maybe the government shouldn’t be involved in harm-mitigation kits for drug users in the first place.

Which, okay, we can debate whether that’s a good idea or whether lines might have been crossed by those trying to probe Trump’s connections with Russia. But we should at least start with a base-level understanding of what is and isn’t actually being alleged or in evidence. And for two weeks running now, certain people have been pretty uninterested in being at all discerning about that — both before and after their read on the situation has been shot down.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

People who appear on Faux regularly seem to suffer from a total lack of both self-awareness and irony.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

HDS in action.

 

[Xan]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

People who appear on Faux regularly seem to suffer from a total lack of both self-awareness and irony.

 

Well, Kaleigh's guy wasn't so much a haircut with an ego as he was a combover with an ego.  None of these bobble heads could spot irony if it came up and smacked them in the face.

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, Xan said:

None of these bobble heads could spot irony if it came up and smacked them in the face.

Oh, I think they know full well, but simply don’t care. They are so immersed in bleating the exact opposite of the truth that it comes naturally to them— and they say the most idiotic things with straight faces.

[fraurosena]

Do you think they realize? Will there be a sudden about-face?

 

[Xan]

Tucker Carlson has been talking about his desire to get an interview with Putin.  He also said that he'd be glad to get both Putin and Zelensky on his program to debate because "both of them are tyrants".  

For me, this crosses a line -- even for Fox.  How is he able to support Putin on his program without any blowback?  On Twitter, people have started calling him "Tuckyo Rose" and Russian state TV even uses clips from his shows.  I thought the right wing hated communists.  

Carlson also said, "America has no legal or moral obligation to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” and claimed that Ukraine isn’t even a democracy.  You'd think this would be a bridge too far, even for Rupert Murdoch.

So, he's fine with Putin but somehow thinks that Justin Trudeau is a dictator.  

Edited February 22, 2022 by Xan

[Cartmann99]

 

[Xan]

I generally try not to type the word "fuck" very often.  In this case, however, I'll make an exception.  Tucker Carlson and his Putin worship has made me angry.  Him saying that both Putin and Zelenskyy are dictators is just an outright lie.  He said that Putin didn't call him a racist so why should he condemn him. 

Tucker can fuck right off.  He can continue to fuck off.  He can get to the sign that says, "No fucking off past this point" and break through that sign and fuck off forever.

I would love to never see his smarmy face again.

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[WiseGirl]

 

[WiseGirl]

Dear Rufus.  Please take this "network" off of military bases, the air, the web...

 

[JMarie]

On 2/18/2022 at 2:39 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

HDS in action.

 

I feel bad for whoever had to watch a whole day's worth of Fox News to tally up Hillary and Trump shoutouts.

[47of74]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Too funny:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Tucker Carlson goes full blame-America on Russia’s Ukraine invasion"

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Tucker Carlson’s remarkably Putin-sympathetic view of the war in Ukraine has yet to catch on with large swaths of the conservative movement. But if it doesn’t, it apparently won’t be for lack of trying.

Carlson lately has tempered his unfortunately timed suggestion that perhaps Vladimir Putin isn’t that bad a guy. But with that point largely conceded, he now has shifted to assuring that Putin is not the only bad guy. Carlson on Monday drove home an argument that has lingered on the fringes of the conservative movement for some time — that the United States and the West invited this war with their support for admitting Ukraine into NATO, a step that Russia finds unacceptable.

To be clear, the idea that NATO expansion into countries such as Ukraine is provocative and might even be a bad idea is not a fringe position; it has long been espoused, dating to prominent, establishment foreign policy voices in the 1990s. But Carlson took things a good few conspiratorial steps further, arguing that the push for NATO was deliberately intended to provoke this war.

Carlson said it was “obvious” that “getting Ukraine to join NATO was the key to inciting war with Russia.” He noted that Vice President Harris was sent to Europe as Russia massed troops on Ukraine’s borders and that she said, “I appreciate and admire President [Volodymyr] Zelensky’s desire to join NATO.”

“‘Up yours, Vladimir Putin,’” Carlson summarized. “‘Go ahead and invade Ukraine.’ And of course Vladimir Putin did that just days later. So the invasion was no surprise to the Biden administration. They knew that would happen. That was the point of the exercise.”

Carlson then turned to his favored rhetorical trick of treating his conspiratorial supposition — that the United States wanted this war — as established fact as he pivoted to related questions: “Why in the world would the United States intentionally seek war with Russia? How could we possibly benefit from that war?”

A version of Carlson’s effort to blame the West — and by extension, President Biden — has been around for a while now, in varying versions. Conservative provocateur Candace Owens tweeted recently that “WE are at fault” for Russia’s invasion, because of NATO expansion. Other Republicans have pointed in that direction as well. Still others, such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), have not gone that far but have argued for backing off from NATO expansion to reduce tensions.

Surely, the consequences of the Ukraine-NATO push must be considered. And you need not look far into the past to see studied minds cautioning about a situation much like the one we find ourselves in today. Former Clinton administration defense secretary Bill Perry said in 2016 that Putin bore most of the blame for Russia’s aggression in Crimea but that “I have to say that the United States deserves much of the blame” for supporting NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe. George Kennan, a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, called it “a tragic mistake” after the Senate in 1998 ratified NATO expansion, even as Russia was still picking up the pieces from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) warned at the same time, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.” Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski argued relatively recently that Ukraine should not join military alliances and instead stick with a Finland-esque approach of remaining neutral while cooperating with the West in other ways.

But there are a few problems with the attempt to shoehorn this valid concern into the idea that the Biden administration is to blame — or even deliberately fomented war.

One is that Putin has made it pretty clear that this isn’t just — or even necessarily primarily — about NATO. Supporters of this view often point to Putin’s Feb. 21 speech laying out his justifications, which included NATO. But in that speech, Putin labeled Ukraine an illegitimate country on land that he views as rightfully Russian territory. He echoed that in 2008 talks with President George W. Bush. Putin’s aggression in Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 coincided with moves to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the Western fold, but there’s much more that undergirds his case for war.

The other is that supporting Ukraine’s right to pursue membership in NATO has consistently been U.S. policy. Carlson isolated Harris’s visit to the Munich Security Conference, but this has been a position across multiple administrations of both parties. However well advised that policy was, it was the long-standing policy. And to shelve it in the face of Russian aggression would be, in the truest sense, capitulation.

Even if you believe it might have averted this war, what message would it send about Russia’s ability to throw its weight around? Its massing of troops on Ukraine’s borders would have earned an immediate payoff. Even if Harris had merely declined to restate U.S. support for Ukraine’s right to pursue NATO membership, that would have been a telling omission. (Conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, for one, has argued that Hawley’s posture was correct, even though he is “wrong about whether the United States should say so publicly.”)

And beyond that, there’s the fact that this isn’t just U.S. policy; Ukrainians now support their country’s membership in NATO by a significant margin. If anyone is big on self-determination, it would seem to be Carlson. And yet that’s curiously missing from his argument.

(Carlson, for what it’s worth, oversimplified Harris’s statement as having “encouraged Ukraine to become a member of NATO.” As with past administrations, she described U.S. policy as supporting Ukraine’s desire to join NATO — a key nuance, diplomatically.)

In January, former Trump and Bush administration Russia expert Fiona Hill offered a worthwhile and nuanced view on this in the run-up to Russia’s invasion in an essay for the New York Times:

To be sure, Russia does have some legitimate security concerns, and European security arrangements could certainly do with fresh thinking and refurbishment after 30 years. ... But a further Russian invasion of Ukraine and Ukraine’s dismemberment and neutralization cannot be an issue for U.S.-Russian negotiation nor a line item in European security. Ultimately, the United States needs to show Mr. Putin that he will face global resistance and Mr. Putin’s aggression will put Russia’s political and economic relationships at risk far beyond Europe.

Yet negotiating over NATO in the face of Russian aggression — whether explicitly or by scaling back the U.S. public commitment to the alliance’s right to determine its membership — is effectively what Carlson suggests we should have done. It’s one thing to argue this policy has been a bad one (Carlson has long been a NATO skeptic); it’s another to cast Harris’s restating of long-standing U.S. policy as some kind of novel provocation — even a deliberate one with an intended consequence.

But there must be a way to blame the Biden administration for this situation, apparently, even if it means shifting the blame away from Putin and implicitly arguing for his appeasement.

 

[CTRLZero]

In the Supreme Court of New York, the defamation case of Smartmatic versus Fox News and others is being allowed to go forwards.  Sidney Powell (jurisdiction) and Jeannine Pirro (non-significance) were dismissed, but the other usual suspects remain.  Here’s a snippet under spoiler.  The Washington Post article contains a link to the full decision.

Spoiler

Smartmatic sued Fox News Media, its parent company and several personalities in February last year, claiming it aired dozens of false statements that fed a conspiracy theory alleging the company’s election software helped Democrats steal votes. Fox News quickly filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that it had merely been reporting on newsworthy events.

In his ruling, Cohen wrote that Smartmatic has a legitimate basis to argue that “Fox News had reason to suspect that what it was broadcasting was false” when the network aired unfounded claims made by Powell and Giuliani because they could not provide evidence for their claims.

“Even assuming that Fox News did not intentionally allow this false narrative to be broadcasted, there is a substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth,” Cohen wrote.

Washington Post - Smartmatic case continues in NY state Supreme Court

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

4 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

And just like that, Tucker Carlson went from wooden puppet to a real little boy!