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Is Fox So Crazy That It's Even Alienating Some Conservatives?

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted June 17, 2009.


The hate-filled rhetoric spewed by Fox pundits like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly is even alarming some of the people who work there.
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It must have been an awkward elevator ride for Shep Smith over at Fox News headquarters last Friday, heading up to the 12th-floor studio where his Fox Report program originates. I'm just imagining the nasty looks he must have gotten from co-workers -- if any of them even agreed to ride between floors with him -- on the day that liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman praised Smith in print. Krugman actually referenced him by name as somebody inside Fox News who refused to go along with the "big hate": the right wing's anti-Obama rhetoric -- almost bloodlust -- that now dominates conservative discourse.

Talk about putting a target on the back of a Fox News anchor. A shout-out from the hated Times op-ed page? Things only got worse for Smith over the weekend when the Times' Frank Rich also singled out the Fox News anchor for praise. I mean, c'mon. Were Krugman and Rich trying to get the guy fired?!

In fact, even before being name-dropped by Times liberals, right-wing bloggers had already teed off on Smith ("Shep sucks"; "Shepard Smith has got to go") for having the nerve to call out the "crazies" on the fringe who were targeting President Obama and feeding off conspiratorial hate.

The truth, of course, is that Smith's job isn't in danger. He's considered an untouchable (ratings) golden boy within Fox News who has the backing of his boss, Roger Ailes. (Not to mention a gargantuan $7 million salary.)

Yet by pushing back on the air against the same right-wing hatred that others at Fox News now regularly foment, I wonder if Smith feels increasingly uncomfortable or alienated within Fox News. If he feels like a stranger within the cable news channel he's been with since its inception, as it now rushes headlong into the GOP fever swamps and does it with Glenn Beck, and his conspiratorial ranting, as the new face and voice of Fox News.

I'm starting to wonder if Fox News is big enough for Shep Smith and Glenn Beck.

For the past decade, Fox News brass offered up the same predictable retort that the channel did news during the day and opinion after 8 p.m., and hey, there's nothing wrong with that. (Even if all the opinion ran in one direction.) But now it's opinion in the morning with Fox & Friends, it's opinion in the late afternoon with Glenn Beck at 5 p.m., and opinion 24/7 with Fox Nation online, which mines the territory of everything right of the Drudge Report.

Smith for years has publicly defended Ailes' credo of "fair and balanced," but it's hard to see how the anchor believes it anymore, as he watches the channel he works for actively rile up the right-wing crazies. If Smith watches any of the other 22 hours of Fox News programming that air each day when he's not in front of the camera, he certainly understands that his employer probably represents the most dangerous voice today when it comes to whipping up irrational hostility toward the new president.


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Is Shep Smith the Only Fox News Anchor Left With Any Real Decency?
[Report this comment]
Posted by: SkeeterVT1 on Jun 17, 2009 2:07 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I can clearly recall Shepard Smith breaking from the Fox News party line during the right-wing network's coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 1995 when he -- and Geraldo Rivera -- raised questions about the federal government's response to the disaster as they reported live from the scene.

There there is Smith's well-documented, profanity-laced outburst during a Web-only Fox telecast against torture.

And now the far-right crazies are going after Smith for having dared to challenge them after the shootings at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

No, I don't expect Smith to be fired. After all, he's Fox's chief news anchor, as much a "golden boy" at Fox as Bernard Shaw was at CNN before he retired in 2000. He's been with Fox News since its launch in 1996 and is one of only three original Fox anchors still with the network (The other two are John Gibson and Neil Cavuto). "The Fox Report," the network's signature evening newscast that Smith anchors, is the only program on Fox News that I can watch without having my intelligence insulted.

But I would not be surprised if Smith finally gets fed up with the network's head-long plunge into outright fascist hatemongering and quits.

What's really interesting is that the crazies are now slamming the 45-year-old Smith -- who has never married and steadfastly refuses to talk about his private life -- with anti-gay invectives. Smith himself acknowledged on the air that some of the hate e-mails he's received included barbs calling him "queer." And according to Smith's Wikipedia page, he is a target of a controversial new documentary, "Outrage," which claims that Smith is a closeted gay man.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» Hurricane Katrina in....1995? Posted by: rancespergl
Gimme A "K"
[Report this comment]
Posted by: Revolutionary (Direct) Democracy on Jun 17, 2009 3:08 AM   
Current rating: 2    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
It's all kayfabe.

The acid test for chumps is whether you believe it's real.


FREE AMERICA

REVOLUTIONARY (DIRECT) DEMOCRACY

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Fox News is the most fair and balanced Network in the US
[Report this comment]
Posted by: Illuminatus- Enlightend Classic Liberal on Jun 17, 2009 6:40 AM   
Current rating: 2    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
As a foreigner living in the US I have a birds eye view of US political bias. I watched the networks coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. I have rarely seen such one sided bias in my whole life as regards to candidate Obama in US MSM. It frightened me.

The only neutral or slightly of center was Charlie Rose and Fox. I was extremely surprised at the latter. Before I moved to the US had read in newspapers and articles back home that Fox News were extremely biased and extremely religious and social conservative.

To my surprise I found Fox News nearly neutral and Bill O'Reilly I classic Burkesian conservative, liberal conservative. Not the raving religious conservative lunatic he was painted as.

What I found even more disturbing was that the bastion of US neutrality, in my eyes, The New York Times was amazingly partisan and extremely biased.

The world turned on its head. I then came to understand what critics of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly meant by them being biased. They equated their own extreme left liberal position as being non biased, the original neutral position. So of course if somebody is neutral/center-right and if you are extreme left liberal their position in your Orwellian Newspeak become extremists.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: America . . . land of crazies! Posted by: premarachel
» RE: America . . . land of crazies! Posted by: Illuminatus- Enlightend Classic Liberal
» RE: America . . . land of crazies! Posted by: thinkblue1194
» Troll alert! Posted by: chief of okeefe
How many boot lickers do you need?
[Report this comment]
Posted by: gabbyone on Jun 17, 2009 7:05 AM   
Current rating: 1    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
With every network on the television licking Obama's boots and refusing to ask any tough questions, it is a good thing we have Fox.
The press is not supposed to climb in bed with
the President, they are supposed to be the watchdogs for our country. You attack the entertainers on Fox, but they have many good journalists and business reporters also. O'Reilly and Beck are commentators not legitimate journalists-see them for what they are. You can add Olbermann and Schultz to that commentator list too.

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America, land of the crazies . . .
[Report this comment]
Posted by: premarachel on Jun 17, 2009 7:12 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
That's how we are seen abroad! And how true it is. That a large corporation like Fox can attract not only crazy people like flies to shit, but embellish the shit any way they can, to make it more desirable to the crazies. This is taking full advantage of a defunked education system, dumbing tv, glorifying of violence, spreading of fear and increasing hardship for the masses.
Fox could quite possibly bring about civil war. They are the brown shirts, the fascists of our age. Until we truly address social problems in this country we will always be open to the hate filled, nasty rhetoric of stations like Fox that rather create news than report it.

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Rabid Foxes
[Report this comment]
Posted by: RICHARD RALPH ROEHL on Jun 17, 2009 9:50 AM   
Current rating: 3    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Albeit I own and use computers, and I have a cell phone in my car, THERE IS NO TELL-LIE-VISION IN MY HOME. My lovely home is sacrosanct.

NO TEL-LIE-VISION in my home means the corp-rat media machine can't infect me as easily as other Amerikans, most of whom are clueless about what's happening. Indeed! Behold! See them (the Amerikans) waddling into Wal-Mart to buy sugar pop water in petro-chemical jugs.

FOX News? Well... Old Coyote Knose that a house full of rabid dogs (the foxes and the wolves) has no room for odd birds like $hep $mith. And the Knose also knows that FOX News is really FOX N-ewes, the alter of worship for Amerika's fat ass, consumer citizens... der corn $yrup $heep.

This includes 'Obamatrons'. Hey! Wake up! The glorious [sic] invasions and occupations in Iraq-nam, Afghanistan-nam and Pak-a-nuke-nam are raging full $peed ahead, all for the $ake of corp-rat war profiteering. Mean, mean, meanwhile the cost of everything creeps up... except for gasoline. That's going to $hoot the moon! The dollar is dead $ucker. Zimbabwe is right around the corner.

That's the good news! The bad news more than suggests... that while your children and grandchildren are begging in the streets for food, and seeking shelter from the elements, it'll still be their patriotic duty to $upport the ethno-racist Zionist nuts in the theo-crazy of Israel. In the United $tates... it is always Israel first! Fat ass Amerika $econd!

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Plangent sound
[Report this comment]
Posted by: Perry Logan on Jun 17, 2009 9:59 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
All that right-wing craziness--and there are more Democrats than ever.

That plangent cry you hear is the sound of Rupert Murdoch in Pain.

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» RE: Plangent sound Posted by: willymack
Think about it
[Report this comment]
Posted by: willymack on Jun 17, 2009 10:45 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Remember that movie "Network"? Remember Peter Finch as the psychotic "prophet" who was allowed to rave on a stage until he passed out? Remember his famous phrase "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more"?
There seem to be several mad prophets ( or maybe PROFITS) on fox noise. Maybe it's a virus or something. Think about it.

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sadly Fox has a much larger base than we lefties
[Report this comment]
Posted by: whealeydj on Jun 17, 2009 6:54 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I can only hope that the premise of this article is correct that more people are convinced that Far Out Xtremist News is untrustworthy. are there any statistics that Fox News is losing watchers?

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Re S Smith of FOX
[Report this comment]
Posted by: Lilly on Jun 17, 2009 9:13 PM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The moment when you had to be watching Smith was when he was reporting from the heart of Katrina and was seeing not just dead bodies but the SAME dead bodies lying on the street around him day after day. He became simply furious. FOX party line, which he's never done much with anyway, was forgotten: he was utterly pissed and nobody could miss how pissed he was. Then he disappeared for a few days; I assumed FOX had called him home for reprogramming.

His usual reporting seems decent. He is the only FOX anchor it's possible to watch without gagging. So I am left with two questions: a) Why did FOX hire him, when their usual folks are so venomous and b) Why did CNN orginally hire Beck, who is the opposite of everything one might admire in journalists and reporters? CNN can't have missed what Beck was---is that what they wanted?

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» RE: e S Smith of FOX Posted by: Morell
AND u actually care Fox is losing s few folks???
[Report this comment]
Posted by: reelman on Jun 20, 2009 7:19 PM   
Current rating: 1    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha
They are balanced and effective...so liberals detest their freedom of speech...because people get to decide and are deciding to abandon the ole angry biased secular socialist crowd...boo hoo.
You big liberal babies.

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