Who else, Fox News. After admitting they were afraid to talk about the News Corp scandal, they finally do a segment on it on Fox and Friends, bringing in a PR hack who is somehow supposed to be an expert about this. But they make a few small changes to the story. I really suggest you watch this video, because it is astounding:
If you don’t know the details of this scandal and how it might bring down the government in England, here’s a summary.
However, in the Fox News version their parent company News Corp and their newspaper News of the World are the victims. Seriously. Talk about false equivalencies, they equate the hacking scandals at the Pentagon, Citicorp, Bank of America, and others, who were the victims of outside hackers, with News of the World, who were the perpetrators. Murdoch’s newspaper hacked into the phones of politicians, celebrities, families of dead soldiers, and even deleted voicemail messages of a kidnap victim who was later murdered. Pure evil. But according to their PR person:
Why are so many people piling on at this point? We know it’s a hacking scandal. Shouldn’t we get beyond it and really deal with the issue of hacking? Citicorp has been hacked into. Bank of America has been hacked into. American Express has been hacked into. Insurance companies have been hacked into. … So we have to figure out a way to deal with this hacking problem. That’s what we have to do.
They also complain about how the head of the News of the World has been forced to resign. Poor her. But before you feel too sorry for her, know that she is being given a severance package of 3.5 million British pounds (over $5.6 million). Other top execs who are implicated in the scandal are being paid millions, presumably to buy their silence.
Not only that, but there is some evidence that similar phone hacking was done in the US, even to victims of 9/11. Not to mention corruption involving News Corp and the US Government.
The segment ends with them saying that we should put this behind us and get on to the important news of the day … and then they cut to a story about Casey Anthony. Complete and utter hypocrisy.
I think the entire News Corp empire should be broken up before it is too late.
UPDATE: Murdoch testifies before Parliament, but his only defense is that his media empire is so large that he had no idea that one of his newspapers was hacking phones, paying off police, and settling lawsuits to buy silence. Plus his enormous power discouraged the government from investigating or even criticizing Murdoch’s companies (indeed, often government employees were former employees of Murdoch’s companies). Murdoch’s own words are the most powerful argument anyone could make that his vast media holdings should be broken up.
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The sad part is that the folks who watch Fox as their primary (or perhaps only) source of news will never even have the slightest idea that they are having the wool pulled over their eyes… again.
OKAY BUT DID YOU KNOW THE GOVERNMENT IS TRYING TO BAN YOUR LIGHTBULBS?!?!?!!!!!!!!!
😉
I have run across dueling statistics that say either that Fox News has more viewers than any other network OR that Fox News is losing viewers faster than any other network. Does anyone have any info on that????? Of course, I’m hoping that the second bit of info is true rather than the first 🙂
Watching Colbert lampoon this clip right now. Great stuff.
With regard to turning News Corp into a victim like the banks: “They are both victims of being in the same sentence as the word ‘hacked'”.
@Patricia I think Fox News was so ahead in overall viewership that they could bleed watchers faster then any of the other networks and still stay ahead for quite a while.
Supposedly most of the people tuning out Fox News are those tired of them saying the same old “The Sky is Falling” bs
“The segment ends with them saying that we should put this behind us and get on to the important news of the day … and then they cut to a story about Casey Anthony. Complete and utter hypocrisy.”
Spot on. That was *hilarious*!
“And if I recall, Murdoch has said he was sorry, so I don’t know why the media keeps piling on this.”
“If anything, you would think martians had landed in New Jersey…again *hahahaha*”
Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
Too bad, Falkelord, you missed the last shuttle.
Any truth to the story that FOX news is banned in Canada? Anyone have more info on this?
My understanding is there is no FOX news broadcasting station in Canada, but there are feeds from other FOX news places. In other words, the FOX news that broadcasts from America is available in Canada.
So FOX thinks it’s OK persecute the average person on the planet, but the same principle does not apply to them?
Isn’t this the same principle of the dictatorship we fled from, in order to establish, among others things, freedom of the press in the first place?
This is why I love the Internet so much. NO MORE TV BULLSHIT!
TV bullshit works, because the close-up faces hypnotize the viewer into behaving like a high-school student trying to fit into a mad clique.
In Canada we have a law that basically makes it illegal for news channels to knowingly mislead their audience/the public. I don’t believe Fox News is directly banned, as you can get the american feed on some if not most cable providers, but what is now known as Sun News Network was originally referred to as Fox News North and they had a hell of a time getting off the ground. There was a big blow up over our Prime Minister basically leading the charge to weaken the no lying on the news law as to allow Sun News to basically act identically to Fox News. That failed and so Sun News is really nothing up here, yet. I do believe that Fox News was denied a license actually.
Up here our news is all pretty much the same stories told by different reporters on different channels. We don’t suffer from anywhere near the amount of spin you guys do, which I think is why we get such a kick out of watching American channels.
I just love how hacking + corporation = victim in Fox’s world.
I wish we could get a law like Canada’s to ban knowingly misleading statements.