For Fox Sake

A quick squiz at how the Fox News Network in America is handling the big economic and political news of the week:



A good DVD to get out if you really want to see how Fox News works is Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.

The Australian equivalent is Sky News, where you will hear 'objective' commentators musing on how wonderful is Malcolm Turnbull, and how lucky we are that he told the banks to drop their interest rates.
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As predicted last week, the McCain camp has gone all out negative - and boy haven't the Republican faithful taken to it. There have been rallies where McCain and Palin have been speaking and when they refer to Obama, people in the crowd have yelled "terrorist" and even "kill him".

At a town meeting type event last Friday McCain was confronted directly with the hate he has helped and encourages to fuel.

At one point a member of the crowd says to him that he was concerned about raising a child under a president who "cohorts with domestic terrorists such as [Bill] Ayers.

Which is little wonder given how much McCain and Palin (and Fox News!) have gone on about it.At this point McCain tries to reason with him - he is greeted with boos and groan of disapproval.

Later a woman claims to be worried about Obama because he is "an Arab". Little wonder again given the recent tendency at Republican Party events to highlight the fact that Obama's middle name is Hussein. The only good thing about such people is that they are hardly swinging voters. They would probably vote against Jesus if he was running on the Democratic Party ticket, and would most likely label him as a law-undermining Jew.



Since the McCain camp has gone negative; things have got very ugly. Ugly in terms of the crowds who are cheering on the hate, and also, fortunately for right-minded people in the world, ugly in terms of the polls for McCain.

Since they went negative things have not moved for McCain - if anything they have gotten worse (and they were bad to begin with).

The New York Times on Wednesday wrote a scathing editorial of McCain's negative approach:

It is a sorry fact of American political life that campaigns get ugly, often in their final weeks. But Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember.

They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia. Senator Barack Obama has taken some cheap shots at Mr. McCain, but there is no comparison. ...

Ms. Palin, in particular, revels in the attack. Her campaign rallies have become spectacles of anger and insult. “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” Ms. Palin has taken to saying.
That line follows passages in Ms. Palin’s new stump speech in which she twists Mr. Obama’s ill-advised but fleeting and long-past association with William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and confessed bomber. By the time she’s done, she implies that Mr. Obama is right now a close friend of Mr. Ayers — and sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the government. The Democrat, she says, “sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled “kill him!” as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.

Yep, McCain, the guy who prides himself on having risen above partisan Washington politics...