I told you geniuses I got all my news off the internet after 9-11
That is how I saw in advance what you've not even seen yet

From a Fox News employee on the front lines


  Nitpicker http://nitpicker.blogspot.com/>

"You know, this war is so fucking illegal." - SPC Pat Tillman
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/09/25/MNGD7ETMNM1.DTL&type=printable

    Thursday, March 15, 2007

      Dance, Foxholes, Dance!

In the light of Fox News scrambling to maintain the thinnest veneer of
"balance"
after" target="new">http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/3/15/185038/229>after
Democrats refused to lend them respectability, I thought it might be
time to point out something I witnessed first hand as a public affairs
sergeant in Afghanistan. I call it the "Fox News Two Step."

You see, because my position was apolitical, very few of the journalists
knew of my personal political leanings. I was, to them, just the guy who
would get them on flights (and sometimes travel with them) to distant
forward operating bases. When I wasn't in the field covering my own
stories, I served as sort of a liaison between journalists and field
units, getting writers, photographers and broadcasters on the ground to
write about the war and answering their questions when they called. In
other words, about half my job was to be a info source and/or travel
agent for journalists.

On more than one occasion, I worked with Fox News producers and
reporters. Once, in Herat, I saw one of the Foxholes approached by a
couple of soldiers. One of the soldiers said he was glad they could
finally talk to a "conservative" reporter. The reporter laughed and
said, "Someone's got to balance out the liberals." But, later, I ran
into that same reporter in Bagram. He wanted an interview with some
soldiers and, when I grabbed one at random to ask if he wanted to talk
to Fox News, the soldier--an Army captain--said he didn't, because, as a
Democrat, he wasn't a fan of the network's politics. The reporter,
shaken up, said that was ridiculous. The network /had/ no politics, but
only told the truth. "Whatever," said the captain and walked off. The
reporter, after a few beats narrowed his eyes at the soldier's back and
quietly hissed, /motherfucker/.

Just before Thanksgiving, 2004, a Fox News producer with whom I'd worked
a number of times in Kabul and Bagram showed up on Bagram Air Field to
shoot what military PA people call "Hi Moms"--the little snippets of
video of service members saying "I'm Corporal Bill Jones from Paducah,
Kentucky and I want to say 'Happy Thanksgiving' to my wife, Sheila and
my parents Don and Lorraine in Louisville." I was confused about why he
would be doing this. My unit--and every PA unit--shot hundreds of these
every year for holidays, the Super Bowl, the Army/Navy game, etc., and
provided them free of charge to all who asked for them. When I asked the
producer why he had come, he said he'd had the same question when he was
told that he should know better. It was "part of (his) contract," he
said, to get on his knees "and give Bush a blowjob" every month or so.

I don't think it's necessary to rat these guys' names out--though
they're written in my notebook alongside where I scrawled what they
said--because one of them I thought was a pretty good guy, but these are
just two of the instances of clear bias on the part of Fox. Many of the
questions they asked seemed designed to lead to soundbites declaring
everything in Afghanistan just wonderful, while other reporters seemed
to want to tell a story well and thoroughly--CBS's Lara Logan, CNN's
Ryan Chilcote and Newsweek's Tim McGirk deserve special attention. (Only
once did I meet a reporter with a clearly anti-US, anti-military bias:
Carmela Baranowska, who treated US bases like free hotels, ate up more
than her share of MREs, once washed her dainties with the Marines'
limited drinking water at a FOB and then, when she was finally kicked
off the bases for being useless, disappeared. After we scrambled the
OHSHIT scouts to track her down, she popped back up on the radar
complete with a convenient and completely bullshit story about Marines
terrorizing Afghans

I can't and won't go into all the reasons her career-enhancing
documentary is ridiculous, but you'll just have to trust me on this.)

I guess the reason I got to see a behind the scenes performance of the
"Fox News Two Step" was because I took my job seriously. I knew
Americans weren't above reproach in Afghanistan, but I also saw that 99
percent of service members really wanted to help people. I believe in
the military, in service and I believed in what we were doing in the
country (though some of the choices made by Karzai and Khalilzad still
make me want to perform an autolobotomy by banging my head against a
wall). Because I was so obviously a cheerleader for soldiers, I suppose
the Fox reporters just assumed I was a pro-Bush guy.

But my experience is just another version of what you can see on Fox
every day, ratcheted up to the /n/th degree. When Fox's anchors accuse
Democrats of rooting for terrorists
or Bill O'Reilly rails against "Secular-Progressives"--/wink, wink/--but
the network's spokespeople still claim to be balanced when their
Republicanism shows, you're seeing the FN Two Step on a level only a
tiny bit subtler than the admission of proverbially fellating George W.
Bush.

(Although the fact that the network has recently kicked off two awful
awful shows seems to be giving the trick away, no?)

Since everyone with half a brain and basic cable knows that Fox is a
Republican house organ, why do they even do this dance at all? Matt
Stoller found some evidence today suggesting that, despite Fox's high
ratings, it might not pay that well
to cater to the old and
crotchety demographic. If it became too obvious what they were doing,
the median age of O'Reilly Factor viewers might slip all the way up to
dead

The Democratic refusal to hold a debate on Fox is not only smart in the
short term--a fact proven by the results of the last Fox-hosted
Democratic debate
-but will, in the long term, also serve as another nail in the coffin of
Fox's credibility. And, since the network is a proven enemy of the
Democratic party (and the truth), that's a good thing.

So anyone who wants to see Democrats do well or simply cares about
seeing candidates involved in an honest debate about the issues should
be happy the Dems dropped Fox as a host. The national party should
ignore anyone who acts like it was a bad idea. And those sounds of
outrage you hear from the Fox studios? Those are just the cries
of increasingly irrelevant scared for their paychecks and two-stepping as
loudly as they can.

As should be clear to you by now, I did not say
that "Fox News reporters in Afghanistan think American soldiers there
are 'motherfuckers.'" I said that a Fox reporter called a soldier a
motherfucker. Truth be told, I've called a few soldiers that myself (and
at least a few of them were--and are--my dear friends). The word isn't
the issue. What is important here is that I, and, I'm sure, other PA
types, got glimpses behind the "fair and balanced" curtain to see the
withered Roger Ailes pulling pro-Republican levers. Not everyone gets
that chance.
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