Fox News has been throwing stones from its very glassy house again. This time with the help of The Hill’s media reporter.
If you turned on Fox News Monday, chances are you saw a lot of barking over the mistakes of other news outlets. That just so happened to support Donald Trump’s anti-American accusation that our media is “a stain” on our country. Yet Fox was forced to retract two very biased headlines last week and prime time host Sean Hannity has yet to retract his inflammatory lies about Seth Rich or the bogus Uranium One “scandal.”
As I’ve previously reported, Fox falsely claimed on Friday that Beverly Young Nelson, who has accused Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual assault when she was 16, had “admitted” she “forged” his yearbook inscription to her. In fact, Nelson admitted to adding notes about the date and place underneath Moore’s inscription.
There was such a backlash against Fox’s blatant attack on Nelson’s credibility that the network was shamed into walking back its allegation.
Two days later, Fox changed a headline that had originally suggested Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn’s back injury was connected to her recent criticism of Donald Trump.
Any network that really cared about fake news would have demanded that prime time host Sean Hannity apologize for promoting an unfounded conspiracy theory about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. Or to stop pretending there’s a big scandal about Hillary Clinton and Uranium One, especially after Fox’s own news anchor, Shepard Smith, debunked it.
That kind of dishonesty and hypocrisy from Fox News is to be expected. But what’s The Hill’s media reporter Joe Concha’s excuse? Other than that he probably wants a contributor contract?
I caught Concha twice on Fox News Monday: once on Tucker Carlson Tonight and once on Happening Now.
Unlike the errors by the Washington Post, CNN and ABC News, each cited as "fresh ammunition" for Trump by Happening Now anchor Jon Scott, each of the Fox falsehoods I just noted was deliberate and deliberately designed for (Republican) partisan gain. Again, we know why anchor Scott and Fox News contributor Judith Miller would have “missed” Fox’s journalistic malpractice. But it’s hard to believe Concha could be so blind or ill-informed so as not to have known.
"it was the worst week for U.S. political media in modern times," Concha asserted. He meant for the rest of the media, not Fox.
As he ignored Fox’s falsehoods, Concha self-righteously accused CNN of deliberately misleading the public and demanded that its anonymous source on a story about Wikileaks be exposed.
Concha never said a peep about the dangerous authoritarianism of Donald Trump calling for Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel to be fired because he tweeted a misleading photo of empty seats at Trump's Pensacola rally last week.
Miller had it right here: She said the real story is not about mistakes by journalists but an administration that doesn’t want to be scrutinized.
MILLER: Let us not make this about us. This is about an administration that is dodging scrutiny, an administration in its first year that has Bob Mueller looking into everything. Subpoenaing thousands of documents. It is our obligation to follow that investigation, to follow this president, whether or not he likes us reporting on his diet or the way his hair looks or whether or not the Russians colluded with members of his administration during the campaign. We have to follow that story.
She forgot to mention that Fox will do anything to help the administration avoid scrutiny - including putting forth fake news while attacking other outlets of being bad actors.
Watch the fake news about the fake news above, from the December 11, 2017 Happening Now.
Originally published at Newshounds.us
