The big difference between Fox News and the other slightly less blatantly biased and occasionally absolutely fraudulent are 2 fold.

#1. Fox News calls itself “Fox News”. Key word being “NEWS”. The term “news” conveys the idea that current events are being reported to the best of the anchors knowledge and ability. It implies a certain level of journalistic integrity. That is certainly NOT the case. Most of the shows are at best “opinion editorial”. Fact checking is all but absent, retractions are rare and hidden, and opinions are gratuitously added. Viewers neither expect proof, get proof, or question the opinions expressed. This is all by design.

#2. Fox News is the only media outlet that is the media arm of a political party. It is not a media outlet that has formed a bias. It is a bias that has formed a network. It is the first (to my knowledge) mass media outlet designed from the ground up as a distributor of a very specific political ideology. I mean of course every dictator from the Pharaohs to Hitler had their own propaganda machines, but Fox is as far as I know the first propaganda machine to be untethered to a single individual or dynasty. It is not a media outlet owned by a ruler, it is a media outlet that owns rulers.

#3. Fox News leads its audience to believe all other sources of information are somehow corrupt. The “lame stream media” or the “liberal media” etc. There is this idea that listening to any other news source will do you or your children harm and that someone is out to get you. Fox News wants you to believe that the only source of truth is Fox News or the personalities it employs. These personalities are often former rulers, current rulers, and would be rulers.

Considering these facts, there is only one type of organization that is even remotely comparable to Fox News, religion. No need for evidence, blind complete loyalty to those speaking, a built in distrust and suspicion of anyone who gets beliefs/information elsewhere as they are corrupt or somehow out to get you. They can quite literally demonize anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Then the idea that the main people involved are somehow greater than everyone else and infallible, even when they are caught in examples of extreme debauchery and hypocrisy.

Also of note is the fact that christian extremists are very likely to get their “news” strictly from Fox.

This whole little theory of mine isn’t meant as a positive or criticism. Its just the observations I have made and I find it fascinating.

Its like the church of conservatism.

Let’s phrase it the other way. We know that CO2 traps heat, we know that human beings have been releasing CO2 trapped since Saurian times, and we know that we’ve been release a lot of it. Are we supposed to believe all that will have no effect? None? None at all? As I said, the debate isn’t about human caused global warming, but how much, and to what effect, and what can be done.

Back to TTT, once again, I don’t but this accusation, but I also now remember what was the good thing I knew about Glenn Beck. It was that he defended on of the bravest radicals alive today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while the liberal establishment stampeded for cover. That’s good enough for me.

Unfortunately, there is a direct correlation between countries that are pro-climate-taxes are also the countries that are the most anti-semetic, specifically Scandanavia and Northern Europe.

The countries doing the least on climate change, America, Canada, Australia, are the least anti-semetic.

Nobody who has ever listened to a single Glenn Beck Show program would ever believe this. You are clearly speaking from a position of absolute and malinformed ignorance.

I’m still here, not “out of the argument”.

Exactly what do you think your going to do about my charges? Nothing, because I publish them everywhere, because I’ve examined the science.

I’m not here to convince you Hugo. You’re a man of blind faith, which can never be disuaded.

You have blind faith in the trust of the Journals, even though they’ve been proven engaging in an embargo against any papers that challenge the consensus.

You have blind faith these scientists wouldn’t suppress research that contradicts their own, even though you can read at http://www.eastangliaemails.com that Phil Jones was conspiring with other Warmists scientists to keep contrarian papers out of the journals.

By constantly demanding peer reviewed papers, you have isolated yourself from anything besides self-reinforcing ideas.

You are now officially out of the argument. I will not have charges like that thrown around lightly. Even if wrongdoing was found in one of these cases, which it has not been, you are accusing an entire group of scientists of being in cahoots to engage in deception? You’d find it easier to heard cats.

Find me some research, and do some actual work. Take a look at how hard, painful and difficult science is, and how much self-criticism and cross-criticism is involved and then, maybe, you won’t cast things like that around.

Of course Falwell was rancid, but this strain in Judaism – the belief that they are punished in exile – is quite common, and it is not “self hating”, or at least, no more so than Judaism essentially is. You’re quite right that we agree on much, but I just do not think that this qualifies as anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is something very specific. Here is Nick Cohen’s excellent point:

All of which sounds reasonable, until you ask a question that I’ve delayed asking for too long: what is anti-Semitism?
In its 19th- and 20th-century form, it was a conspiratorial explanation of power from the radical right. In this it differed from standard racism, which is generally resentment of powerless outsiders who look odd, lower wages and take jobs. The template was set by the reaction against the American and French revolutions. How could Americans proclaim such insane ideas as the rights of man, the counter-revolutionaries asked. How could the French overthrow the king who loved them and Holy Mother Church which succoured them? They couldn’t admit that the Americans and the French wanted to do what they had done. Their consent had to have been manufactured by the new rulers of the world. Originally these were the Freemasons, who were damned for peddling enlightened ideas. Only after Jewish emancipation opened the ghettos were the Jews press-ganged into the plot. They represented everything that was hateful about modernity: equal rights, religious toleration and the destruction of tradition.

That’s exactly right.

Now, where we don’t agree is this:

Because we expect better. Things really were better before Murdoch invaded.

Oh come on. You really think that there was a happy land of scrupulous objectivity and then came the Evil Baron Murdoch? Let me give you an example; once my friend got me to watch Outfoxed, which advances this odd point of view. One of the chaps talking in it is Eric Alterman, author of such books as What Liberal Media?. Well, to answer that question, he was found to be part of that Journolist fiasco, and I also know that he supports an online blacklist.

None of this is surprising to anyone who has grown up with fleet-street. That’s why I think it’s a very good thing that Fox exists. The whole point about this exercise is that it is supposed to be dialectical and confrontational; “true left and true right, perfectly balanced” as Peter Hitchens beautifully phrased it. It is exactly from that conflict that we can get some measure of what the truth is and the facts are.

Here’s another example; following this hilarious “Weinergate” fiasco (if you haven’t read the Hitch’s comments on it, you should), I stumbled across a quite devastating takedown of one of MM’s articles.

You seem to see Ruport Murdoch the way Glenn Beck sees George Soros. It’s a bonus being on the outside looking in; you can see how it all works a bit better when you’re not in the gears.

Lets be clear. I am accusing the climate science community of fraudulently arriving at their results for political ideological purposes. http://www.eastangliaemails.com

You said:
Now, I freely accept, in fact I know far better than you, that there are many, deeply sinister political figures involved here – Al Gore, Lovelock, Greenpeace etc. – but don’t you dare throw insult the integrity of practicing scientists without stone cold proof.

If you want to get into the argument, please find me some papers published in topline journals within the last, say, ten, fifteen years. .

No.

The Journals and the corrupt climate scientists are one in the same. http://www.climatedepot.com

[The Holocaust as justified punishment for Jews trying to live anywhere but Israel]it’s the stated view of very many rabbis

Their self-hating-Jew extremism is unrepresentative of the community, to the point of worthlessness. They do much more to help the Nazi cause than a terrified, edge-of-death 14-year-old George Soros ever did. No different from the sliver sect of anti-Zionist rabbis who went to Iran to shake Ahmadinejad’s hand at his death-to-Israel conference.

I will point you to Christopher Hitchens’s Daniel Pearl memorial lecture, where he points out that, today, all anti-semites are also anti-Zionists.

Hitch is a great writer and thinker, but he’s as much allowed to make mistakes as any of us. I saw several of his interviews in which he was furious at Jerry Falwell for proclaiming that the Antichrist would be a Jew–and surely Falwell’s notion there is at least as religiously-based as is the similarly grotesque mania that any Jew not living in Israel is committing a crime that would justify putting them in ovens. I doubt Hitchens would consider the people with any of those opinions as being friends of the Jewish community who view Judaism as a lasting and legitimate contributor to the American cultural spectrum–and if he did consider them as such, he’d be wrong. No big whoop.

I am still unsure why Americans act so virginal at finding out that news organizations have biases and agendas.

Because we expect better. Things really were better before Murdoch invaded.