Category Archives: media
Fox News can’t bear the truth: Right-wing terror groups are America’s gravest threat – Salon.com
via Fox News can’t bear the truth: Right-wing terror groups are America’s gravest threat – Salon.com.
SUNDAY, JUL 5, 2015
The numbers don’t lie. Since 9/11, more Americans have died at the hands of white supremacists than radical Muslims
ERIC BOEHLERT, MEDIA MATTERS
Bill O’Reilly (Fox News)
This article originally appeared on Media Matters.The numbers don’t lie.
Since 9/11, more Americans have died at the hands of homegrown “white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims,” the New York Times reported this week. Citing a count provided by Washington research center New America, the Times confirmed that with the race-base mass murder in Charleston, S.C. last week, 48 Americans have now been killed by “people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the ‘sovereign citizen’ movement,” as compared to 26 Americans who have been killed by “self-proclaimed jihadists.”Those figures might come as a surprise to most Americans. Indeed, the media narrative since 9/11, and certainly the conservative media account, has been that Jihadists are waging an escalating war on the U.S. By contrast, how often in recent years have news consumers seen or heard extended debate and discussions about right-wing or white supremacists killers in the U.S.? Killers who appear to be twice as deadly to Americans as jihadists?
“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. John Horgan of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell told the Times. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”
The New America research findings confirm what Media Matters has been highlighting for years: From neo-Nazis killers, to a rash of women’s health clinic bombings and attacks, as well as assaults on law enforcement from anti-government radicals, acts of right-wing extreme violence continue to unfold regularly in the United States.
And Media Matters has also been shining a spotlight on the fact that not only does Fox News downplay homegrown acts of right-wing, anti-government and white supremacist violence, treating them as rogue, isolated events (if covering the events at all), they also hype beyond proportion and common sense attacks by Muslims in America.
That attack mode allows Fox to accuse President Obama of being “soft” on Islamic terror. (Obama’s administration is too “politically correct.”) It also lets Fox advocate for bugging mosques and eliminatingother Constitutional rights. Recall that it was on Fox that viewers were told, “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
Right-wing violence? Fox News doesn’t recognize a clear and present danger.
That double standard was on display this week when Megyn Kelly devoted almost her entire Fox News program Wednesday night to an interview with Traci Johnson, who was attacked last year by a co-worker at Vaughan Foods processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma. The attacker was Alton Nolen who had been recently been fired over racial comments. Nolen then went home and retrieved a large kitchen knife. He returned to the workplace and began attacking his former co-workers. He beheaded one woman and injured Johnson before he was shot by a company official. Nolen later confessed to the attack.
Fox News immediately led the right-wing charge to declare the Vaughan Foods attack to be an act of ISIS-like terror. (Nolen was a recent convert to Islam.) Devoting an extraordinary amount of TV time to wildly hyping the crime, Fox hosts like Kelly and Sean Hannity created special programming to cover the story. (i.e. “Terror In The Heartland.”)
But in the end, law enforcement found no evidence that Alton’s killing was terror-related, and labeled the killing a workplace attack. Appearing on Fox News after the attack, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that, while Nolen “was looking at the extremist ideology,” “there is no evidence at this point that he was directed by a terrorist organization to do what he did or that that was the principle motivating factor.” The FBI also found no links to terrorism.
Yet there was Kelly this week – months after the crimes — speaking over ominous background music and once again suggesting the Moore, Oklahoma attack had been the product of “radicalized” terror. In other words, Fox has been reduced to creating incidents of Islamic terror in the United States, while at the same time Fox plays down glaring examples of deadly right-wing violence.
The steady pattern of those political attacks may be one reason the Department of Homeland Security this yearissued an intelligence report warning about the rising right-wing terror threat. Fox News immediately objected, with host Eric Bolling insisting there hadn’t been any recent examples of homegrown terror to justify the government’s warning. Co-host Greg Gutfeld agreed, claiming liberals can only name two far-right terrorist events ”over four decades.”
Seriously?
On a September night last year, 31-year-old marksman and “survivalist” Eric Frein ambushed two Pennsylvania state troopers outside of the Blooming Grove barracks in northeastern Pennsylvania. After the assassination, the state police commissioner reported the shooter had “made statements about wanting to kill law enforcement officers and to commit mass acts of murder.” Another official noted the shooter has a “longstanding grudge against law enforcement and government in general.”
Claiming to be acting under the bloody “banner of Liberty and Truth,” Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda entered a restaurant Las Vegas in June, 2014 and executed two local policemen while they ate lunch. During the ambush, one of the shooters reportedly shouted that the “revolution” had begun. A week before the killings, the shooters posted a manifesto on Facebook where they announced “….we must prepare for war.” Jerad Miller, who traveled to Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch that spring to join the militia protests against the federal government, declared: “To stop this oppression, I fear, can only be accomplished with bloodshed.”
The ambush in Las Vegas came just two days after Dennis Marx, a member of the “sovereign citizen” anti-government movement, opened fire on a courthouse outside of Atlanta. Sovereign citizens are militia-like radicals who don’t believe the federal government has the power and legitimacy to enforce the law.
On August 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page pulled up outside the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, WI, and started killing worshipers. Page murdered two Sikhs outside the house of worship and then killed four more inside, including the president of the temple. According to acquaintances, the 40-year-old killer hated blacks, Indians, Native Americans and Hispanics, and was interested in joining the Klu Klux Klan.
On May 20, 2010, two West Memphis, Ark., police officers were shot and killed by a father-son team of AK-47-wielding sovereign citizens during a routine traffic stop.
Two months later, dedicated Glenn Beck fan Byron Williams stocked a pickup truck with guns and ammo and set off up the California coast to San Francisco in order to start killing employees at the Tides Foundation in hopes of sparking a political revolution. En route to his target, Williams got into a 12-minute firefight with California Highway Patrol officers.
The shocking list goes on and on and on. Sadly, the church massacre in Charleston now ranks alongside a litany of homegrown radical attacks. They’re the type of attacks Fox News doesn’t want to focus on.
Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of “Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.”
Jon Stewart unpacks Antonin Scalia’s hypocrisy and looks at his inconsistent judicial rulings
illusion…
a whole new meaning to ‘conan the barbarian’…nice one, conan
NBC just cut ties with Donald Trump, pulling Miss USA and Miss Universe
via NBC just cut ties with Donald Trump, pulling Miss USA and Miss Universe.
MON JUN 29, 2015 by Walter Einenkel
I farted
Cue the phrase “liberal media” because everyone’s favorite blunt object just got more bad business news.The network is “ending its business relationship” with Trump over his “recent derogatory statements” regarding immigrants, the company said in a statement Monday.
“To that end, the annual Miss USA and Miss Universe Pageants, which are part of a joint venture between NBC and Trump, will no longer air on NBC,” the statement continued. “In addition, as Mr. Trump has already indicated, he will not be participating in The Apprentice on NBC.”
Donald Trump has already shown how to lose jobs both abroad and at home—just by talking and being himself. This guy should be riding an actual elephant into the GOP debates—he’s willing to tell it like the Republicans actually think it is.
fact checking cnn as only john oliver can…
oh, come back, john oliver; your country needs you more than it needs russell brand
Bill O’Reilly Accused of Domestic Violence in Custody Battle
via Bill O’Reilly Accused of Domestic Violence in Custody Battle.
J.K. Trotter
Filed to: BILL O’REILLY 5/18/15
Three weeks ago, a Nassau County Supreme Court justice ended a bitter three-year custody dispute between Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly and his ex-wife, Maureen McPhilmy, by granting custody of the couple’s two minor children to McPhilmy. Though nearly all documents pertaining to New York family court cases are sealed, Gawker has learned that the justice in the case heard testimony accusing O’Reilly of physically assaulting his wife in the couple’s Manhasset home.
According to a source familiar with the facts of the case, a court-appointed forensic examiner testified at a closed hearing that O’Reilly’s daughter claimed to have witnessed her father dragging McPhilmy down a staircase by her neck, apparently unaware that the daughter was watching. The precise date of the alleged incident is unclear, but appears to have occurred before the couple separated in 2010. The same source indicated that the daughter, who is 16 years old, told the forensic examiner about the incident within the past year.
Update
May 18After this post was published, Bill O’Reilly denied the allegation of abuse, telling Politico’s Dylan Byers late Monday: “All allegations against me in these circumstances are 100% false. I am going to respect the court-mandated confidentiality put in place to protect my children and will not comment any further.” Update
May 20Gawker has published court transcripts which corroborate our source’s account of the domestic violence allegation that O’Reilly denied. You can read those transcripts here. The apparent domestic violence assault would be the latest in a series of revelations about O’Reilly’s disturbing treatment of his family members, and his ex-wife in particular.
O’Reilly and McPhilmy separated in April 2010, after which McPhilmy began dating a Nassau County Police detective named Jeffrey Gross. Upon learning of their relationship, as Gawker reported in 2011, O’Reilly called up his high-placed connections within the NCPD to have something done about Gross. Since O’Reilly was helping raise money for the department’s associated charity, the Nassau County Police Department Foundation, his calls sparked an internal affairs investigation into Gross and his relationship with McPhilmy—an incredible waste of police resources, and a devious way of getting back at McPhilmy by harassing her new boyfriend.
The O’Reillys formalized their divorce in September 2011, and agreed to share custody of their school-aged children. As part of their agreement, the couple assigned a neutral therapist named Lynne Kulakowski to arbitrate any potential custodial disputes, should they happen to arise in the future. Shortly thereafter, however, McPhilmy learned that O’Reilly had in fact added Kulakowski to his household payroll so she could serve as a full-time nanny—in which capacity, as a judge later explained, she was required “to perform virtually all of [O’Reilly’s] parental duties.”
In a unanimous decision two years ago, a New York appeals court ruled that O’Reilly’s behavior “could undermine the integrity” of their joint-custody agreement and ordered a trial court to consider McPhilmy’s petition for sole custody.
While all of this was going on, as Gawker reported in March 2013, O’Reilly was trying to get McPhilmy excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, in which the couple married in 1996. McPhilmy even received a letter from her local parish, another Long Island institution where O’Reilly enjoys influence, admonishing her for taking communion. (In the Church, divorcing and remarrying is considered a grave offense to God.) At the same time, O’Reilly was seeking a formal annulment—a procedure most commonly sought for marriages that last less than a year—for his and McPhilmy’s 15-year-long matrimony.
We were able corroborate the fact that the justice issued a decision in the case, and that O’Reilly has appealed it, at the Nassau County Clerk’s office in Mineola. Neither O’Reilly nor McPhilmy responded to requests for comment. A representative for Fox News Channel did not return messages.
O’Reilly’s lack of response is especially worth noting. The anchor has spent his highly remunerated career obsessing over patterns of violence among racial minorities, particularly black people, and the apparently unique effect of violence on the integrity of black families. As he fulminated on-air in December 2014: “The astronomical crime rate among young black men—violent crime—drives suspicion and hostility. … No supervision, kids with no fathers—the black neighborhoods are devastated by the drug gangs who prey upon their own. That’s the problem!”
Or, as O’Reilly claimed in August: “The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family.”
If you know any more about this, please get in touch. Methods for contacting us securely can be found here and here.
Email or gchat the author: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · Photo credit: AP
To which one can only reasonably add…
digger666 
You must be logged in to post a comment.