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The Right-Wing Disinformation Machine

knapplc

By knapplc,
in Politics & Religion

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funhusker All-American

funhusker

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37 minutes ago, BigRedBuster said:

 

I didn't see her defend Epstein.  She asked a legitimate question and the contributor gave a solid answer, "he should have never gotten that deal 11 years ago and the FBI was also going on some new information..(paraphrasing)"

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knapplc Legend

knapplc

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Fox News' Very Ugly Day

 

 

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Hannity got played by Russian propagandists

Early Tuesday, Yahoo News published Michael Isikoff’s in-depth report on the origins of the conspiracy theory about Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed on the streets of Washington, DC, in July 2016.

 

According to DC investigators, Fox News’s story was completely bogus. It was quickly retracted, and Fox News announced it was conducting an internal investigation to determine how it was published in the first place. But more than two years later, not only have the results of that investigation not been disclosed, but Hannity has never apologized for promoting the conspiracy theory on his show.

Tucker Carlson smears a Muslim congresswoman as “a living fire alarm”

About 12 hours after Isikoff’s story dropped, Tucker Carlson, a primetime host with a show preceding Hannity’s that has repeatedly come under criticism for promoting white nationalist themes, uncorked an attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that was beyond the pale.

 

During a monologue toward the end of his show, Carlson characterized Omar — a Somali refugee who, along with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), became one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress earlier this year — as “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”

 

“She has undisguised contempt for the United States and its people,” Carlson said, citing no evidence and ignoring that 78 percent of voters who cast ballots in Omar’s Minneapolis district voted for her last year. “No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive ... she’s a living fire alarm, a warning to rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately — or else.”

 

Omar responded on Twitter by indicating she’s taking Carlson’s attack in stride.

 

 

Carlson’s monologue illustrated not only how Fox News promotes white nationalist themes but also how those themes are deployed to radicalize people. But Carlson’s attack on Hannity was only one of the ugly broadsides made by a Fox News primetime host on Tuesday evening.

 

Laura Ingraham helps slut-shame Christine Blasey Ford

Immediately following Hannity’s show, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and the Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway teamed up to slut-shame Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who came forward late last summer with her statement that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.

 

Hemingway, promoting her new book, sought to discredit Ford by describing her as “a heavy drinker who was much more aggressive with boys than we were led to believe” when she was in high school.

 

Ingraham didn’t register any objection to Hemingway’s smears, but instead reinforced them, saying, “When you scrub your social media profile, that’s a statement, is it not?”

 

And that’s not all. Earlier in the day on Tuesday, Fox News used the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein — a convicted sex offender with ties to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump — to launch a misinformed attack on President Barack Obama.

 

Afternoon host Harris Faulkner and Campus Reform editor Lawrence Jones III blamed Obama for the sweetheart plea deal Epstein received in 2008 from Alexander Acosta, a former US attorney who now serves as Trump’s secretary of labor — even though Obama wasn’t even inaugurated as president until January 2009.

 

And on Fox & Friends, hosts allowed White House counselor Kellyanne Conway to spread misinformation about the US census with impunity.

 

Yet just on Tuesday alone, Trump posted six tweets that either directly promoted Fox News programming or featured video clips from Fox News shows. And on Wednesday morning, he retweeted a post from right-wing commentator Mark Levin that attacked CNN host John Berman for criticizing Carlson’s latest attack on Omar as “what to many is just a racist comment — a flat-out racist comment or offensive comment suggesting that people shouldn’t be allowed in the country.”

 

Fox News viewers don’t seem to be bothered by any of this

Tuesday may have been an especially ugly day for Fox News, but it wasn’t particularly unusual. The network regularly comes under fire for spreading conspiracy theories, amplifying white nationalist themes, and pulling out all the stops to demean critics of President Trump.

 

Yet Fox News was the most watched outlet on all of basic cable in the second quarter of this year, marking 70 consecutive quarters that it has been the most watched cable news network.

 

 

 

Fox's viewers aren't bothered by any of this because they're just regurgitating an amplified version of what their viewers already believe.

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