November of '06 was one such moment....
And now there is the Fox News "hissy fit" over the Democrats wising up and refusing to let Fox News host the first Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate in Nevada.
TRex at firedoglake has a great take on it and also gives us a peek at Matt Stoller's article concerning Fox News.
Stollers comments first:
Over the past three weeks or so, the progressive movement – bloggers, Moveon.org, grassroots activists, filmmakers – pressured the Nevada Democratic Party to drop Fox News as the host of a presidential debate in August. In pursuing this short campaign, we made two basic arguments that were eventually accepted by party leaders.
First, we argued that Fox News is not a news channel, but a propaganda outlet that regularly distorts, spins, and falsifies information. Second, Fox News is heavily influenced or even controlled by the Republican Party itself. As such, we believe that Fox News on the whole functions as a surrogate operation for the GOP. Treating Fox as a legitimate news channel extends the Republican Party’s ability to swift-boat and discredit our candidates. In other words, Fox News is a direct pipeline of misinformation from the GOP leadership into the traditional press.
Via Think Progress, we see a video of "BillO's" response on Fox:
Tonight, Bill O’Reilly attacked the “radical movement” that opposed the Nevada Democratic Party’s debate with Fox News. O’Reilly said that MoveOn, “the Daily Kos or whatever that stupid thing is,” and others “use propaganda techniques perfected by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of information. They lie, distort, defame, all the time.” Progressive activists attack Fox News
because “we report on them accurately,” O’Reilly said.
TREX responds:
No, dickhead. We don't want anything to do with Fox because you are (in the words of Mr. Dickens) "vile and slanderous calumniators". And trust me. We're not the Nazis here. If you're going to invoke Godwin's Law, Mr. O'Reilly, you should bear in mind that Hitler was NOT an out-of-control liberal, no matter what Ann Coulter says.
And finally, after all the back-and-forth, the bottom line from TREX:
FOX NEWS IS NOT NEWS!
Okay? Democrats, are you listening? Fox News is nothing but a propaganda mill. Any and all stories and commentaries on Fox News end the same way, i.e., Republicans are good and Democrats are bad. Period. They barely even play at a pretense of objectivity.
Any attempt by Democrats to make nice with Fox is doomed from the outset. The Nevada debate was a set-up, an ambush. Nevada Democrats did the right thing by telling Fox where they could stick it. We need more of this, please. And we, the netroots, need to pound this into the heads of any Democrats who will listen:
Fox News is determined to destroy you.
In their ideological casino, all the games are fixed and the house always wins. Unless you're Joe Lieberman, Fox is going to find a way to discredit, drown out, and humiliate you. It is their sole purpose in the world. Nothing that they say will ever, ever truly be "fair and balanced".
We actually won this one folks....we didn't give faux news the chance to ridicule, undermine, demean, mock or marginalize our candidates....we didn't let them develop a narrative for our primaries.....
ON EDIT 11:02 am
Woohoo! Digby joins in....beautifully!
But I am damned if I'm going to fail to exercize legitimate grassroots
political power in the nomination process of my party, which is what happened in
this case. It's called "democracy" and if certain political poohbah's and media
mavens don't like it, that's just tough. Candidates vying for the nomination of
the Democratic Party have to respond to the voters. Contrary to Kondracke and
O'Reilly's hysterical rantings,
that's as far from Stalinsim and Nazism as you can get.
