TV News LIES

Opens second front in effort have all News Corp. TV licenses revoked

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has petitioned the FCC to deny renewal of three Washington-area Fox-owned TV stations. The group had signaled the move last spring in the wake of the News of the World phone hacking scandal in Britain.

Fox News is following its well established pattern of underreporting stories that don’t appeal to its conservative base, instituting a virtual blackout of Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) controversial — and widely condemned — comments about “legitimate rape.”

Fox News has has a long history of offering slim coverage to stories that could disappoint conservatives including, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and passage of New York’s historic same-sex marriage law.

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If you want to know what PBS would like without government funding turn on A&E, History Channel, or the ever oxymoronic Learning Channel. These networks have been long held up by Republicans as the private sector alternative to PBS, but look at the programming that these channels actually contain. Would Sesame Street be replaced with Pawn Stars? Instead of Antiques Roadshow, how about Storage Wars? Replace Downton Abbey with Toddlers and Tiaras.

Romney was asked by Fortune where he would cut government spending, and he answered, “There are three major areas I have focused on for reduction in spending. These are in many cases reductions which become larger and larger over time. So first there are programs I would eliminate. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to strand (sic) on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf.”

Mitt Romney was essentially telling Elmo and the rest of Sesame Street to stop being a bunch of bums and get a job. Mitt Romney’s vision for America includes the death of Amtrak, slashed funding for the arts and humanities, and a privatized PBS.

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Former Rupert Murdoch protege Rebekah Brooks has been formally charged with conspiring to hack into the phones of hundreds of well-known people and their associates, a move first announced last month by Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service.

The development had been expected since July 24, when prosecutors named Brooks as one of eight people accused of participating in a campaign of espionage which targeted more than 600 celebrities, sports stars, politicians and crime victims.

The chief war court judge has agreed to let media and civil liberties lawyers argue for openness at the start of a pre-trial hearing at Guantánamo in the death-penalty case of five alleged conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks.

A consortium of 14 media groups, including The Miami Herald, and the American Civil Liberties Union separately filed motions protesting protective orders that shield the public from access to secret information in the case.

Since late 2009, there’s been a slowly-growing wave of attacks from the unconventional oil and gas industry on media outlets that cover the controversies surrounding hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and other shale gas practices.

Reporters who write for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to Reuters to the New York Times have had their professional bona fides called into question after unearthing documents and facts that challenge claims that fracked shale gas is cheap, abundant, and clean.