Monday 21 July 2008

FoxNews - Last Stand of the Conservatives ?

Let's be honest, for FoxNews to describe itself as "balanced" is like saying Freddy Kreuger is "handy" with a chainsaw. If you've never seen FoxNews it is an appallingly self-opinionated cable news channel which is unashamedly anti-liberal, pro-conservative and anti-Democrat.

Not that it ever says that, it's all done through tone and snide innuendo by a group of telegenic news presenters all from the Right side of the tracks.

FoxNews has a problem with this year's US presidential election. It hates Barack Obama with a healthy passion. Nearly every news discussion I see on FoxNews is a more or less thinly veiled attack on Obama, whether on foreign policy (implied message: he doesn't know enough. We can't trust him to keep us safe) or on domestic policy (implied message: Obama will raise your taxes).

On the other hand, FoxNews doesn't really like John McCain either. McCain isn't conservative enough for FoxNews and he had the audacity to run against the greatest conservative of them all, President George W. Bush.

However, as Obama builds a poll lead and the McCain campaign founders, more and more objective analysts are forecasting an Obama victory which, with a strengthened Democratic majority in Congress and the Senate, will put the Republicans and their conservative friends back in the nightmare of 1992, powerless to prevent the liberals running America.

The latest FoxNews ploy is to bizarrely talk up the economy. I saw, on their "Bulls and Bears" programme last week, a totally irrational discussion asserting that oil would crash back under $100 a barrel and that would lead to a huge surge on the stock market and a sharp economic recovery in time for the election (implicit message: vote McCain).

It took a wrestler in a suit, one John Bradshaw Layfield, to introduce some much-needed perspective and that took the wind out of the presenter's sails. The presenter was one Brenda Buttner - she is married to one Tom Adkins who was the founder of one of the more odious American conservative websites: commonconservatives.com

No, I'll not be sorry if Obama wins in November but watching the faces of the FoxNews presenters if it's an Obama landslide will be worth staying up late.

1 comment:

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