A group calling itself the Tea Party Fire Ants is calling for a boycott of Fox News because the channel has become too liberal. They’re afraid their beloved news source is becoming the “right-wing CBS News” and they’re taking their business to media outlets willing to cover Benghazi and the president’s birth certificate 24/7.
Is the boycott working? If you say it isn’t, you’re obviously a part of the conspiracy against the Tea Party.
“We’ll have ratings numbers by beginning of the week,” writes the author of benghazi-truth.blogspot.com, “though we have seen liberal groups on the internet trying to artificially inflate FOX ratings during this 2nd boycott to deny the Tea Party a victory, even against a common enemy!”
The truth is, Fox News’ ratings have been on the decline since the November election. Some of that decline certainly comes from viewers disappointed after months of being assured Mitt Romney was going to win in a landslide. The channel has since reflected the Republican Party’s official stands by accepting the end of the Bush tax cuts on the richest and at least pretending to want immigration reform. But the channel has been just as dogmatically anti-liberal as ever. The problem is that as the Tea Party gets less and less popular, the only people left who claim the mantle represent the extremes of the Republican Party.
The Tea Party would never have been a national force of the magnitude it reached in 2010 if Fox News hadn’t promoted it directly. We know this because once the channel stopped doing so, the group immediately went into decline. Now Frankenstein’s monster is headed back to the Doctor’s laboratory.
But to calm our friends in the Tea Party, here are five examples of Fox News being as biased as ever.
Bill O’Reilly Yells At Liberals
Bill O’Reilly wants you to know that President Obama hasn’t submitted any proposals for cuts. When liberal Alan Colmes points out that isn’t true, O’Reilly says that this specific plan isn’t specific enough.
Benghazi Trutherism Continues
One of the key aspects of the Benghazi conspiracy theory is that the surivors of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya are being hidden, possibly in Kenya with the president’s real birth certificate, and being prevented from speaking. The only problem with that theory is that the survivors have already spoken to investigators.
A search of FoxNews.com finds 40 mentions of “Benghazi” in the last month. But when you sell a story as “10 times bigger than Watergate” for months and don’t cover it every minute, you’re bound to let a few Tea Partiers down.
Rob Portman’s Son What?
When Senator Rob Portman announced that he had become pro-same-sex marriage after his son came out to him, it was big news on most cable channels. But the first elected Republican senator, um, “coming out” wasn’t a big enough deal for Fox News to mention it more than a couple of times, according to ThinkProgress.
What Correction To That Menendez Story?
When Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was accused of having sex with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, Fox News was happy to report the story. Sean Hannity even used it to call out the media’s “double standard” when it comes to covering sex scandals. When the Dominican women who were the sources of the story said they’d been paid to make it all up — no such luck.
Invoking Slavery To Criticize Obama And The Media
Does it get any better than this, Tea Party? Fox News’ Jim Pinkerton called out NBC News for trying to preserve its “master/slave” relationship with the White House. That’s a delicious sandwich of white persecution paranoia and fantasies of Obama’s totalitarianism. Maybe you’re upset because his fellow pundits laugh at him. But that’s what happens when you say these things around adults.
It’s tough to live up to the Tea Party’s standards, but claiming that Fox News doesn’t provide enough Benghazi coverage or do enough Obama-bashing is like saying ESPN doesn’t give you enough SportsCenter.
