Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Obama VS FOX

Commentary By Ron Beasley



There are those among the DC brain(dead) trust who think that Obama's war against FOX news is a mistake - I disagree.  If you are a student of fiction you know that it is the antagonist that empowers the protagonist - every good guy needs a bad guy.  George W. Bush had the axis of evil and Osama bin-Laden.  For Obama the logical choice was FOX " News".  You don't even have to watch FOX to suspect it's probably little more than a tool of the Republican Party.  Just look at it's president - Roger Ailes.  Ailes was a media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani.  He is rumored to have said after Obama's election that the mission of FOX news was to attack Obama 24/7 and that's what they have done.  FOX created the teabagger movement and shamed the other networks into reporting it.  Journalists report the news they don't create it.  It's pointed out that MSNBC has Maddow and Olbermann but the idea that a network owned by General Electric would be a tool of the Democratic party is absurd.  As Steve Benen  points out that not even the issue:

But let's put all of that aside and focus on a point too many observers
don't appreciate: the line between Fox News' personality-driven
primetime hosts and Fox News' "reporting" doesn't exist. This isn't a
network that does legitimate journalism during the day, and then let's
GOP clowns run wild at night -- this is a network that acts as the arm
of a political party and a cog in a larger partisan machine all day.

That's right, it's all winguttery 24/7 with the possible exception of Shep Smith. 

Josh Marshall:

I'm sure there are legit, ethical journalists in the organization
(in fact, I've known several of them. And God help them.) And there are
standouts like Shep Smith
who goes off the reservation with some regularity. But as a product the
straight news is almost more the stuff of parody than the talk shows
which are at least more or less straightforward about what they are.

As we know, MSNBC has now made a big push to refashion itself as a
liberal or perhaps just non-hard-right-wing alternative to Fox. But the
distinction between the two operations becomes clear whenever you watch
'news' on MSNBC as opposed to Maddow, Olbermann or Ed.

If you actually watch Fox News with any regularity it's hard to see
any point to discussing the fact that the station operates more or less
openly as a wing of the GOP.

Bottom line - Obama needs an antagonist and FOX news certainly qualifies.

Update:

I don't think Eugene Robinson had a chance to read this but he now thinks the war on FOX is a good idea.



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3 comments:

  1. KatOctober 20, 2009 at 2:34 PM

    I read a snippet of a pro-faux blog today which advised Obama, 'Whatever you resist, persists.'
    Riiight, I thought -- because, as the Borg so famously insisted, 'Resistance Is Futile!'

    ReplyDelete
  2. HootsbuddyOctober 20, 2009 at 11:06 PM

    Ron, you called it exactly right. If Obama has a weakness it is that his inclination to be perpetually conciliatory and upbeat, even interacting with card-carrying evil people, makes him seem pusillanimous to those who don't understand judo. Fox is like a disruptive kid in class whose misbehavior cannot be overlooked by the teacher. Ignoring it only makes it worse. And addressing it openly, though not very effective, is all that an instructor can do. In the end, all a teacher can do with such pupils is identify them to the rest of the class, passing them off to someone else ASAP.
    Meantime, the GOP by default allows Fox to rape their brand repeatedly. It's the same odd and tragic behavior that keeps spouses, typically women, in abusive relationships with mates who repeatedly bully them into submission. If Fox's behavior is ever to change it will be Republicans, not Democrats, making the correction.
    (The same dynamic is true, incidentally, about defeating Muslim extremists. In the end it will be overcome not by non-Muslims but by more rational fellow Muslims. This is the foundational reason the US will never prevail against extremists in Asia.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. EarlOctober 21, 2009 at 12:11 AM

    I'd have to agree, of course, but I did find it amusing that the administration is being criticized for noticing the elephant in the room.
    Also amusing is the 'Murkin's idolatry of that withered old Australian.
    Maybe it's just me.

    ReplyDelete

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