Fox News - Fair and Balanced? Hardly.

At the bottom you'll find a story that ran last week by Charlie Reina on the Fox News/Barack Obama scandal, that is definitely worth your time, pending you keep up with current events/news.

Just a quick back story, incase you're not familiar with the situation...on January 19^th, (full clip found below) during Fox News Channel's early morning show, "Fox and Friends", anchor/host Steve Doocy and his co-anchors said about Barack Obama: "he spent the first decade of his life raised by his Muslim father as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa." Doocy later hinted that Obama "could have possibly been trained to hate America at a very young age." Had FNC researched the story themselves before going to air with it, they would have come to the conclusion that everyone now knows…the story was completely false. But, that of course, is not how Fox News operates. Instead of Fox apologizing about their mistake and false report or taking responsibility for it, they instead blamed their source, Insight Magazine, which is a conservative Christian publication with ties to The Washington Times, which is run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

CNN instead did the dirty work as one of our correspondents traveled to Indonesia to investigate and determine if there were any truths to the Fox News story. There were not. (It's worth noting that ABC News also sent a team to Indonesia to do the same thing and found the same results.) Anderson Cooper reported on the false news story for CNN and pointed out the fact that several news outlets ran with the story, without first investigating the facts. Apparently Fox News saw this as a personal attack (even though Cooper did not specifically name Fox News) and released an ad claiming that Cooper is "the Paris Hilton of news" and gets beats by Greta Van Susteren every night at 10p. Fox is known for making similar attacks in the past to anyone who debunks one of their stories or questions their credibility. Fox uses their ratings as bragging rights for success, as opposed to things that really matter in journalism - accuracy, credibility, sources, and/or awards - a Peabody, 3 Emmy's, and a Dupont, all of which Cooper received in 2006. (Greta did not receive any.)

Every part of the story Fox reported on turned out to be false. The school Obama attended is a public school (not a private Islamic militant school as Fox suggested), and gives little to no emphasis on religion. Obama was not raised under the Islamic faith, as Fox News also asserted. His Kenyan-born biological father, who Barack only met once, was a one-time Muslim who later abandoned the faith and became an Atheist. Even after Obama fired back at the false claims saying : "I've never been a Muslim, and was not raised a Muslim. I am a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago", Fox News still hammered away at the story, asking several guests to comment about the story on their evening programs over the course of several days.

This is just one of many examples of how Fox News touts itself as being "Fair and Balanced", when in fact they go to air with stories that are intentionally damaging to anyone that does not line-up with their conservative/republican agenda. Instead, they present "news" in the form of innocent gossip such as: "what we're hearing from sources is…" without first independently confirming the information. When you break it down and look closely at the way they handle these kind of stories, including the language they use, the visuals/graphics, the background music, their voice inflection on certain words, etc, it's very deceptive and anything but news. Below, is a much more in depth description of how FNC operates, and who better to write about Fox than a former Fox News journalist? Also, if you like investigative documentaries, check out Robert Greenwald's film "OutFoxed', which exposes in great detail the biasness at the network, including several interviews with former and current Fox News employees.

First, the clip/story in question. This is when Fox first went to air with the story about Obama:

Now, the ad Fox News is running in magazines attacking Cooper:

And finally, here is today's story on the matter written by former Fox Newser Charlie Reina:

Loath as I am to criticize my former employer, Fox News Channel, I can't help but weigh in on FNC's current public go-round with the Cable News Network. Fox's smarmy hit job on Barack Obama, which touched things off, is contemptible in its own right. But what makes this latest dustup downright nauseating is Fox's hypocrisy in targeting one of CNN's best for the worst of its trademark vitriol. The Mediabistro website told the story in a recent headline dripping with unintended irony: "Fox Is Going After Anderson Cooper."

You see, it's not the first time Fox has gone after Cooper. In the past, though, its pursuit was in hopes of luring him away from CNN. Trouble is, the seduction was so self-protectively feeble that Fox never reached first base.

I watched part of the mating dance play out at FNC one day, not long after Cooper's star began rising at CNN. I was in the office of a then-senior producer who, like me, had worked with Anderson years earlier. At one point, the producer reached over and dialed Cooper's direct number at CNN, explaining that he had been sounding Anderson out, unofficially, on Fox's behalf.

Whether the game plan came from above or was the producer's own, I can't recall. But the idea apparently was for him to run interference – to sound Anderson out before Fox management risked the rejection of any formal offer.

I got the impression that even the producer knew he was on a fool's errand; that for Cooper, whose talents and instincts were in actual news, coming to Fox would be a huge step down professionally. In any case, this particular call went nowhere. The producer led with, "So when are you comin' over?" Anderson laughed politely and changed the subject. I doubt he ever gave the absurd idea a moment's serious thought.

Now, five or so years later, here's Fox, the spurned suitor, engaged in a desperate effort to defame its one-time object of desire. The network's chief attack dog, Irena Briganti, has declared Cooper "the Paris Hilton of television news." It's a low blow, but nothing new for the lowbrows at Fox P.R. In fact, it's a cheap shot straight from the playbook of Brigante's predecessor, Rob Zimmerman.

One of Zimmerman's prime targets was another rival network's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield of MSNBC. She was young, attractive and hard-working. And in the news-heavy weeks after nine-eleven, she had become a darling of the national press. A December, 2001, newspaper article profiling Banfield contained, among a variety of opinions, Fox's assessment of her, via Zimmerman, as "a lightweight … the Anna Kournikova of television news." This was so gratuitous a slur that I, in my naivete, thought Zimmerman had been sand-bagged – quoted on a remark he'd made off the record. When I saw him later that day in the FNC newsroom, I asked if that had been the case. "Hell, no," he said. "We propelled -- we generated that story. We're out to get (Banfield), to ruin her."

So now, per current Fox spokes-assassin Irena Briganti, Anderson Cooper is "the Paris Hilton of television news." I'll say one thing for Irena. What she lacks in originality, she makes up for in redundancy.

It is true that Cooper set himself up for the attack. But he did so forthrightly, by publicly criticizing Fox for the tawdry way it conducted the Omama smear. To wit, the smarmy chit-chat on Fox & Friends suggesting that as a youth, Obama may have been trained by Muslims to hate America.

On the surface, this was merely a "we're only telling you what we've heard" kind of thing. Three gossips dishing dirt over coffee on a show that's not even part of the network's news report. But it speaks volumes about the people who run Fox News, because they use this morning cluckfest -- as they do O'Reilly, Hannity & Colmes, and FNC's other entertainment shows -- to set the table for what then becomes the channel's news report.

Here's how it works: Have the chatterboxes drop an innuendo, repeat a rumor, pose an "innocent" question embarrassing to the enemy (just about any Democrat.) Then, leave it to the news anchors -- whose hours are written and produced by newsroom personnel who get their daily marching orders directly from above -- to question their guests on those same rumors and innuendos.

In this way, without actually reporting, the network manages to turn a cheap, partisan smear into a "story" and keep it in the news for as long as is politically expedient. Now everyone's happy – if by everyone, one means Fox executives and the politicians (just about all Republicans) who love them.

For this, one can almost excuse FNC's capo, news chairman Roger Ailes. He's spent most of his adult life guiding political campaigns with tactics that have left even his most hard-bitten party comrades cringing. Ailes is so steeped in the martial arts of politics, so adept at twisting words and distorting facts in the service of his party, that he can't be expected to treat news any differently. Or so one might argue.

But it's the so-called journalists who run FNC, most notably v-p John Moody, who have no excuse. Moody joined Fox after 20 or so years as a legitimate newsman, a respected writer, reporter and bureau chief. Now as FNC's chief news manipulator, he has no problem using the honorable profession he once represented as a front for disseminating political propaganda.

John's own words, in his daily editorial memos to the Fox News staff, show just how he operates. There's no better example than his post-Election Day memo last November, just after the Democrats won back Congress.

"The elections and (Defense Sec. Donald) Rumsfeld's resignation were a major event but not the end of the world," writes Moody. Then, directing the day's coverage from Iraq, he instructs: "(L)et's be on the lookout for any statements from the Iraqi insurgents, who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem-controlled Congress."

Don't even wonder if this is just John being Moody, innocently allowing his personal politics to slip through. This is how he and Fox management operate, and there's nothing innocent about it. In the days leading up to the elections, the Fox chat shows were obsessed with the idea that America's enemies were rooting for the Democrats. Then, with the Dems' victory, came Moody's Dems-and-insurgents memo. And sure enough, by that afternoon, Fox news anchors were citing "some reports of cheering in the streets on behalf of the supporters of the insurgency in Iraq, that they're very pleased with the way things are going here and also with the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld."

When Moody began sending his memos, early in 2001, I lost what little respect I had had for him as a newsman. His heavy-handed and partisan manipulation of the FNC news report had been evident all along. But now he was putting it in writing, leaving a paper trail. Not for the first time, I thought, arrogance meets ignorance. That Moody has been exposed publicly and to this day has not bothered even to tone down his memos shows how inseparable those two failings can become.

It is, of course, a fact that Ailes, Moody & Co. has been successful at its game. But as a news organization, Fox derives no respectability from the high ratings it flaunts. What the numbers do indicate, I believe, is that Fox News Channel has managed to set the journalistic bar so low, for so long, that much of the TV-watching public has forgotten what honest news is.