Fox News Is Off The Deep End

I was doing my normal evening blog surfing and I came across this article at TPM: Fox Poll: Does Obama Want To Cut Taxes, Or Is He Corrupt Instead?

To be specific, here’s what the poll asked: “What do you think President Obama would like to do with the extra bank bailout money — save it for an emergency, spend it on government programs that might help him politically in 2010 and 2012, or return it to taxpayers?”

The basic assumption here, of course, is that the only reason Obama would want to spend money on the economy is to use the cash as a sort of political slush fund — not simply saying that one disagrees with spending the money or thinks it’s a bad idea, but that it is inherently illegitimate — while saving the money or cutting taxes have purer motives.

My first thought on reading the article was there goes Fox again. But that thought took me by surprise a little bit. Why should Fox get some kind of break for their bad journalism. They still call themselves Fox “news” and Chris Wallace and Brit Hume are still considered journalists by many people.

This got me thinking about the many recent incidents of journalistic malpractice committed by Fox in just the last year. Fox had a chart that added up to 120% on whether scientists were fudging global warming data. I won’t even get into the fact that somehow scientific data is going to be treated like it’s an American Idol contestant. Fox had another chart that added up to 193%. They were also caught using fake crowd footage for Sarah Palin’s book signing and for Michelle Bachmann’s tea party, not to mention the crowd inflation for Michelle Bachmann’s tea party and Glenn Beck’s 9/12 march. Sean Hannity was caught altering Obama’s words to make them sound like the complete opposite of what he actually said.

Other Fox News shenanigans are documented here and here.

So what’s happening with Fox? Are they following their viewers down the crazy train? I think Fox should change their name to the Glenn Beck channel. It’s more accurate.

Update: John Stewart documents the dumbing of Gretchen Carlson.