Since Rupert Murdoch (the founder of Fox News) purchased the Wall Street Journal in 2007, we can see just how the mainstream news works.
Last month, the WSJ claimed that Obama was using a list of reporters to call on during his press conferences, and argued that President Bush would not have been able to get away with using such a list. Media Matters promptly pointed out that Bush did indeed use such a list. As did the American Journalism Review, who further called Bush’s press conferences “scripted”.
You would think that once such a lie is revealed the media would stop repeating it, but of course Fox News doesn’t play by those rules. As Crooks and Liars points out, yesterday Liz Trotta regurgitated the claim that by using a list of reporters to call on, Obama was doing something “historic” “like no other president I’ve ever seen”.
Trotta wasn’t content to just repeat a lie, but felt the need to embellish it. She claimed that Obama was using “preselected questions in a tightly controlled news conference” that would “tailor questions and answers to the way he wants them.”
But what’s really funny is that when her claim that the questions were preselected was corrected, she admitted her mistake, but again claimed that the questioners were preselected, and “that is brand new in the history of press conferences”.
I guess they are following the propaganda rule that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes true. Is the media trying to make up for the fact that they were notoriously soft on Bush by attacking Obama using anything they can dream up?
UPDATE: See also this recent example where Fox News ran video of Joe Biden saying the “fundamentals of the economy are strong” in a story about how the Obama administration is “now singing a different tune” about the economy. Fox claimed the clip was from last weekend, but it was actually six-months old, and — even worse — Biden was quoting McCain’s famous economic gaffe. Fox later apologized, calling it an “honest mistake”.
