Relief is just a leak away

By Capt. Fogg

There's nothing like a good leak. No, I'm not talking about beer drinking or kidneys. Yes, it may still be all about indecent exposure, but exposure of a different kind of naughty bits. God bless the leaker.

Remember "climategate," that clumsy journo-speak title for some e-mails between British climatologists that after a bit of redaction seemed to be saying that the evidence for global warming was fabricated by a great worldwide network of rogue paleoclimatologists plotting to be characters from a James Bond movie? Well, the hoax may be on the other foot now, so to speak, but you won't hear it from the folks at Fox News who spread it around the planet. You won't find Fox News admitting or mentioning that NASA data confirmed a rise in temperature quite independently and with irrefutable scientific rigor.

You won't find Fox News admitting to error of any kind much less to deliberately lying, whether its hoaxing us about scientific data or showing the fake and fraudulent video that ruined ACORN. I admit, those e-mails had me going for a while, but that was before the new data and the new revelations. Even Andrew Breitbart publicly washed the egg off his face, but Fox News? Well, you decide.

It was all too easy to call Julian Assenge a "terrorist" or call for his summary execution, but I'm curious to see the outcome of some recent leaks showing just how Fox News slants the news:

Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data... we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question,

said Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon in a leaked e-mail in response to correspondent Wendell Goler's report that that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization data again confirmed that the 2000 to 2009 decade has been the warmest worldwide on record, not just warmer than the previous one.

Like anything Fox News gets paid to misrepresent, conflicting data must always be impugned by the " some say" or "people say" trick as though those "critics" weren't simply Roger Ailes or Bill Sammon or a Fox News sponsor or most of all the Republican Party.
When the data conflicts with the politics, always mention "the critics." That's unslanted journalism, Fox News-style.

And when something you don't like sounds good, change the name.

Take the "public option," for instance. According to a leaked memo from Republican pollster and Fox News man Frank Luntz:

If you call it a "public option," the American people are split, if you call it the "government option," the public is overwhelmingly against it. 

Public sounds popular, sounds democratic, sounds like the people want it and polls show that they do, so let's call it "the Government option," said Sammon to Sean Hannity in another leaked e-mail. "Great idea," said Sean.

Let's also claim that the "government option" would be "sponsored by the government," although in fact, the proposed public option would have funded the program with the premiums paid by enrolees -- just like private insurance. So we need even stronger language -- let's call it the "Government-run option" and drape it in the Soviet flag.

Never mind that we're lying, whatever serves the Party, that's what we'll say. That's journalism, Fox News-style.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)