August 28, 2010
Turn Off Fox
Many of us already know that Fox News is biased—but it’s actually much worse than that. For years they have used lies, distortions, and race-baiting to divide this country. Recently, it’s gotten downright dangerous. Earlier this summer, a heavily armed man got into a gun fight with police after he was pulled over on his way to kill people at the Tides Foundation[1]—an obscure non-profit that Glenn Beck regularly demonizes on his Fox News TV show.
Fox News is bad news for America—and it spreads, and is legitimized, partly through TVs in public places.
That’s why I’ve joined the TurnOffFox campaign—the first part of a larger campaign to diminish the influence of Fox. It’s about educating people about Fox and getting it turned off in stores, restaurants, and other public places.
Will you join me? It takes just a moment to declare your own household “Fox free”, and at the same time appeal to public establishments in your community to stop playing Fox. And you’ll get a FREE Turn Off Fox sticker when you do.
No other news organization that’s considered legitimate consistently wages smear campaigns based on lies and race-baiting. But for years Fox News has done exactly that, and the pattern has only gotten worse since Barack Obama entered national politics.
Here are just a few examples:
- A frequent Fox guest, Jesse Lee Peterson, said that the majority of Black people have poor moral character, and cited “what they did to the dome” after Hurricane Katrina as evidence.[2] Peterson has also used his platform on Fox to claim that 90% of Black people are racists—against Whites.[3]
- In a case of naked race-baiting, Fox host Glenn Beck called President Obama a “racist” who had a “deep-seated hatred for White people or the White culture.”[4] Earlier that week, Beck claimed that the President’s health insurance reform proposals were a form of “reparations” designed to “settle old racial scores.”[5]
- Fox host John Stossel argued that the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act—which prevents businesses from discriminating based on race, sex, and other factors—should be repealed.[6]
- Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity were the first to air deceptively edited and incomplete video of Shirley Sherrod’s remarks to the NAACP.[7] The video made it seem like Sherrod was confessing to using her position at the USDA to discriminate against White farmers, when she was really talking about the importance of overcoming prejudice. Sherrod lost her job over this misrepresentation, which Fox enthusiastically repeated without seeking the facts. Fox has since tried to pretend it had nothing to do with this smear—but Fox is the number one reason these kinds of distortions and smears have any part in our national dialogue.
The examples above aren’t even a tenth of Fox’s vicious lies and smears, and over the years they’ve just gotten more brazen.
The goal of Turn Off Fox is to reduce the number of public TVs showing Fox News, while spreading the word about Fox’s poison (and how it works) to those who don’t know.
Signing up for the campaign is just the first step. We make it easy for you to tell us about businesses playing Fox. If you’re willing to talk with them, we’ll provide you with straightforward materials that explain why they shouldn’t be a party to what Fox is doing. And if there are businesses you know that want to tell the world they would never play Fox, you can help them declare themselves a “Fox-free zone.”
As businesses Turn off Fox and stand up as Fox Free, and as we encourage our friends and family to do the same, we’ll help make clear, to people across the country, what Fox is about. And we’ll reduce their ability to do harm.
Please join me in signing up for the TurnOffFox campaign. Thanks.
References
- ↑ "I-580 gunman targeted ACLU, Tides Foundation". KGO-TV. San Francisco, CA. August 20, 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
- ↑ "Defending Bennett's comments, Rev. Peterson cited alleged violence at Superdome to claim that most blacks 'lack moral character'". Media Matters. October 3, 2005. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
- ↑ Ellen (February 4, 2009). "Jesse Lee Peterson, Hannity's Favorite African American: I Think We All Agree That Barack Obama Was Elected Mostly By Black Racists And White Guilty People". News Hounds. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
- ↑ "Beck caps off week of race-baiting by calling Obama a 'racist'". Media Matters. July 30, 2009. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
- ↑ "Glenn Beck: Obama agenda driven by 'reparations' and desire to 'settle old racial scores'". Media Matters. July 23, 2009. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
- ↑ "Stossel calls for repeal of public accommodations section of Civil Rights Act". Media Matters. May 20, 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
- ↑ "Fox smears Sherrod as racist, Sherrod cancels Fox interview". Media Matters. July 20, 2010. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
