Fear and Loathing in Prime Time: Media Matters Action Network Dissects the Cable Anti-immigrant Hate-Mongers

The folks at Media Matters Action Network have taken a scalpel to Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck to dissect the bramble of anti-immigrant lies regularly peddled on the cable “news” shows. Media Matters soberly analyses these commentators’ rhetoric and gives truth to the lies, buzzwords, half-truths, innuendos and hateful claims regularly spewed by the gaggle of screamers that populate the cable “news” networks. No surprise to their findings.

There are many problems facing the United States today: a faltering economy, a health-care crisis, and the continuing war in Iraq, to name a few. But viewers of some of the most prominent cable news programs are presented a different reality, one in which one issue stands above all others: illegal immigration.

Media Matters Action Network undertook this study in order to document the rhetoric surrounding immigration that is heard on cable news. When it comes to this issue, cable news overflows not just with vitriol, but also with a series of myths that feed viewers' resentment and fears, seemingly geared toward creating anti-immigrant hysteria.

The study painstakingly details the use of buzzwords, loaded phrases and propagandistic methods employed by Dobbs and his cable cronies. As well, the study notes, as we have in prior postings, the links between “mainstream” commentators on cable and extremist groups. While the extremist links are far more extensive than the ones highlighted in this study, this should serve as an antidote to those who want a rational and reasonable debate on the issue of immigration. As we have stated before, the nutwing web is completely intertwined with hate groups that congregate on sites such as VDare.com. On this issue, we will defer to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, both of which have done outstanding jobs highlighting these connections.

Fear and Loathing in Prime Time: Immigration Myths and Cable News

Media Matters Action Network

http://mediamattersaction.org/reports/fearandloathing/online_version

Joe Klein has an excellent piece on the Lou Dobbs and the Media Matters Report in Time Magazine (May 25, 2008), entitled Lou Demagogue. Herein a sample:

Given the amount of serious journalism going on at CNN--the reporters risking their lives on battlefields all over the world, fine journalists like John King and Candy Crowley working to report the presidential campaign accurately, the excellent fact-checking that Wolf Blitzer did earlier this year on the Obama Madrasa smear--given all that and a nearly thirty year history of really trying to present the facts straight...I've got to wonder why the network allows Lou Dobbs to continue spewing false, inflammatory nonsense under the guise of objective journalism.

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/05/lou_demagogue.html

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