Slick Brit

by digby

In the ongoing “Fox is fair and balanced” kabuki show, we often hear that there is a big difference between the pundits, who they admit lean right, and their neutral and unbiased news divison, headed by respected journalist Brit Hume.

From Think Progress, here’s their unbiased Hume this morning:

HUME: And the other thing that needs to be noted here is when she says that she had nothing to do with getting her husband the trip, that flies in the face of the evidence adduced by the Senate Intelligence Committee whose findings were released not on a partisan basis — the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was that she very much did have something to do with it, that she recommended him and that she put it in a memo.

WALLACE: So she was lying under oath?

HUME: I think that there is reason to question her credibility on that point.

Chris Wallace and Hume are considered the “real” journalists as opposed to Hannity and O’Reilly. Yet, just like their wingnut colleagues, they are entirely wrong on the facts — and their agenda is entirely obvious.

Here, for the zillionth time are the facts behind the bogus “bi-partisan” finding in the SSCI report that Wilson sent her husband on that damned trip:

Hume’s false claim originated from a statement attached to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq that was released in 2004. In an addendum to that report, Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Christopher Bond (R-MO), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) wrote definitively, “The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador’s wife, a CIA employee.” The right-wing, including columnist Bob Novak, have taken the statement written by three Republican senators and falsely attributed it as the “unanimous” conclusion of the Senate report. The three conservative senators based their claim on testimony by a CIA employee who appeared before the Senate Intel Committee. Plame revealed on Friday that the CIA employee later apologized to her “with tears in his eyes” because he said “his words had been twisted and distorted” by the senators. And in fact, the unnamed employee drafted a memo, asking that he be re-interviewed by the Senate to correct the record. His attempts to set the record straight were denied.

Considering that Fox is rightly seen as a right leaning propaganda arm of the Republican party, if only because of its pundits’ conservative leanings and Republican advocacy, you’d think that Hume and Wallace would go out of their way to get the facts straight in these partisan battles if they cared even the slightest bit about their credibility.

Not only don’t they bother, they take it to another level and accuse Wilson of lying under oath, based upon slick, misleading GOP talking points: they always say that all the Democrats and Republicans signed the “report” but they always fail to mention that the accusation against Wilson was not part of that report but rather a separate statement. It is that very slickness that gives their game away — they are being much too careful with their words not to know what they are saying.

I am exceedingly tired of rightwingers telling me I can believe them or believe my own eyes. Fox is a Republican propaganda network, pure and simple, and they should be acknowledged and dealt with on that basis. The insistence that they are “fair and balanced” is insulting to the intelligence of every informed viewer in the nation.

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