Worst Segueway of the Week Award: Fox & Friends links the Emancipation Proclamation Anniversary to Obama's 'Government Plantations'

Its almost laughable that "Are you using the term slavery too loosely?" was even asked in this segment of FNC's Fox & Friends Weekend Sept. 22 edition. No matter what vaguely cogent argument may have come out of 'Blacklash' author and FNC contributor, Deneen Borelli's mouth, all the while she spoke, the lower third of the screen was littered with terms that specifically refer to black slavery: Indentured to Government Borelli: Americans being enslaved by debt, The Government 'Plantation' US enslaving citizens with debt. 

Clearly, no one at Fox & Friends Weekend thought it was a bit much to link the two for the sake of taking a dig at the Obama administration on what is usually such a Fair and Balanced® Saturday morning news show.

As long as this show is on the air seven days a week, The Daily Show will never run out of material. Or Saturday Night Live for that matter. At best, Fox & Friends is a self-spoofing show. At worst, and sadly to boot, the show is a popular and power platform for launching attacks on leftist or progressive causes and the Obama administration with facts full of 'truthiness' and octopus-like conspiracy theories. Fox & Friend also experiences frequent visits from Republican nominee Mitt Romney, as the NYT notes.

And finally, to eliminate some of the noise about the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation draft as a result of FNC's hullabaloo, some video via the US National Archives youtube channel, which is an excellent and interesting panel discussion by academics and local community leaders. The panel was held as part of a Documented Rights civil rights eight-month exhibition in St. Louis which recently closed.

Fox's top five most misleading charts

Just keep telling yourself that ...

Your eyes can play tricks on you, and so can charts and graphs ... especially if viewed on Fox News.

The most common FNC tactics are using scales with an irregular interval and starting a bar graph without a zero point. Both tactics visually distorts the graph to exaggerate the gaps between data points that actually have little variance. However, even then, there is a good chance the chart you are looking at includes data that is just plain wrong. Below are five of the most misleading Fox News Channel charts, all of which fail on some level to present information in an unbiased way. Can you spot what's wrong?

Fox News Hannity: Second highest rated show on primetime cable news revives birther/Obama foreigner conspiracy theory

According to Wayne Allyn Root, former 2008 Libertarian VP candidate, President Barack Obama must have been a foreign exchange student, because Root remembers everyone who went to Columbia. Except for Obama, who Root also figures, must have been lurking around campus with all the other foreigners occuppying his time "smoking pot and attending socialist meetings." This is a truly bizarre segment, hosted by Sean Hannity, who has the second highest rated show on cable primetime news. Crooksandliars:

Sean Hannity, always the shrinking violet concern troll, is never the birther, of course. He just allows idiots with idiot theories to be softball interviewed on his show to sound the dog whistles, which will then be echoed by the likes of Breitbart, Glenn Beck, and the Fox morning crew.

But this one is particularly stupid. Even the dumbest Fox viewer ought to be scratching their head over this one. Wayne Allyn Root has been pimping his story for a very long time on sites like World Net Daily and more recently, Glenn Beck's The Blaze. It goes like this: Root went to Columbia at the same time that Barack Obama went to Columbia but Root has no recollection of Obama, therefore, Barack Obama must have been a foreign exchange student.
Root's story is so weak even Reason.com is embarrassed by it (and him):

FOX News pushes Conservative study that says new Voter ID laws "protect minorities"

The crew from FNC's "Fox and Friends" are up to their old tricks again: spreading disinformation provided to them via a Conservative think-tank with a dog in the fight.  Basically, everything that Steve Doocy just said about Voter ID laws is completely wrong and insulting to boot. This is but thinly veiled propaganda. Notice that Doocy quotes one of the senior fellows who conducted the study, "The criminals, more often than not, are Democrats violating the rights of people who tend to be black or senior," right after crudely asserting that "blacks and the poor" are typically the victims of voter fraud.  So according to the National Center for Public Policy, Democrats are committing voter fraud against African Americans, yet there is no mention of the sizable percentages of African Americans who will be disenfranchised as a result of Voter ID laws, which are supposed to protect said African Americans from losing their right to vote because of Democrats committing fraud. Holy crap! that is a headache.

Of course, the arguments in favor of Voter ID requirements are framed around "voter fraud," which is almost non-existent. And the few rare cases in which voter fraud has occurred have never swayed the outcome of an election. According to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice (New York University School of Law):

Nailing Murdoch: media mogul's influence in UK gov leading up to Iraq War revealed

Getty Images via  The Telegraph

With no signs of the Conservative FOX behemoth slowing in the midst of the election cycle, here in the UK, the man behind the curtain appears to be increasingly vulnerable to scrutiny (and maybe even the law). Thanks to Prime Minister Tony Blair's Communications Director, Alastair Campbell, detailed diary entries describing conversations between Rupert Murdoch and Blair have become public. The diary reveals that Murdoch did indeed put pressure on the Blair Administration to speed up British involvement in the Iraq war. Murdoch had previously testified before the Leveson Inquiry that he had never used his position to influence the actions of Prime Ministers. However, the new evidence, detailed extensively by the Guardian, shows that Murdoch made a series of calls to Tony Blair in the weeks leading up to the Iraq war.