Fox News Channel

While being ignorant of the facts is not as bad for a journalist as deliberately suppressing them, not knowing what you’re talking about can be far more embarrassing—and amusing.

Soledad O’Brien, the soon-to-be-former host of CNN’s “Starting Point,” proved that point definitively yesterday when she revealed that she had basically no knowledge of the new favorite story among left-of-center journalists, the supposed racism of Fox News president Roger Ailes.

The liberal media should have reported President Obama's Chicken Little sky-is-falling claims about the sequester, but "with clear skepticism" instead of mindlessly parroting them, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox News's Sean Hannity on the March 7 edition of his eponymous program.  "They should have gone to the American people and in effect said, this man is lying," but instead, "they did the exact opposite. They waved the pom-poms for him," the Media Research Center (MRC) founder argued.

Even worse, Hannity added, after the sequester ended up being a nothing-burger, the media whined about it, wringing their hands that the public are not concerned. "Let's understand what they mean when they say it's sad.... they're sad that the America people aren't believing the media," Bozell argued, adding the the "big losers" in the whole sequester ordeal are the liberal media, because "people are seeing right through it." [watch the full "Media Mash" segment here]

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Hannity and Bolling issue comment.

The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it's canceling public tours of the White House beginning this weekend due to budget sequestration.

On Thursday, Fox News hosts Eric Bolling and Sean Hannity each offered to pay for one week's worth of tours to keep the White House open to the public.

CNN harped on the controversy over Fox News head Roger Ailes calling President Obama "lazy" and Vice President Biden "dumb as an ashtray." The network covered it on five shows on Wednesday and Thursday, but three of the shows ignored that Ailes used Obama's own words.

In making the "lazy" remark, Ailes cited a 2011 interview with Barbara Walters where Obama said that "deep down, underneath all the work that I do, I think there's a laziness in me." Erin Burnett was the only CNN anchor to promptly give that context in her report; on Thursday's Starting Point, conservative panel member Will Cain first brought it up, and co-host John Berman affirmed it. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

"I think that for democracy to survive and thrive, I think we need a vigilant media. You know, we now have a lap dog, thrill up our leg, a**-kissing, suck-up, lapdog media. How do we have a thriving democracy when people can't get accurate, fair information? That seems to be hard to me."

So marvelously said Fox News's Sean Hannity on his program Tuesday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"We have two kinds of people in Washington in the press, we have the reporters and the repeaters," NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham told Fox News's Neil Cavuto on Thursday's edition of his Your World program. "We've had the repeaters all week of panic, you know, big scoops of sequester panic ripple" from the media who were busy parroting fallacious Obama administration talking points. [watch the segment below the page break]

"Part of the problem with this whole thing is" that the liberal media have been "instructed to go out and build panic, and they're very willing to go and do that" for the Obama administration, the Media Research Center director of media analysis added. "Our news media is so statist that they always think that the withdrawal of government from anything is a disaster" while they:

Jay Leno took a marvelous swipe at the Obama-loving media Wednesday.

During the opening monologue of NBC's Tonight Show, the host commented on the President's claim about realizing his mistakes after being in office for four years saying, "So apparently he does watch Fox News" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters reported, Fox News host Sean Hannity was rudely treated by Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) Tuesday.

Rather shockingly, the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz and Lauren Ashburn, in a video posting at the website Daily Download, said Wednesday that Hannity was "in the right" and that it was indeed Ellison that behaved poorly (video follows with transcript and commentary):

UPDATE: Hannity issues comment at end of post.

Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) had an amazingly heated discussion with Fox News's Sean Hannity Tuesday evening.

At the beginning of the six-minute slugfest, Ellison called his host "the worst excuse for a journalist I've ever seen" leading to a truly ugly encounter that culminated in Hannity ending the interview by saying to his guest, "You are a total waste of time" (video follows with rough transcript and commentary):

The liberal media’s love affair with the Obamas appears to have reached a new climax following the first lady's appearance via satellite on the Academy Awards on February 24. 

Speaking on the O’Reilly Factor on February 25, the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn admitted that Michelle Obama’s Oscar appearance was, in Bill O’Reilly’s words, “Hollywood Left boosterism,” but gushed that it was a “brilliant idea.”   [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

On Wednesday, the New York Daily News reported that Rob Morrison, an anchor for CBS's New York City affiliate WCBS, had quit his job after being arrested the previous weekend for an alleged assault on his wife, CBS MoneyWatch anchor Ashley Morrison. While this news story has been picked up by CNN, the New York Times, and UPI, CBS's own morning and evening newscasts have yet to report on it.

By contrast, CBS This Morning devoted several news items to the arrest and trial of Fox News correspondent Douglas Kennedy in 2012. During a April 4, 2012 report, then-anchor Erica Hill pointed out his affiliation with the news outlet before interviewing the journalist's attorney:

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had some harsh words Friday for all the fearmongering going on around the country concerning the looming sequester next week.

Appearing on Fox News's Happening Now, Paul said, "Balderdash. It’s untrue, unfair, dishonest, disingenuous. The president is making stuff up" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

How does Bill Maher keep his job at HBO?

On Thursday he tweeted, "Man, #HermanCain is making a comeback - says he likes working with Fox team, particularly some of them fine-ass white women they got there":

While the President and his media minions are trying to scare everyone into thinking that if the sequestration on federal spending goes through on March 1 it will be the end of the world, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer had a different view Wednesday.

Appearing on Fox News's Special Report, Krauthammer said, "This is the most ridiculously hyped Armageddon since the Mayan calendar" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Taken to task by numerous individuals on Twitter yesterday -- see Twitchy's excellent roundup here -- Fox News Channel The Five liberal co-host Bob Beckel today sought to explain, if not actually apologize for, his comments on the February 19  program in which the panel's token liberal both suggested campus rapes were rare incidents and that college co-eds might accidentally shoot someone who was not really a rapist:

On Tuesday's MSNBC Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough blamed conservative media outlets for recent Republican electoral defeats: "...for conservatives that think they have to stay in their own little media world, since Rush Limbaugh went on the air and became a national figure, Republicans have lost five out of the last six presidential elections in the popular vote. Since Fox News went on the air in 1996, Republicans have lost four out of five." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Co-host Mika Brzezinski snidely chimed in: "Please keep doing what you're doing." Scarborough continued his rant: "So when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon had to go up against a media culture that absolutely hated them, that despised them, that mocked them, that ran them into the ground every night, and there was no conservative outlet, they won 49 states....But for people that think...they have to stay in this little box, I've got bad news for you. It's not working."

During yesterday’s edition of Fox News Sunday, Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, who wrote the book "The Price of Politics" on how Obama handled the debt-ceiling fiasco in 2011, explained again to his media colleagues that it was a White House initiative to use a hatchet with these budgetary matters in the form of sequestration.

When Fox host Chris Wallace suggested the news media would highlight every spending-cut casualty expected from sequestration, liberal analyst Juan Williams agreed: "I think the news media will play into that at every level." Wallace asked Woodward to repeat his reporting:

"It’s not so much about Marco Rubio drinking water, it’s about the media drinking the Kool-Aid for Obama."

So marvelously said syndicated columnist and dear friend of the Media Research Center's Cal Thomas on Fox News Watch Saturday (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Remember Anita Dunn, the former Obama communications director that claimed Fox wasn't a news network?

Well, she's at it again saying Wednesday, "What you're seeing now with Fox is that that alternative Fox universe that they created for four years is crumbling."

Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday made a marvelous observation about the media firestorm surrounding Dr. Benjamin Carson's speech last week at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Appearing on Fox & Friends, Ingraham said, "We can have celebrities talk about fracking and all sorts of political issues...but the head of pediatric neurosurgery at one of the top hospitals in the world" shouldn't discuss healthcare (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

Former Congressman Allen West (R-Fl.) had some harsh words for America's media Monday.

Appearing on Fox News's On the Record, West said, "I think that we cannot continue to go on believing that all we can do is ask the President what his favorite color is and continue to have these softball interviews" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"If you go and you talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth of education, of knowledge, of understanding what the real issues are, and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they're supposed to think, and they keep repeating that and pretty soon they say, 'Oh, that must be true.'”

So marvelously said Dr. Benjamin Carson - the neurosurgeon who blasted onto the political scene last week with an extraordinary speech at the national prayer breakfast - on Fox News's Your World Monday (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):