Fox News Channel

As NewsBusters reported, President Obama, in an interview published Sunday by The New Republic, said, "If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you'll see more of them doing it."

Within a few hours, Fox News's Greta Van Susteren struck back:

"If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you'll see more of them doing it."

So said Barack Obama in an interview just published by The New Republic:

As NewsBusters reported last week, America's media were in total swoon mode over Hillary Clinton following her testimony before Congress.

On Saturday, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas said of their behavior on Fox News Watch, "They're going to part the waters like Moses did the Red Sea to give her a clear path to be the first woman president...They treated [Barack Obama] as a Messiah, they’re going to treat her as the Virgin Mary" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The media's sickening love affair with Hillary Clinton has gone so over the top that Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) took issue with it Thursday.

Discussing the Secretary of State's recent testimony on Capitol Hill with the gang at Fox & Friends, McCain said, "She was called feisty according to the mainstream media. She obviously has an adoring media. She really didn't answer any questions" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

More and more, Fox News's left-leaning contributor Kirsten Powers is becoming a must-see analyst on the network.

Appearing on The O'Reilly Factor Wednesday, Powers said, "I think liberals because they are so used to controlling all the media...when they hear things that don't jibe with what they want to hear, it's very disconcerting and unsettling" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Good Morning America co-anchor George Stephanopoulos appeared on Tuesday's O'Reilly Factor to openly lobby for more gun control and reflect on his previous career as a Democratic operative for Bill Clinton. O'Reilly played a clip of Tom Brokaw comparing not speaking out about guns to allowing racism to flourish in the south.

Responding to this, Stephanopoulos hedged, "It's not the analogy I would use, but I think what he was talking about there is the kind of passion that people feel right now." Later, the reporter opened up about his own liberal take on guns: "Look, I have been a long-time supporter of gun control measures that, you know, I think are in accord with the Second Amendment." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Brit Hume had some harsh words for America's Obama-loving media Monday.

Appearing on Fox News's Special Report, Hume said, "[The President's] inaugural speech should put to rest for all time the notion much favored by his admirers in the press that he is a centrist. He is not" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Fox News Watch host Jon Scott on Saturday asked his guests why President Obama typically ignores Fox News at his rare press conferences.

Kirsten Powers smartly answered, "Because he doesn't want to be embarrassed" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

While Obama's media predictably gush and fawn over the President's anti-gun initiatives Wednesday, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer not surprisingly had a different take.

Appearing on Fox News's Special Report, Krauthammer said, "The things he signed today, the executive orders are useless" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

Dennis Miller had some harsh words for Al Gore Wednesday in the wake of the global warmingist-in-chief's decision to sell his Current TV network to oil-supported Al Jazeera.

Appearing on Fox News's O'Reilly Factor, Miller said, "He’s a bad guy. Ethically speaking, he makes John Edwards look like Sir Thomas More" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

While the arrival of 2013 rang in a happy new year, it also brought in happy ratings for the Fox News Channel, which continued to dominate the cable news channel race in total viewers and the Adult 24-54 demographic for the 11th consecutive year.

According to a news release from FNC, Nielsen Media Research found that the network completed the previous 12 months with the top 11 programs in total viewers. Demonstrating the network's dominance is the fact that the evening audience for Fox News topped the ratings of CNN, MSNBC and CNN combined with an average of 2,071,000,  up 11 percent.

Two weeks after he clashed with pro-union demonstrators protesting a law that gives workers in Michigan the choice of whether or not to join a union, Fox News contributor Steven Crowder has posted almost nine minutes of raw, vulgarity-laden footage.

Throughout the video, which was released to prove that Crowder and other conservatives in Lansing that day were attacked by union thugs, there's the incessant, irritating sound of someone at the protest beating on a drum.

Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine is a media writer with a flaw. He wrote about Fox News without seeming to think he had to watch it. On Monday night, he wrote an article hotly claiming that Fox News hosts were ordered not to talk about gun control after the Newtown shooting (except for  Fox News Sunday).

Jeff Poor at The Daily Caller unloaded a painful box of facts on Sherman about all the examples of gun-control talk over the weekend. Sherman’s report was anonymously sourced and loose on the facts:

The situation in Michigan resulting from the government's passage of “right to work" laws in a heavily unionized state reached a new level on Friday, when Fox News contributor Steven Crowder filed a complaint with the police regarding an attack on him by a protester.

“By calling in, he's in essence filed a complaint,” said Richard Hale, the shift supervisor at the Lansing post of the Michigan State Police.

After Karl Rove disagreed with other Fox News Channel contributors that President Obama had won re-election on the night of Nov. 6, a reporter for the New York Magazine website has claimed that network president Roger Ailes was “angry” at the GOP strategist's “tantrum,” which led to Rove being “benched” from the cable channel for 27 days.

In a story on the subject, Gabriel Sherman relied on many anonymous “sources” to claim that “Rove's meltdown” resulted in his banishment by Ailes, who sought to “reposition” the news channel “in the post-election media environment.” In truth, according to Fox officials who spoke on the record, Rove has been less of a presence on the channel because the election has ended.

Teamsters Union president James Hoffa warned on CNN Tuesday that there would be "civil war" in Michigan over thepassage of right-to-work legislation, but after anchor Brooke Baldwin made two brief mentions of it the CNN blackout began. In contrast, on the next day Fox News hammered the "civil war" threat as an example of radical rhetoric.

How bad was CNN's blind spot to the controversy? After Hoffa warned of "civil war," Baldwin simply repeated his words back to him. "[I]n the meantime, as you wage this civil war, what does this mean for unionized workers moving forward in Michigan?" she asked, without demanding how violent the union pushback would be.

Christmas: a season of generosity, good cheer, preparation for Christ’s birth – and a swarm of lawyers seeking to purge any mention of Christianity from the public square.

Every Christmas, the so-called secular community starts shrieking whenever any mention of religion is brought into the public eye. Lawyers successfully targeted a school’s performance of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ Even Christmas trees have too much religious content to suit the self-appointed censors.

NewsBusters reported last week that Fox News's Sean Hannity had come down on actor Ed Asner for his participation in an animated video depicting a rich person urinating on regular Americans.

Asner struck back Monday on Current TV's Young Turks saying, "I think he's behind on his rabies shots" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Whatever its origins, there seems to be an innate desire among many lefties to classify those who disagree with their belief system as mentally, morally, or psychologically inferior—or preferably all three. This being the case, it should come as no surprise that in addition to cooking up real academic studies using biased questionnaires designed to make conservatives look stupid, statists also have a habit of getting taken in by fake “studies” which validate their alleged superiority.

Perhaps the most famous such hoax involved the fictitious Lovenstein Institute and a ranking of presidential IQ which supposedly showed former president George W. Bush as having the lowest intelligence of all presidents in the 50 years preceding him. Gleeful statists repeated this meme on numerous blogs and even in some newspapers, never bothering to check whether or not a Lovenstein Institute actually existed. Fast forward to 2012 and once again, the left has been taken in by another hoax “study,” a press release from a fictitious Intelligence Institute which claimed that the average IQ of Fox News Channel viewers is 80, 20 points below the standard IQ of 100.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr said of Fox News Friday, "It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War."

This occurred during an online video interview with the Huffington Post (video follows with transcript and commentary):

If you were a Republican presidential candidate, wouldn't you jump at the chance to do a one hour primetime interview on Fox News Channel the night before Election Day?

According to Bill O'Reilly who appeared on NBC's Tonight Show Thursday, that's what Mitt Romney was offered and he turned it down (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power. The extremely liberal MSNBC host was recognized in the spoken-word category for the audiobook version of her New York Times bestseller.

Maddow's nomination is an apt opportunity to remind our readers that an assortment of reviewers have critically panned the progressive commentator's polemic about the military-industrial complex for its blatant misrepresentation of history and glaring omissions.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, Ed Asner narrated an animated video for the California Federation of Teachers wherein a rich man urinated on a group of poor people.

In an interview aired on Fox News's Hannity Wednesday, Asner asked one of the program's producers if he could urinate on him (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In a video posted at the Daily Caller by Jeff Poor (HT Hot Air), Fox News's Greg Gutfeld went after Bob Costas's opportunism and hypocrisy on gun rights in the wake of the Jovan Belcher tragedy. He also took on Jason Whitlock's inexcusable characterization of those who believe that the Constitution's Second Amendment means what it says and insist that our government to continue to act as if it does as racists.

The video and a transcript follow the jump (internal links added by me; bolds are mine):

On Sunday, NewsBusters broke the story about NBC's Bob Costas blaming guns for the previous day's murder-suicide by an NFL football player.

During a Grapevine segment involving the incident on Fox News's Special Report Monday, host Bret Baier quoted NewsBusters' associate editor Noel Sheppard (video follows with transcript):

In an appearance on Monday's America's Newsroom program on Fox News, veteran sportscaster Jim Gray at first expressed what seemed like absolute agreement with NBC's Bob Costas regarding the need for more gun control in light of the horrific Jovan Belcher murder-suicide on Saturday.

In what turned into a sanctimonious lecture during halftime programming on Sunday Night Football, NBC's Costas endorsed an anti-gun screed by Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock. Asked for his thoughts by Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum, Gray wholeheartedly agreed with Costas and Whitlock, but then oddly backtracked just as the interview was concluding [ video (via MRCTV's Ian Hanchett) and transcript below ]

Reviewing several dispatches from the past couple of days, the latest news out of Egypt is that Egyptian "President" Mohammed Morsi "is not backing down in the showdown over decrees granting him near-absolute powers," that "clashes between the two camps (Morsi's Islamist supporters and secular opponents) ... left two dead and hundreds injured," and that the country's Muslim Brotherhood-dominated assembly "pushed through the 234-article draft (constitution) in just 21 hours from Thursday into Friday ... (after) Coptic Christians and liberals earlier had walked out."

The draft constitution includes several articles "that rights activists, liberals and Christians fear will lead to restrictions on the rights of women and minorities," and omits "bans on slavery or promises to adhere to international rights treaties." Oh, and I almost forgot: "The Obama administration is declining to criticize Egypt's draft constitution." It's worth identifying at this point several (but by no means all; what follows is surely a small sample) of those who in 2011 reassured the world that Egyptians had nothing to fear if the Brotherhood and Islamists became dominant.

Before Election Day, Newt Gingrich predicted Mitt Romney would win.

On NBC's Tonight Show Thursday, host Jay Leno asked the former House Speaker if this was because he was "just watching Fox News?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):