Fox News Channel

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):

It’s commonplace for a news organization to be attacked for failing to cover certain major news events.  On the other hand, it is rare for a news outlet to be attacked for doing its job and reporting the news. 

According to Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Thomas Ricks, Fox News’ extensive reporting on the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi is not only a waste of time but an example of how Fox is, “the wing of the Republican Party.”  Appearing on Monday’s Happening Now, Ricks openly called out Fox News for its coverage of what he dismissed as merely a “small firefight.”  [See video below break.  MP3 audio here.] 

Schlockumentarian Michael Moore on Friday took an ironic shot at the Fox News Channel.

Appearing on HBO's Real Time, the perilously liberal propagandist said, "By watching Fox News you have de-evolved" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Hannity responds.

Bill Maher on Friday told Fox News’s Sean Hannity to commit suicide.

This occurred on HBO’s Real Time as the host discussed the Florida man who allegedly killed himself last week as a result of Barack Obama’s re-election (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Dennis Miller said Wednesday that he didn't watch the President's press conference because he "wanted to see a crowd that was less fawning."

"So I watched the Justin Bieber concert over on Nick Tunes," he told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In NYT-land, the liberal cable network MSNBC has been "gaining ground" on conservative Fox News for years (without ever actually catching up). Times media reporter Brian Stelter (pictured) filed the latest enthusiastic installment in MSNBC's quest for the white whale of ratings parity with Fox News in "The Anti-Fox Gains Ground."

Meanwhile, Stelter's media news colleague David Carr gave backhanded praise to Fox News for not lulling its "conservative base with agitprop" on Election Night the way it had every other night leading up to the vote.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer on Tuesday said the White House used David Petraeus’s affair to get the CIA director to give testimony about the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that was in line with the administration’s position on the matter.

Appearing on Fox News's Special Report, Krauthammer said, "The sword was lowered on Election Day" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

With all the gloating the liberal media has been doing since the election, one would think the margin of victory was comparable to that of Ronald Reagan's overwhelming win over Walter Mondale in 1984. From The Atlantic to Politico and various other outlets, there have been an abundance of columns published in the past week urging, as they always do after a rout at the polls, that the GOP must evolve to the left on key issues.

The underlying themes have all been indistinguishable, almost as if they are collaborating with one another. The Republican party is in trouble, and anyone who refuses to accept the reality of this is delusional, they insist. If you can't beat the Democrats at this point, join them wails the chorus of liberal writers -- or at least impose the Fairness Doctrine to get the ball rolling.

The Simpsons took a swipe at Karl Rove and the Fox News Channel Sunday.

As Fox's hit animated series began, lead character Bart was in his classroom writing repeatedly on the blackboard "I will not concede the election till Karl Rove gives me permission" (video follows with commentary):

Greta Van Susteren on ABC's This Week Sunday took exception with a cheap shot at Fox News from Nation magazine's Katrina vanden Heuvel.

This came after vanden Heuvel said of former CIA director David Petraeus, "Don't forget that over at your network at Fox, he was your candidate for a while" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CNN's Anderson Cooper asked a question on CBS's Late Show Friday that some might consider a bit indelicate.

"How does Dick Morris still have a job?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said Friday that the revelations concerning CIA Director David Petraeus's affair will now make what happened at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, back in September "the hottest story around."

As Krauthammer noted on Fox News's Special Report, this goes in stark contrast to how the media buried this story before Tuesday's election (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters previously reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, in response to Barack Obama's re-election victory, said Tuesday, "I'm so glad we had that storm last week."

Fox News's Bret Baier covered Matthews' pathetic comment on Special Report Wednesday while quoting NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Just in time, New York Times media reporter Jeremy Peters noticed on Election Day that MSNBC has been rather slanted in its hostility toward Mitt Romney, and that it's starting to reflect badly on its sister network NBC, in "Dueling Bitterness On Cable News."

Peters used findings from the Pew Research Center as his launching point to hit both MSNBC and Fox News for partisan stridency, though MSNBC seemed to take more punches.