Fox Nation is a Jerk

If anyone who has strong political leanings wants to put themselves in an altered emotional state, all they have to do is go to the most extreme and unfiltered blog or forum of their political opposites. Those of conservative leanings would recommend  Democratic Underground or Daily Kos I’m sure, but considering our own site has been leaning left, we would like to point out our treasure of the internet crazies: Fox Nation.

Fox News calls itself “fair and balanced,” but it has some of the most right leaning personalities in American media (Hanity, Beck, Napolitano). This could be explained away by saying that their actual reporting of facts on their non-opinion programming is non-biased, but why then would they create and continue to operate a site so filled with biased and anger as Fox Nation?

Fox Nation fails to be fair or balanced in both aspects of a website/blog: site created content and user created content. First, Fox Nation doesn’t actually create its own stories. Instead, it links stories from many reliable and unreliable sources by posting them under a headline and attached picture. The issue is these headlines often distort what the original news article was trying to say, and the pictures are often not related to the story. They also post stories that benefit the Republican Party and bash the Democratic Party.

A perfect example of this is an Associated Press story titled “US criticizes Israeli settlement construction plan.” The article goes into an accurate and evenhanded report on the issues of settlement expansion in occupied territory by Israel, which is a major issue when it comes to the peace making process and logically is something the U.S. is “deeply concerned” about. However, Fox Nation turns the state department’s “deep concern” over this possibly illegal and clearly detrimental action into the headline “Obama Slaps Israel Again” along with picture of a black Israeli flag that is clearly meant to make the situation seem sinister and dire.

Of course, a headline such as this just opens the floodgates to call President Obama a Muslim, which is not a bad thing but it is not true, and to attack him with comments like:

roscop: “Wouldn’t it be nice if Israel has just had enough of Obama’ mouth, and had their hit men to take him out?”

and

crazymidwest: “Obama and the democrats (commies)= racist and ANTI-SEMITIC”

These comments above don’t adequately show the vitriolic hate that fills Fox Nation though. User comments on forums and blogs are hard to monitor, especially when they rely on user flagging and not active monitoring, but Fox Nation seems to be a place where nothing is out of line as long as it is conservative. Take for instance their recent picture of the day, a random 5 year old picture of the future wife of Prince William in a bikini. Of course, the bikini isn’t as “teeny weenie” as the headline suggests, but its basically some eye candy for the common male gaze at Fox Nation. As a topic in itself,  it seems totally apolitcal and the worse one would expect would be male gawking at this tiny picture, but what follows is much worse.

Somehow the connection is readily made between someone about to marry a prince, who is not yet next inline for the throne, and the First Lady of the United States.

bogo98: England gets her, and we get MO.

scotty262: Lets see a Princes like that or a cow like we have in the WH, which would you choose????

leebob: “She can always hire a personal trainer like MO did. We are waiting to see the new MO, waiting, waiting, waiting, think I will take a nap.

GrandmaWI: Better her in one than Michelle O.

gmrgwho: Please, tell me, we’ll never see Michelle in this classy type outfit…

leebob: When we do see Mooocelle in one we will all have to renew our prescriptions for glasses because we will not belive our eyes.

diemuslimpig: Striking resemblance to our own First Lady! (ok not so much)

And my fav:

osagetrail: Just remember America, if you eat what the Gorilla tells you to, forget the bikini. You will have a 4′ wide az and a face that looks like it hit a wall at 80 mph.

Now, as mentioned earlier, it is hard to police a traffic heavy website that has the goal of political debate, but you can’t be serious when people who go by the name “diemuslimpig” have 8,000 comments on your site and 2,000 on your your main site (Fox News) are still posting.

Fox Nation is a horrible site with horrible misleading headlines and, for the most part, horribly mislead or hateful commentators. Simply put, Fox Nation and those who fuel it are jerks.