What kind of a news enterprise would promote an author with a record of outrageous lies, uncorroborated allegations, and a stream of denouncements from across the political spectrum?
Look no further than the online community for Fox News that is published by a super-secret cabal that refuses to identify their editors: Fox Nation.
The author in this case is Edward Klein. He has spewed more delusional conspiracies and slanderous insults than anyone this side of Glenn Beck. He has called Hillary Clinton a lesbian, Bill Clinton a rapist, and, of course, Obama a Muslim usurper from Kenya. His previous works have been blasted by staunch conservatives like Kathleen Parker, John Podhoretz, and Peggy Noonan, whose Wall Street Journal review described his book as “poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.”
However, in the past few days the Fox Nationalists have posted six separate stories based on allegations from Klein’s new book. None of the allegations have been affirmed by any independent source, but they are repeated at Fox Nation as if they were facts. Here is the recent rundown of the phony articles:
When was the last time Fox Nation featured six stories from any other single source? But now they have posted six articles all based on the same book by a notably disreputable character. That’s a pretty generous contribution of free PR for a marginal author and an untrustworthy collection of hearsay. There are only two reasons why the Fox Nationalists would go to these lengths.
1) The slander proffered by Klein achieves the primary goal of everything on Fox: disparage President Obama. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or even plausible. Just shout as loudly and as often as possible the most asinine garbage you can think of and you’re liable to get your book promoted by Fox.
2) Fox Nation is wholly unaccountable for their ranting. They do not publish the identities of any of their editorial or administrative personnel. No one can be held responsible or asked to justify their work product. That’s convenient because so much of what appears on Fox Nation is so childish and embarrassing that no one would want to take credit (or blame) for it anyway. It is highly unusual for a legitimate news organization to keep their editorial team secret. Fox Nation is the only one I can think of who does so, but then they have an excuse – they are not a legitimate news organization.
In this election season we can expect to see more of this. There will be other books by sleazeballs like Klein that will get the same treatment on Fox and other right-wing media platforms. These people are not concerned with journalism. They are focused only on negative propaganda. And for that you don’t need credentials or that pesky detail that honest journalists call truth. Fox News has perfected the promotion of this dreck, and they will surely continue to lead the way.
The Borat of right-wing pseudo-journalism has just released the latest in his attempts to so thoroughly discredit himself that his mother would be ashamed to take his calls. James O’Keefe, a convicted criminal, has been trying to prove that voter fraud in America is at crisis proportions. But the only thing he has succeeded in proving is that he himself is a recidivist perpetrator of attempted fraud that ultimately fails. And he has never rebutted the studies that show that 