Fox News is spoon-fed a scandal — and blows it - By Alex Seitz-Wald for salon.com

[Douglas Carpenter]

Fox is still too busy focusing on fake scandals to cover the real one

Just when scandal-mania seemed to be dying down comes troubling news, via former Salon writer Glenn Greenwald, that a secret FISA court made Verizon turn over records of every call made on its service in the U.S. to the National Security Agency. This is a big deal, but as Alex Pareene noted, it will only become a real scandal if Republicans make it so — just as Democrats did when NSA abuses were uncovered under Bush.

This is why conservative scandal-mongers can’t have anything nice. When they’re handed a real scandal that should confirm all of their worst suspicions about government overreach, they fail to take the bait and fall back on a stale non-scandal that cable news has chewed over for months already. They know Benghazi is safe territory for them and that their viewers like it, but it’s too bad the most popular cable news network isn’t doing a better job of informing its viewers about legitimate Obama administration problems.

This afternoon, World Net Daily, the birther news website, blasted out an email to readers: “Mother of all scandals: Obama’s war on Christians.”

“This should be a litmus test for Republicans: either take action against this program, or never invoke liberty or limited government again,” Conor Friedersdorf tweeted, regarding the NSA story. Just as soon as they spend a few more months talking about Benghazi.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/fox_news_is_spoon_fed_a_scandal_and_blows_it/

[Tx4obama]

1. The Republicans can't call NSA a scandal - because they've voted for it many times.

No way the Republicans are going to admit that they've done something that they shouldn't have done.

[BlueCheese]

2. Most of them probably think it's the right thing to do.

Only the ever-shrinking libertarian wing of the GOP opposes it, but they're not powerful enough.