By James Rainey Los Angeles Times
October 11, 2008 - 12:00 am
Now and then, Fox News makes a stab at living up to its "fair and balanced" tag line.
At other times, the cable network's operatives throw off all pretense, let their neatly trimmed hair down and do what they seem to love best - blame all of the world's evils on those pointy-headed, America-hating liberals. Like, say, Barack Obama!
Fox host Sean Hannity and his producers served up a heaping portion of just such red meat Sunday night on Hannity's America. And they've since been making lame defenses of the faux documentary, which bore the subtle title: Obama and Friends: The History of Radicalism.
Fox's hourlong screed is just the kind of media coverage that has contributed to the increasingly angry and irrational tone on the campaign trail. Even by the low standards of this election's advocacy journalism, the program plumbed new depths - relying on innuendo and guilt by association to paint the Illinois senator as a dupe of the shadowy forces of the left. Much of Hannity's report was based on interviews with a half-dozen partisan commentators, whose main qualification seems to have been a previously expressed disdain for Obama.
Near the top of the program, the host introduced one of them, Andy Martin, as an "author and journalist." But reporters in his Chicago hometown know Martin better as a perennial political candidate and serial litigant.
The Chicago Tribune has examined Martin's past. He was refused entry to the Illinois bar in the 1970s, in part because his Selective Service records showed his thoughts exhibited "a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character."
In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, he referred to a judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew." And a federal judge noted his history of "vexatious, frivolous and scandalous" lawsuits.
When he ran for Illinois governor two years ago, Martin quoted a nearly 30-year-old Tribune editorial that called him "an absolutely brilliant campaigner" when he was running for a Senate seat. He didn't mention that the same editorial said he "has no more business in the U.S. Senate than an elk has in a phone booth."
...
So when Hannity wanted to know what Obama did as a young community organizer, Martin was ready with a pithy answer: "I think a community organizer, in Barack Obama's case, was somebody that was in training for a radical overthrow of the government."
Martin offered no evidence. None. But, when I called him, he helped me understand why this was not a problem.
"I do involve with the facts," he began, "but when the facts aren't all there, and the perpetrator has concealed all the facts and is basically refusing to testify, you are allowed to draw an adverse inference."
http://www.cmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081011/OPINION/810110388
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