Mitt Romney is Funneling Money to Drug Cartels to Claim Mexico for Mormonism! (Or Why Faux News is so Dangerous)

By now articles about the legendary inaccuracies to stories Faux News reports are almost old hat. Nearly every week, people accuse them of making something up. If it can be proven they did, they ignore it long enough to hope it goes away. If it cannot be proven to a certainty what they reported is wrong, they deny til they die.

If what they just reported cannot be proven beyond certainty to have been false—not just a wrong statistic but wholesale bullshit—then Bull O’Reilly will lower his horns, scrap his hooves, and charge headlong at anything that just called him out. The next night doing an entire segment about the “evil clown” Jon Stewart and him being a puppet for the liberal agenda. Glenn Beck goes even further to suggest that seemingly everyone and everything is involved in a conspiracy against him, and generally indulges in the biggest persecution complex on cable. Just last week his off the charts paranoia involved a far flung conspiracy web that Google is somehow in cahoots with Obama…mwawahahahaha eviiiil.

Of course, Faux’s safeguard against this is that their “pundits” aren’t hard news guys, and therefore don’t have to tell the truth. If Sean Hannity says “I think Obama is the anti-christ” or “I think Joe Biden might have raped my grandmother at gunpoint,” he is protected by those first two words, but fully aware the first two words are the last ones the audience heard. They get the misinformation, but not the fact it was the “opinion” of a guy like O’Reilly who seems dead certain about everything. When O’Reilly is up there, in glorious full comb over and leather neck, he says everything so authoritatively and with such “you’re wrong, I’m right” certitude NOBODY believes this is just a man shooting the shit with his small talk opinion for an hour.

Some might argue “Well, this information is available on the internet for anyone who wants to fact check” ignoring that O’Reilly has one of the oldest viewer ships in all of TV. How many 75 year olds are really going to go to the internet to hunt for an hour to find out if what they just saw was totally factual or not? They’re more likely to say “Damn O’Reilly just blew the lid off this ‘Obama hires Mexican drug lords to be muscle for ACORN’ story.” And O’Reilly is probably the most factual talking head at Faux News, which isn’t saying much.

Someone like Glenn Beck might consider “I read some shit in an email” a valid method of fact checking. Right now, a hyper conservative blogger living at home with his dog Reagan might take to his red, white, and blue keyboard and post a story about how Michelle Obama takes kickbacks from the “powerful” lettuce lobby to promote kids eating lettuce over happy meals. Within hours a larger blogger like Matt Drudge has picked this story up, and within a day it has hit Sarah Palin’s twitter feed. Glenn Beck picks it up off Palin’s twitter feed by that afternoon, and then the “Hard News” guys can mention the story. They mention it “Well, Beck is saying something interesting…” instead of mentioning it “Well, Beck has lost his meds again.”

If anyone complains, Faux can release an ass covering press release saying “Once again, Glenn is a pundit offering his opinion” forgetting that putting him on an hour a day during big viewer hours is hardly NOT endorsing what he’s saying. You might be able to buy that “The views expressed in this program are not necessarily the station’s views” infomercial disclaimer if it was 3am on a Saturday morning, but 5 o’clock every afternoon which is when most stations run their “hard news” programs? If someone really presses Faux on an inaccuracy in one of their stories, they might run a retraction at 4 o’clock in the morning in between weather maps and the 10 people that watch Red Eye (a show that definitively proves Republicans aren’t funny).

Then Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin will take to the radio and the internet, respectively, to lambaste that apology. It’s a strange, strange way for TV news to function. CNN covers the news, Faux News creates it.

So right now I’d like to declare that Mitt Romney is indeed funneling money to Mexican drug cartels in an effort to claim Mexico for Mormonism…of course MSNBC (which some will argue makes up just as much as Faux does, but even though they’re liberal they are still stubbornly beholden to facts) will take one look at it and throw it out.