Fox 'straight news' reporter James Rosen raises laughable Obama 'security' concern, lies about Obama's promises

-- by Dave

One of the favorite pretenses at Fox News is to pretend that there is some magical barrier of objectivity between their "opinion" anchors and their shows and their "straight news" hours featuring "real" reporters -- guys like James Rosen.

'Course, it's all a farcical facade -- their news segments are only marginally less biased than their opinion shows. Though they sure whine loudly enough whenever someone points it out.

Just the past couple of days, Rosen has coughed up a couple of real hairballs demonstrating (once again) just how "fair and balanced" Fox News really is.

First, on Bill O'Reilly's show Tuesday, Rosen argued, with a perfectly straight face, that President Obama had raised some serious concerns about national security because he had described Republicans in Congress as "hostage takers" with whom he had negotiated:

Rosen: One other point, Bill, if I may, and this should concern a broader spectrum than just the president and his supporters. And that is the potential national security implications of a president of the United States broadcasting to the world that he is willing to negotiate with hostage takers if he believes the hostage is being harmed.

O'Reilly actually burst out laughing, assuming that Rosen was kidding. He wasn't.

Then yesterday, on Happening Now, Rosen followed up with a segment about Obama's record regarding how well he's keeping his promises. It featured a clip of Obama saying, "Look at what I promised during the campaign. There is not a single thing that I said that I would do that I have not either done or tried to do," and "And if I haven't gotten it done yet, I'm still trying to do it."

Rosen then told his audience: "That leaves little terrain as ground for contradiction, and yet the Pulitzer Prize winning website PolitiFact.com lists more than 500 broken Obama campaign promises."

But as Simon Easter at Media Matters observes, that's a far cry from what PolitiFact actually reports -- namely, that of the 506 campaign promises they've monitored, Obama has actually broken only 24 of them:


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And the best part is that, because he said all these things on Fox News, Rosen will never have to run a correction. And Bill O'Reilly can keep laughing at his absurd "concerns".

Y'see, at Fox, spreading misinformation and lies and wild conjecture isn't cause for correction. It's the job description.


[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]