President Trump is fond of labeling most media outlets “FAKE NEWS” (his caps, not ours), but it is his favorite cable news channel that has deservedly earned the nickname “Faux News” for its propagandistic reality bending in order to promote the extremist right-wing agenda of the Republican party and its leader of misleading.
Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters For America, uncovered one of the more insidious examples of the lengths to which the masterful political schemers at Fox News will go to distort the truth to peddle their poisonous point of view.
In an extensive Twitter thread inspired by the ruckus caused by the Democratic National Committee’s decision to not accept the invitation from Fox News to host debates for their party’s primary candidates, Gertz revealed the hidden anti-Semitic manipulation that the network employs as part and parcel of its everyday “news” coverage.
Gertz begins his thread by pointing out that now is far from the first time that the Democrats have decided to banish the highly partisan network — that stands in fervent opposition to its values — from its promotional calendar and that it did little to hurt the party the last time it took this same stance.
Is the argument that Obama suffered a backlash over the decision and could have won 400 electoral votes and 55 percent of the popular vote or what?
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 11, 2019
In the course of researching the history of the relationship between the Democrats and Fox News, Gertz stumbled upon an interesting phenomenon: an anti-Semitic attack on Jacques Steinberg, a Jewish reporter then working for The New York Times covering the media beat, who had written articles that displeased the dastardly executives running the channel.
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Not content with merely countering Steinberg’s reporting with facts that would support their views over his, Fox News responded with a racist and bigoted act that went far beyond anything done or said by the Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) whom they’ve been pillorying for her supposed anti-Semitic dog whistles for the last week.
Using before and after photos, Gertz demonstrates how Fox News’ graphics department altered a photo of The Times‘ media columnist to make it look more like the exaggerated caricatures of Jews depicted in the Nazi propaganda that the network has begun to resemble so closely of late.
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Chaser: Our photo comparison showing how Fox & Friends altered an image of Steinberg they showed on-air about six weeks later. pic.twitter.com/E1y8sz8WoN
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 11, 2019
One of Gertz’s Twitter followers kindly posted an example of the kind of image that the photoshop wizards at Fox News were trying to evoke with their malicious alterations to Steinberg’s photo.
https://twitter.com/MisterJayEm/status/1105211896842645512
Gertz followed up his initial post with a correction to the chronology of his story a little later in the day, adding in a response from the cable network that essentially admits that this sort of photographic falsification was a “common practice.”
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Tweak to the timeline, I wrote that the F&F segment came six weeks after the 2007 Times story. I misremembered/misread, the F&F segment happened in 2008. Apologies.
Oh, and this is what happened when Fox was asked for comment about it: https://t.co/L6yhjrdmo2 pic.twitter.com/ob9wJdCDsA
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 11, 2019
There you have it. Proof that the network pretending to be staunch supporters of Israel, loudly accusing Democrats of anti-Semitism while lauding President Trump, has no commitment to reality whatsoever.
Faux News, indeed!
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Original reporting by Matthew Gertz at Media Matters For America.
