TV News LIES

Legendary journalist and 50-year veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas has come out of a seven-month retirement to resume her weekly political affairs column today, published in print and online exclusively in the Falls Church News-Press.

Thomas' first column back appears on Page 13 of this edition, and its subject is Social Security reform. Now age 90, Thomas began her journalistic career in 1942 and has covered every U.S. president one a day-to-day basis as a White House correspondent since 1960. She declared her retirement abruptly on June 8, 2010 following a firestorm of criticism that arose from spontaneous taped comments she made the day before that some claimed to be anti-Semitic.

The New York Times has sued the New York Police Department, saying the department had routinely violated a state law that requires government agencies to provide information to the press and the public.

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, The Times described four requests made by reporters this year for information that it said the police had delayed or denied. The Times said the department’s handling of the requests reflected a pattern and practice by which the police avoided providing material that the State Freedom of Information Law said must be released.

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times broke a taboo of sorts among mainstream news organizations by urging Fox News to “crack down on... partisanship in its news ranks” or ”stop pretending to be an objective news source.”

he editorial was prompted by the leak of an internal Fox News memo ordering its “reporters” to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” The memo was sent by Bill Sammon, Fox News' Washington managing editor, in 2009 and released by Media Matters last week.

The Times noted that “such data aren't in serious dispute among climate scientists.”

Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

Yet another study has been released proving that watching Fox News is detrimental to your intelligence. World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, conducted a survey of American voters that shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. What’s more, the study shows that greater exposure to Fox News increases misinformation.

So the more you watch, the less you know. Or to be precise, the more you think you know that is actually false. This study corroborates a previous PIPA study that focused on the Iraq war with similar results. And there was an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that demonstrated the break with reality on the part of Fox viewers with regard to health care. The body of evidence that Fox News is nothing but a propaganda machine dedicated to lies is growing by the day.

Fox News Channel's top Washington editor ordered the network's reporters to couple any mention of global climate change with skepticism about the data underlying such a scientific conclusion, according to an e-mail released by a liberal media-watchdog group Wednesday.

Media Matters for America said the internal e-mail from Bill Sammon, Fox News's Washington bureau chief, called into question the network's impartiality in reporting on climate change.