Top Stories

The New Mexico Independent going forward

By | 11.16.11

I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…

EIB hears more anti-cap-and-trade testimony

Mesa Verde 80
By | 11.10.11

While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…

New Mexico’s largest university low in popularity

jobs-80
By | 11.10.11

Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.

Drum roll, please! Sean Hannity… Misinformer of the Year

By | 12.17.08 | 4:33 pm
Gwyneth Doland is a dangerous radical, Hannity looks to be saying.

"Gwyneth Doland is a dangerous radical," Hannity looks to be saying.

Fox News talking head Sean Hannity has been named 2008 Misinformer of the Year by Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog group.

Hannity has been a prolific and influential purveyor of conservative misinformation. But never has he so enthusiastically applied his talents for spreading misinformation as he did to the 2008 presidential race, focusing his energies primarily on President-elect Barack Obama. Day after day, Hannity devoted his two Fox News shows and his three-hour ABC Radio Networks program to “demonizing” the Democratic presidential candidates, starkly explaining in August: “That’s my job. … I led the ‘Stop Hillary Express.’ By the way, now it’s the ‘Stop Obama Express.’

Hannity’s “Stop Obama Express” promoted and embellished a vast array of misleading attacks and false claims about Obama. Along the way, he uncritically adopted and promoted countless Republican talking points and played host to numerous credibility-challenged smear artists who painted Obama as a dangerous radical. When he was not going after Obama, Hannity attacked members of Obama’s family, as well as Sen. Hillary Clinton and other progressives, and denied all the while that he had unfairly attacked anyone.

Read the entire 800,000-word (roughly) excoriation of Hannity here.

Fox News defended Hannity by saying he is a conservative commentator, not a journalist. (Meaning what? It’s OK for commentators, but not journalists, to lie mislead on TV?) Anyway, the distinction between commentator and journalist is lost on many television viewers.

Comments