Matt Taibbi's truthiness analyzed

[Octafish]

63. I find it interesting what ''Liberals'' FOX News allows on-air.

With Fox News Liberals, Who Needs Conservatives?

They play the left on Rupert Murdoch’s TV

By Steve Rendall
FAIR, March 1, 2012

Fox News co-host and contributor Bob Beckel has called for the assassination of WikiLeaks spokesperson Julian Assange (“A dead man can’t leak stuff”—Follow the Money, 12/6/10), for furnishing guns to school children (“If you give your kid a gun, no bullying”—Five, 1/5/12) and for militant opposition to the “War on Christmas,” which is “completely out of hand” (Five, 12/9/11).

These views are anything but out of place on Fox News, where hosts and commentators are known for fantasizing about murdering progressives (FAIR Blog, 11/10/10), deifying gun ownership (Beck, 6/29/11) and courageously confronting those who would wish them happy holidays (O’Reilly Factor, 11/17/11).

But Beckel is presented as a left-leaning voice on Fox, a counterweight to the network’s army of right-leaning talkers. And he’s far from an atypical specimen there.

As one of five co-hosts on Fox’s new program the Five, Beckel is supposed to serve as foil to four conservative co-hosts. That’s the theory. In reality, Beckel more than occasionally joins his conservative counterparts. (Typically, Five panelists include former George W. Bush aide Dana Perino, Fox News Red Eye anchor Greg Gutfield, Fox legal commentator Kimberly Guilfoyle and Fox Business Network host Eric Bolling.)

For instance, when Beckel’s colleague Bolling (Five, 12/14/11) recounted how he’d kicked a representative from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) off his Fox Business show (Follow the Money,12/12/11) for opposing the display of a nativity scene at a Texas courthouse, Beckel bluntly approved: “Good.” When Five co-host Greg Gutfield (12/9/11) compared FFRF to a woman who’d once demanded that he put out his cigarette, Beckel’s only response was, “Did you deck her?”

Discussing charges that GOP Rep. Mark Foley (Fla.) had exchanged inappropriate messages with male congressional pages (Hannity & Colmes, 10/2/06), Beckel suggested that Foley, because he’s gay, should have been kept away from pages to begin with, likening him to a notorious bank robber: “If Willie Sutton is around some place where a bank is robbed, then you’re probably going to say, ‘Willie, stay away from the robbery.’”

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http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/with-fox-news-liberals-who-needs-conservatives/