Fox News Reportedly Used Fake Commenter Accounts To Rebut Critical Blog Posts

I have been on the record, I have little more than total disdain for 90% of our corporate own media.

They seem to be fixated on sensational celebrity news (who really cares that much about the Kandashian family drama), ambulance chasing, the seasonal missing white chick, racially charged hot button stories, over-the-top political opinion sharing and much more...

The alphabet soup news selection in America --- think ABC's, CBS's, CNN's, NBC's, MSNBC's -- fails miserably at keeping our citizens truly informed on news with substantive value.

They have been stuck in the bastardization genre known as Infotainment -- for what that's worth. Tabloid TV.

If you ask me: Keeping an electorate deaf, dump, blind, divided and distracted keeps the ruling elite in power. We are easy to manage in this delirious state of mind.

All well and stated, I hold special contempt for Fox News. They have taken news reporting -- you know, like once upon a time when news was actually reported by journalists -- and transformed it to propagandizing: serving as the information wing of the Republican/Tea Party movement.

And here is another disturbing example of how depraved of journalistic ethics Rupert Murdock's and Roger Ailes' Fox news is:


Here's an interesting bit of Fox News skullduggery from David Folkenflik's new book on Rupert Murdoch's media empire, courtesy of Media Matters:

In a chapter focusing on how Fox utilized its notoriously ruthless public relations department in the mid-to-late 00's, Folkenflik reports that Fox's PR staffers would "post pro-Fox rants" in the comments sections of "negative and even neutral" blog posts written about the network. According to Folkenflik, the staffers used various tactics to cover their tracks, including setting up wireless broadband connections that "could not be traced back" to the network.

From the book itself:

Fox PR staffers were expected to counter not just negative and even neutral blog postings but the anti-Fox comments beneath them. One former staffer recalled using twenty different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had one hundred. Several employees had to acquire a cell phone thumb drive to provide a wireless broadband connection that could not be traced back to a Fox News or News Corp account.  source

I guess its a fitting match, fake and skewered news and fake and skewered comments.