can you spell 'manipulative'? F..O..X

I am very irritated by Fox at the moment.

I know they're pro-Bush and have a Republican bias, but how dare they use a natural disaster and the suffering of thousands of people to further their own agenda! In a bid to excuse the federal government's lack of response, they've been telling viewers that people have no right to ask for help in situations like this - that it's not the government's job to bail them out of trouble...they have to stand on their own two feet and help themselves...blah, blah, blah.

I bet that isn't what they would say if a nice big tornado ripped through the middle of the Bible Belt. But hey, it's that godless den of New Orleans, so clearly these people are just begging for government aid because they're lazy. Bastards. This isn't some straightforward argument about the welfare state. These are people who lost everything in one day. The very people they are railing on for not evacuating in the beginning are in some cases the most independent of the lot, who thought they could brave their way through it and not ask for help.

The worst of all is the way they are slagging off at the Louisiana government and saying that 'in a time like this you need a strong leader...just look at Giuliani - when 9/11 happened he was really there for his people, etc etc'. Now I'm not downing the man, but the disaster he was coping with:
a) was vastly different in terms of the nature and scope of what needed to be done, and
b) had the immediate and continued support of the federal government.

The bombing of the World Trade Center was truly terrible, but it did not create the kind of refugee problem that Louisiana is facing right now. So why are they comparing the two? Easy - the news is that Giuliani is running for president in 2008 on, you guessed it, the Republican ticket. Fox really are the most ludicrously biassed news source. A disaster happens and they immediately look for a way to manipulate the news to their cronies' advantage. I'd call it shameless journalism, but it isn't journalism - it's propaganda.

And people wonder why Chomsky damns the media. Well, duh. Watch Fox News for an hour or so and find out.