Fox Claims Fraud Surrounding ‘Obamaphone’ Was Kept Quiet Until After FCC Vote
A recent piece was aired on Fox and Friends where host Ainsley Earhardt aired a flashback video of the 2012 election and spoke with a member of the FCC. I’ll neglect the purposeful race-baiting of the video, though it certainly represents what the people who run and watch this network think about the motives of certain members of our society. Instead, let’s focus on Ajit Pai and his statement, the FCC member, who is the supposed whistleblower.
Now, I have no disagreement with Mr. Pai, or his actions if he truly believes that the government is trying to hide the actions of a company instead of trying to do anything at all about them. However, either he is not as informed as he thinks he is, or he is playing political games. In the first case, he made a mistake which is forgivable because we all have done it. In the second, he is a willing pawn in the hands of the Fox News machinery.
First off, to say that news of the fraud was completely unknown to the public is foolish. As Ms. Earhardt points out, the fraud was detected in 2014, and it was first publicized by CBS4 in Denver by Brian Maass. It was picked up by other national media from there, so it wasn’t unheard of. Secondly, it has come to light that it was the Office of the Inspector General and not the FCC that wanted to keep the fraud notice secret because of their investigation and impending fine in the matter.
However, I think the government could have acted quicker and much more decisively in the matter which would have precluded this whole report on Fox and Friends which tries to paint the President and government in a terrible light. I suppose that is nothing new, and plays right into the common themes of their network. No matter what the situation is, they are going to push that agenda anyway.
But seriously, you’d think that with all their incredulity this stuff never happens on their watch. Conservatives who watch Fox must have short term memory loss. I know to the average American, 10 million dollars lost in a scheme like this is a huge amount of money, but as far as government funds go, it is not even a drop in the barrel. Now, if we want to talk about waste and defrauding the American taxpayer let’s get to some actual ones, like Haliburton, which wasted hundreds of millions in one single division alone – KBR.
The only thing that is truly foolish about this whole style of reporting is the hypocrisy involved. Conservatives love to tout their ethos of self-reliance and that everyone should be responsible for themselves. And yet like in so many other instances, when things aren’t going their way, they see fit to blame someone else and can’t see the how badly that reflects on them.
This time, they intimate that it is the President’s fault that the FCC is corrupt by hiding this fact from the public, when it never was really hidden or his fault. That’s why Republicans have people who want to get rid of so many government agencies that monitor businesses and try to keep them honest. If they aren’t around, they can’t be corrupt, and neither can the businesses, because there aren’t any laws for them to break. Of course, that logic leads down a totally different and horrifying path.
Below is video of the segment, courtesy of Fox News:
