FOXLEAKS: Fox Caught Scripting Socialism Attack

February 03, 2011 10:00 am ET by Oliver Willis

"Isn't that what they do in socialist countries?"

Steve Doocy's question sounded like a spontaneous reaction to what he apparently saw as the threat Barack Obama would pose to freedom of the press.

It wasn't.

The Fox News host's inflammatory question had, in fact, been scripted the night before in an email sent by a Fox producer.

The incident, which occurred on the October 27, 2008, edition of Fox & Friends, came during what appears to have been a network-wide campaign to tie Obama to socialism in the month leading up to the presidential election. Internal Fox documents obtained by Media Matters and a review of the network's pre-election coverage show that Fox hosts, producers, and other journalists were involved in the effort.

October 27 was also the day that Fox's then-deputy managing editor Bill Sammon sent an internal email referencing what he described in the subject line as "Obama's references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists in his autobiography, 'Dreams from My Father.' " Sammon appeared on multiple Fox shows to discuss his "research" and also wrote a FoxNews.com piece about Obama's "affinity to Marxists."

The events leading up to Doocy's "socialist" question began four days earlier, when WFTV (ABC's Orlando affiliate) anchor Barbara West interviewed Joe Biden. During the interview, West suggested Obama's infamous exchange with "Joe the Plumber" -- in which Obama had advocated, "spread[ing] the wealth around" -- was a "potentially crushing political blunder."

West then asked: "You may recognize this famous quote: 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' That's from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?"

"Are you joking?" asked a stunned Biden. "Is this a joke?"

"No," said West. "That's a question."

In response to West's interview, the Obama campaign reportedly cancelled a planned appearance by Jill Biden on WFTV and told the station, "This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election."

On the evening of October 26, a Fox producer named Elizabeth Fanning emailed an outline of the next morning's Fox & Friends to numerous staffers at the network. The document, obtained by Media Matters, listed five separate segments about the WFTV interview that were scheduled for the October 27 show. For each segment, the document listed an identical series of questions, including: "Isn't this what happens in communist countries?"

And that's almost exactly what Doocy said on the air. Interviewing Fox contributor Michelle Malkin, Doocy asked, "Isn't that what they do in socialist countries?"

Here's how the document described the segment featuring Malkin [emphasis added]:

8:15 (B-BLOCK) - MICHELE MALKIN - CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST & FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR - OBAMA CAMPAIGN CUTS OFF TV STATION, AFTER BIDEN ANGERED BY QUESTIONS. IS THIS A PREVIEW OF THINGS TO COME? WILL THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS ROOM BE LIKE THIS? CAN YOU NOT ASK TOUGH QUESTIONS? WILL THEY SUPPRESS THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS? ISN'T THIS WHAT HAPPENS IN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES? ((DENVER, CO)) ((STEVE AND GRETCHEN))

And here's Doocy's actual exchange with Malkin:

DOOCY: And after that line of tough questioning the Biden camp called the TV station in Orlando and said, "You are not getting any more interviews for the balance of the election cycle." Michelle Malkin is joining us right now. Of course, she is a conservative columnist and a Fox News contributor. She's out there in Denver right now. All right,Michelle, they pulled the plug on any future interviews because of that tough line of questioning. Your observations, please.

MALKIN: There's a chill wind blowing, and I think that this does signal what the future of the White House press corps would be under an Obama-Biden administration. How dare Barbara West of WFTV confront Joe Biden with some basic, simple questions that anyone who wasn't totally in the tank for Obama would feel comfortable asking? And --yes, so she's been blacklisted, and apparently the station has been bombarded by Obama cultists who are offended that she was so quote-unquote rude and quote-unquote combative to the increasingly erratic and super-gaffe-tastic Joe Biden.

[...]

DOOCY: Well, you know, Michelle, the whole thing is -- a couple weeks ago, a tough question was asked about "spreading the wealth around" by Joe The Plumber. What happens to him? He gets investigated. Now, Barbara --

GRETCHEN CARLSON (co-host): West.

DOOCY: -- West out in Orlando, she asks some hard questions, and the station gets shut down. You know, your comment about a chill is perhaps accurate because people will think twice before they ask something like that. But isn't that what they do in socialist countries where, you know, "I don't like that, you're done"?



MALKIN: Yeah, like I said, this is a preview of things to come. And I think it's particularly interesting timing, this Barbara West interview with Biden at the same time that now we have this 2001 tape, as you guys mentioned this morning, where Obama is musing about how best to redistribute wealth. It's not about whether it's a good thing or not, whether it's American or not, it's whether he should do it through the courts or legislatively.

But Fox wasn't done with the West-Biden interview. That night, West appeared on the October 27 O'Reilly Factor, where Bill O'Reilly noted that West had "used some buzz words like 'Marxism' " but declared that her "questions were fine":

WEST: I went into the interview with the mindset that we had some serious questions and serious issues in this country that need to be answered. And we're running out of time to getting the answers to those issues.

O'REILLY: But you used some buzz words like "Marxism." I thought your questions were fine. I don't know whether I would have phrased them quite that way because you gave him a little wiggle room to do a couple of things. There's no doubt that income redistribution is controversial. And I brought it up with Barack Obama myself. But he wanted to paint you as a far right person just by the tone of your questions. Do you see what he wanted to do?

WEST: Yes, indeed. I -- I think that he would like to still do that. But, I am not. I am a reporter who works for a television station that asks probing, penetrating, straightforward, challenging questions. That is our job.

"You did your job," said O'Reilly. "I didn't have any problem with it."

The following morning, West was back on Fox News, this time appearing on the October 28, 2008, Fox & Friends. Co-host Gretchen Carlson declared it her "favorite story of the day."

"You're completely professional," Carlson told West at the conclusion of the segment. "I know that you were labeled as 'unprofessional' by the Obama campaign after that interview. Very professional."

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201102030006

I helped cause the financial crisis, and I'm sorry.

Ken Kupchik
JANUARY 31, 2011 4:15PM

I was twenty-two years old when I decided to go into mortgage sales. I was finishing an undergraduate degree in Criminal Justice and had decided that I didn't want to go to Law School as I had originally intended. I didn't have rich parents, and had never made any significant money, so I set out to find the highest paying job someone with my limited qualifications could find.

At the time, my girlfriend's best friend was dating a guy who worked in mortgages. He drove a BMW, had nice clothes and carried himself well. Over drinks one night, I kept quizzing him on his success, and he told me all I needed to do was read a book or two and have some sort of people skills and I could be making six figures. Hearing those words was like a dog whistle to a middle-class immigrant who had only worked restaurant and construction jobs until that point. As it turned out, the bar for entry into the mortgage world was even lower than reading a book or two.

I applied for several mortgage jobs on the internet, sat back and waited. Within a few weeks, I got called back for an interview at what is now known as one of the biggest culprits in the sub-prime mortgage collapse. The manager interviewing me was down to earth, and promised me that I'd be making over 100k a year if I just followed the sales process. It was a no-brainer for me, and within a month I was on a flight to Illinois for corporate training. Before I left for the airport, I got my first check in the mail; $950, the most money I had ever been paid at one time, and that was only for two weeks of pre-training office work.

The training was boring and disillusioning. The computer system they taught us made no sense to me, and the calculations even less so. This didn't really matter though. All you needed to do was learn the script. Everything else was unimportant. JUST LEARN THE SCRIPT. I distinctly remember our trainer, an energetic middle-aged woman telling us: "This is the only job where you will be able to help people, and make more money than you've ever made before in your life." At least the second part was true.

Once we got back from training, the selling started. We would take inbound phone calls from current customers patched in from a corporate call center. Many of them weren't even interested in refinancing, they had just called in to ask a question and were transferred to us. It was our job to get these people to "lower their monthly payments," or "consolidate their high-interest credit cards into a low monthly payment," mostly through sub-prime refinancing. We also had "port" leads; endless lists of existing customers that we would constantly call and offer to lower their mortgage payment. This was late 2006, the peak of the sub-prime boom. Years of bank deregulation had allowed commercial banks to become mortgage companies, taking on ungodly risk and leveraging it over and over again. Mortgage companies bundled sub-prime loans and sold them as mortgage backed derivatives on the secondary market. This meant that wall street was making a killing reselling the bad loans that we were selling to consumers.

The perception among the general public is that mortgage salespeople were sleazy, greedy and immoral. This was partly true. I worked with some people who would have sold their own mother to make a buck. I literally knew of drug dealers who had gone into mortgages because it was less risky and more profitable than selling cocaine. But there were plenty of decent people in the industry as well. The problems mostly came down from the top. Regional managers had a no-holds barred mentality. You had to do anything to make the sale, no excuses. This meant working late, lying to people, and committing fraud. I once walked into the copy room and saw someone cutting out a signature and copying it onto another document. Stories circulated about other branches staying up late and manufacturing fake asset documents to qualify borrowers for loans. On one of my loans, a regional manager turned a 2/28 year adjustable loan into a 6 month adjustable because it made $500 more for the company. I had to explain to the borrower that it was the best we could do. She signed on the loan because the needed the 15k cash out in equity for accumulating bills.

And the money came flowing in. There were some months when I would make close to $10,000. It wasn't unheard of for a loan rep with no college education to be pulling in close to $20k a month. I had money for the first time in my life. I bought all the clothes I wanted, bought my dream car, an Infiniti G35 coupe, and started helping my parents out with their bills. Affording things was no longer a problem. I should have been happier than ever before. But I wasn't. I was miserable. I hated what I was doing, and I hated going into work. I dreaded the office, I dreaded the people and I dreaded what we did. I figured out early on that we weren't "helping people," we were taking advantage of them. Did some loans put people in better situations? Yes, but more put people in worse ones.

I spent a total of nine months working for a subprime morgage company before I quit. I walked out as a 23 year-old making six figures a year. I left because I knew that we weren't helping people, and I hated feeling the way I did knowing what were truly a part of. I remember sitting in my manager's office with tears in my eyes trying to explain to him how I felt, and hearing him trying to rationalize what were doing: "We're helping people", "Someone else will do it if we don't." I quit the next day. I went back into the industry for under a year after subprime dissapeared in 2007, but only long enough to finally put the nail in the coffin of my mortgage career.

There are few things that I regret in my life. Among those regrets are a handful of loans that I should never have agreed to make. I would have lost my job, but it wasn't worth the money I made from them. I never committed fraud, but that's only because most of it was legal at the time. I don't regret the experience. It taught me about what kind of a person I didn't want to be, and what money can make you do. I helped cause the financial collapse, and I'm sorry. No one has apologized to you, and we all should. We hurt people who were much more honest and hardworking than we ever will be, only for money. I am truly sorry, and I will never hurt people for money again.

http://open.salon.com/blog/ken_k/2011/01/31/i_helped_cause_the_financial_crisis_and_im_sorry