propagandawar

Fox and Newsbusters claim the lack of media coverage of Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street is due to media bias, while showing even worse bias and utter hypocrisy. Fox, News Corp and others have characterized about three or four anti-Semites seen at protests as somehow representative of the views of a significant number of protesters without a shred of evidence this is the case.

Today News Corp employee Sean Hannity began his show by citing smears published by other News Corp employees, saying the anti-Semitism at Occupy sites had spread “almost all over the nation”.

Fox’s pattern of using it’s own propaganda to pretend stories are “widening” has been exposed before, but it’s back – trying to attack OWS as Hannity cites the NY Post, another News Corp property .

As CBS News explained, incidences of anti-Semitism were hard to find, while Jews were well represented among the protesters, including large Occupy protests in Israel.

What had increased was right wing exploitation of the rarest of incidences. Online, we found a total of five signs documented, one of which was a tiny scrawling on a board and the other three were similar “Google Jews” signs all in the same handwriting. Another video containing audio of one anti-semitic comment and the same few signs were shown in a slickly-produced video complaining about anti-Israel “mobs”. Armed with little more than this, Bill Kristol’s special interest group called on Obama to denounce OWS.

Brent Bozell of Media Research Center highlighted a single clip of an anti-semitic black man ranting (the same “Google Jews” theme seen on the signs) and surmised in his headline that Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street was “Rampant” – without including any other incidences. He then called on ABC, CNN, CBS and NBC to report this, or else “they are deliberately covering up an act of anti-Semitism”.

Is he trying to say all these networks are anti-Semitic as his own “sources” claim they are all controlled by the Jews? Pretzel logic.

Rupert Murdoch’s own WSJ published polls on protester views and anti-semitic responses were nowhere to be found. No one mentioned Jews, Israel or even foreign policy. Raw data here.

With all of these wild-eyed exaggerations of anti-Semitic sentiment coursing through OWS, it’s no wonder Sean Hannity thought the issue was growing. Had he done any real research though, he might have found these incidences so far have been even rarer than right wingers trying to infiltrate OWS crowds and plant false stories.

Yesterday, one Koch-fueled videographer was caught trying to give away bongs so he could take damaging pictures of OWS protesters. Another right wing blogger was caught on tape causing a disturbance in the middle of an OccupyDC demonstration at the Air Space museum.

Ironically, the media has discussed anti-semitism – only to dismiss it. The NY Times and the ADL agreed this was rare as anything seen so far and not worthy of any significant mention – unless you wanted to foist baseless attacks.

We know News Corp wants to smear this movement as a whole. In the process of making a mountain out of a molehill, they show how quickly propagandists are to play the race card in wasting our time to distract from the central issues being protested.

Related: One Percenter Hannity Again Saying #OWS Hates Jews