In a ten-minute rant on her show Thursday night, Rachel Maddow tried to explain the long NBC and ABC blackout of “Fast and Furious” scandal news by somehow tying it to the Shirley Sherrod controversy. The American people should move along, since this scandal is only a “paranoid delusion” and shouldn’t be covered by anyone other than Fox News. It should be carefully quarantined.
The graphic behind Maddow read “WHAT YOUR UNCLE WHO WATCHES FOX NEWS ALL DAY IS ALL WORKED UP ABOUT.”
Maddow began: “The great Fox News conspiracy about Shirley Sherrod, the racist, that nobody else was covering, was, in fact, a paranoid delusion of the conservative movement and the conservative media machine. And so now, we find ourselves, a couple years later, facing another test for the news media. Do you take the bait again? Do you follow the latest Fox News conspiracy theory?”
If you watch MSNBC all day, you and your uncle think there's a vast conspiracy called the "War on Women" and a plot to deny black and Latino people the right to vote in swing states. You might also be outraged daily that the Boy Scouts doesn't yet have gay scoutmasters teaching twelve-year-olds a merit badge in government-subsidized contraceptive techniques.
Alongside Mother Jones and other left-wing journalists, the MSNBC host claimed that blogger Michael Vanderboegh was the evil genius who uncorked this whole "cuckoo for Cocoa puffs" conspiracy theory for Fox News, and concocted the notion that the Obama administration engaged in gun walking to make a case for gun control inside the United States:
MADDOW: This is not some weird, boggy offshoot of what the Fast and Furious scandal is. This is what the Fast and Furious scandal is. This is it. It is a conspiracy theory on the right that President Obama is secretly trying to take away all your guns. That's what it was. They created this program was actually started by George W. Bush as a means of upsetting people about gun violence and their abolishing the Second Amendment.If you watch Fox News, as your source of information, you marinate daily in conservative media and that is your source of information about the world. This has been drilled into your head over and over and over again.
Fox News is now apparently conspiring to force the rest of the “real media” into covering this non-story:'
MADDOW: Just like with the Shirley Sherrod story. Fox News has been very upset that they haven`t yet been able to bait the rest of the real media into following this crazy conspiracy theory of theirs yet, and they are starting to overtly bait the mainstream media into covering it and they are starting to lash out and blame people who do not cover it yet.
BRET BAIER: NBC Nightly News is playing some serious catch-up, because the network news show has only mentioned the failed gun tracking program, "Fast and Furious," once for a few seconds since the scandal broke last year. Keep in mind Attorney General Holder has testified before Congress no less than nine times.
MADDOW: That was a host named Bret Baier on Fox News last night. He`s supposedly one of the straight news, no opinion anchors on Fox. That’s the same Bret Baier incidentally whose news program has been identified the militia-blogger guy, the throw-bricks-through-their-windows guy whose conspiracy theory this is. He’s been identifying him as an online journalist helping out with their coverage of the "Fast and Furious" scandal.
If you put the name “Vanderboegh” in the Fox transcript file on Nexis, you’ll find one appearance in a William LaJeunesse story on July 8, 2011 – just one. He's not exactly a Fox News regular contributor, as Maddow implied.
Maddow concluded; “This is a test. This is a test. We have been here before. We know how this ends. News media of America, you are getting baited to cover this story that Fox and the right have cooked up in their own special cockamamie marinade for more than a year now. Are you going to swallow this one, too?”
