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morning news today violence has once again flared up. these are the images seeing from the streets of canada. child hope for a shelter are today. and when the news is off and when it's something really crucial. to get down to. special coverage. this time the latest news from the. live broadcasts special guests discussions

on the state security and stability. first. for the full story we've gone to. the biggest issues get the human voice ceased to face with the news makers. eleven thirty pm in the russian capital thanks for staying with us on our t.v.'s are your headlines president medvedev says the u.s.

shouldn't be jealous about a new security arrangement between russia and europe which would help everyone speaking at the global policy forum in jaroslava he also said the speed of development in the country shows only those with poor memories still accuse russia of totalitarianism. russia's republic of north mourns the victims of yesterday's car bomb attack in its capital's central market the blast killed seventeen leaving more than one hundred sixty injured. and figures show thousands of americans have been converting to islam since nine eleven despite accusations the media is fueling antagonism towards muslims up next artie's cross talk to bait show host paedo ellen his guest discuss the us media and the recent and controversial restoring honor rally in washington stay with us for that. you.

know you know welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle it's angry and all pervasive right wing media particularly television and radio are enormously influential in the u.s. for some shock jocks reflect public opinion others see it differently right wing media is full of hate and intensely biased. to. discuss america's media wars and politics i'm joined by matthew vacuum in washington he's a senior editor at capital research center in new york we cross to alexander's i check he's a journalist and author of the book common nonsense glenn beck and the triumph of ignorance also in new york we have steve rendall senior analyst at fairness and accuracy in reporting and another member of our crosstalk team on the hunger all right steve i'd like to go to you first in preparing for this program i came across

an amazing article in the washington post a few days ago majority of g.o.p. thinks obama wants to impose islamic law now tell me where did that come from because it sounds like a car came from the blogs fear that it go from the blogs fear into the mainstream and now everybody's talking about it and it seems quite amazing that we can hear these things repeated over and over again and then people start believing it. i think that's right i think you're exactly right peter i think what you have is you have these rumors that began in the in the right wing fever swamp so the blogosphere they sleep upwards into into the world of talk radio and fox news and other murdoch outlets like the new york post and they are amplified they enter this right wing media app echo chamber in which they raise doubts now as with other bits of right wing propaganda they don't have to succeed you don't have to

get most of americans believing that obama is in fact a sleeper agent for for islam but if you can toss that you can throw some smoke out there and muddy the waters if you will to mix metaphors you can create doubt and this is bad for your opponent and it's a it's a tried and true we had this with the swift boat i think we're seeing this now with the ground zero mosque as well oh xander you've written a book on glenn beck i mean is there any accountability for these types of people in the media they go around and repeat these kinds of things and very hateful speech here i mean you know in the blogs theory but he thinks it's really a fair game and why not ok everyone can be a journalist if they want but i mean and once it goes into the mainstream this is really about politics and it really has a lot to do about people's welfare and it feeds off an enormous amount of anger that is in the united states right now and maybe for good reason so is people like glenn beck ever held accountable or is it just their advertisers that are finally

making him come to own up to his words and opinions. well there has been a pretty successful campaign against glenn beck organized by online activists that's the closest thing to accountability that we've really seen. come from is more extreme comments but his employers stand by him both affiliates on radio and the fox news channel all the way up to rupert murdoch of course have his back and have defended him and his more outlandish comments so the question of accountability is an interesting one there doesn't seem to be the same sort of. people held to account the way they used to be with a sort of standard you know what they were already structure in a standard kind of shared reality where there's truth and there's fiction and if you say something that's blatantly false and outrageous you are immediately called out and held up to be a fraud and not someone who's trustworthy that world has disappeared and it doesn't

seem to we're going to be returning to it anytime soon you have this alternative reality that basically consists of fox news and the talk radio hosts who pretty much can create their own truths and maintain them amplify them and as the previous speaker said stephen said they take on a life of their own and you only need to really get a quarter of the public believing it and it has a massive massive impact on the quality of matthew fingo to you is this is this really the media of fear of looking for scapegoats for trying to explain what's wrong in society i mean there's a lot of things wrong like i said there's a lot of reasons for people to be angry but people are being scapegoated i mean this stuff going on with with people believing that obama is going to bring islamic religious rule to the united states i mean that's just pure ludicrous for anyone that is looking at reality but it's scapegoating and it's going after politicians and again never being held accountable this is the politics of scapegoating. i

think that when a public figure is disliked all sorts of rumors are likely to stick to him but i don't think contrary to what you've been suggesting that what glenn beck and other . segments of the talk radio. sector are doing is scapegoating i think that there has been a genuine grassroots reaction to the radical policies of the obama administration and the democratic controlled congress and people are upset about it president obama presented himself more or less as a moderate as a pragmatist during the two thousand and eight election campaign and then americans were shocked to find out that he was very radical once he got into office he forced all sorts of policies on the american people that they didn't want particularly his obamacare his plan that is going to eventually lead to a single payer health care system which the american people overwhelmingly reject

so you know there might be some people out there who are scapegoating but i don't think that opposition to the left wing agenda is necessarily scapegoating steve we do certainly that's a totally i would totally reject going to germany i mean if i could just say one thing i mean characterizing that is the agenda as radical i mean that in itself as you're naming it already you've already described it in and i want to talk about it is i want to talk about if we can have a dialogue when we get to the point it's radical ok go ahead steve. well first of all let me just say that the series of policy initiatives that obama has taken have been very corporate friendly very very centrist if you look at from the obamacare which is which which basically was created by the pharmaceutical and and insurance industries in this country this is a centrist what is creating what is creating insecurity in the country is you have

two parties both of them mostly own by corporations yes the democrats are a little closer to wall street but the republicans are nearly fully owned by corporations including the oil industry what you have is the need for an f.d.r. you have the need for some economic populism and there is no candidate there is no major candidate or party that is carrying that water so you have a lot of restlessness you have nonsensical things like glenn beck and the tea party movement which don't make any sense they're totally in the pocket of corporations and yet they're out fronting this supposed. economic populist movement that are going to you know take back things for the little guy when they're fully there fully own by by corporations so you have this polity that that is sort of at loose ends because there is no f.d.r. there is nobody that is that is really pulling for the little guy republicans are owned by corporations and the democrats are nearly fully owned by corporations and

obama is no exception to that you know matthew if i could just jump back to you real quick that i mean i'm not i don't want to tell a lot of debt a lot of goading no no matthew i know if i go back to you is it a lot of liberals are very disappointed with obama because he isn't radical enough we go stay with the word i mean he's an empty suit he's and he's still too close to corporations he compromises on everything we how can you say that's a radical agenda because i mean if i guess if the right wing media doesn't say it's radical then they're not going to be able to sell their media right i mean you have to always say he has nationalized part of the financial services industry he's nationalized. part of the automobile industry he's increased. spending. that that is not and that's not really an answer and it's typical of leftist always want to change the topic when they get into trouble and this scapegoating of corporations simply doesn't work the american people are rejecting this right now certainly corporations were

a lot of corporations insurance companies were on board with the obamacare plan and and it's unfortunate that they were but this is not you know this is the argument that corporations are to blame for all of america's ills this is a form of of left wing populism and scapegoating in and of itself ok and i'm going to say that it's the left that stewing the scapegoating not the right ok i'm going to go to you let's give i'm going to give you a hypothetical let's say hillary clinton had won the democratic nomination and was elected later or mccain had won the election do you think that would have been any of this tea party movement that people like glenn beck's like dr. i think if a clinton had come back to the white house absolutely i mean all you have to do is remember what happened the last time there was a clinton in the white house you had a lot of the same sort of hysterics you had the same conspiracy theorizing on the right the same smear tactics so i think you would see a lot of it i think i don't think it would be quite as hysterical if there wasn't

a black man named barack obama that has seemed to add an extra edge to what we're seeing today i don't think you can quite explain the anger or otherwise that you've seen just explode since the election of obama i mean i'm not going to reduce it just to that i don't think that's fair or accurate but clearly there's something else going on here that has made it extremely it has made it a fundamentally different kind of anger at the sort of liberal establishment that we saw the last time a democrat was in power it's it was infused with something else because it went from nothing to all of a sudden this. extremely irrational just fire across the land so i think obama's election gave it a different spin but yes if clinton had been elected you would see something similar mccain probably not so much although that clearly there would still be discontent with some of the policies that he would have carried over from from the bush years but nothing like nothing like you're seeing now. do you do you think

that when i look at right wing media i look at fox and all that it seems to me their only purpose is to destroy the obama presidency it doesn't matter has nothing to do with policies whatsoever it's to show that they can do it it has nothing to do with policies. we just want to destroy him well i thought the purpose i thought the purpose of the media was to. was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable the purpose of the media is to be critical of the government. and it seems that most of the mainstream media is not doing its job right now they've all uncritically accepted obama's policies and they go to bat for him on a regular basis so if the media is being very critical of the obama administration if the fox news is and and talk radio is that doesn't necessarily have to mean anything i'm going to jump in here. after a short break we'll continue our discussion on the political discourse in the u.s.

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with max cause for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report on our. sister. and. welcome back to cross talk i'm about to remind you we're talking about america's media and of messed up politics. to keep. it for let's see what russians think about the u.s. today. political discourse in the united states often goes to extremes with a condom it likely to dip into another recession and the government appearing polis people are seeking answers from other sources the recent protests in washington

organized by t.v. and radio host glenn beck was seen as an indirect challenge to barack obama's policies but what do russians think about the u.s. today according to a recent russian public opinion research center poll fifty nine percent of the respondents have a good attitude towards the united states in september two thousand and eight the number was fall lists me at twenty two percent and another twenty seven percent of russians have a negative attitude towards the u.s. back to the. army general stephen i have to go back to you and again i mean we can use obama because that's there the right wing's favorite lightning rod it seems to me i mean i don't see the common sense in a lot of media expression the right wing is that you know obama is for abortion rights he's for gay rights he's for sex education in schools you know the typical liberal and but at the same time the right whispers and they to him and i so i will

i will say they tell my eyes how can the same man then support secretly imposing a very strict rule islamic religious law i mean doesn't anybody in the mainstream say you can't have both but i never see that being fed at least on television and on radio no one wants to make the logical conclusion you can't have both at the same time go ahead steve. well i think there is the mainstream media does do some challenging of these rumors and of these as you put it lies which i would agree with that term as well but i think it can't do enough you have major propaganda outlets that are spewing i mean rush limbaugh regularly refers to the president as a boy in the context of american racial history that's a racist remark you have tea party polls polls of tea party members that show that they have they have views that are considerably more hostile to blacks than the average american you have racism going on here i think alexander is right that

there is a certain flavor to the opposition that can only happen because he's black had hillary clinton come into office i think you would have seen some of the same opposition but also a different flavor probably including sexism certainly her husband bill clinton ran into a rabid irrationalist movement that claimed. some of them claim that he was responsible for fifty four murders in the united states so the. the the right always will gen up of some kind of campaign usually doesn't come from official party members but these outside organizations that are not exactly discouraged and are not to get back to your question are not sufficiently challenged by the mainstream media which is constantly looking over its shoulder worried about being called liberal media because the right has pressed this case for years that the media are liberal or socialist or even communist and so they're constantly looking over their shoulder skittish about taking on

a lot of right wing myths i don't senator feingold to you i mean you wrote a book about the man i mean in your opinion after watching this rally on the mall i mean what is his agenda do you think i mean is he doing it for money for the celebrity or does he really believe he reflects the views of a significant amount of people in the united states what makes him tick in your opinion. well it's more complicated than just one answer i think clearly he's a businessman and he has a self image of himself as an entertainer and he enjoys making money he's very good at that but i also think his politics are deeply held i think he genuinely believes in god the devil heaven and hell and all of this stuff that he talks about and i believe that based on what i know of his mormonism he did here is to a very far right interpretation of history that is a strain within the mormon church not the official view of the mormon church but it's a strain within the mormon church that sees america as having a divine origin and

a divine destiny in which people like himself mormon men play a historical role and sort of leading america through the fire to some sort of redemption and you can understand what happened on the mall without understanding that that's really how glenn beck sees himself and the united states and i think a lot of the people that were watching him share his belief in god and divine destiny although they're probably they would probably be a lot more uncomfortable with the mormon flavor and back zone view then they are because they just don't know about it but yeah i think a lot of people connected his religious interpretation of this country and he connects to that very deep level and they're not going anywhere regardless of how irrational his political read on things are outside of this very devout sort of p.s. world that he lives in matthew franco to you and we we've heard different views here you very much differ with with steve here where we are is where is dialogue in all

of this here because the country has a lot of problems and i think for the third time i'll say there's a lot of reasons why people should be angry i don't know why they necessarily have to be angry with obama inherited a terrible mess but where is the dialogue here i see when i see these right wingers they're not interested in dialogue they're just interested in hate and just pushing an agenda that doesn't allow it. any kind of interrogation if you interrogate them you're considered you know and an anti you are just an evil person and that word evil i use specifically i mean because of what we've just heard you're putting things into a religious context and things like that is there any room for dialogue as we go through this crisis because maybe a dialogue is what is necessary all this is this is quite this is quite a caricature of the tea party movement that you have been painting and i'm not sure that i understand the question this need for a dialogue what the sound. people in america it's part of the democratic process people are talking what's wrong with people being angry from time to time i don't

think that's necessarily a bad thing it's not like people are rioting in the street you know burning cities down i don't think there's anything wrong with people blowing off steam i also would agree with you i would have to you agree with that i would definitely agree with you but at the same time if you say that obama is a closet muslim i mean that's doesn't you know that's going into irrationality ok that's irrational do you think he's a muslim. no i don't think he's a muslim but that's the no i think that. he's been very careful in downplaying and hiding parts of his past and this has allowed the rumor rumors to flourish so i think a lot of that is his own fault but. i'm pretty sure he is a christian and that he was born in the united states. i want to say that i think

that this characterization of opposition to obama as racist is quite tiresome and this is something that the left has been waiting to fall back on for some time if america was so racist how come all sorts of millions of white people voted for him in two thousand and eight and helped to elect him. particularly the white male population which the left likes to make fun of on a regular basis likes to attack. if america is so racist how could he have gotten along with a canal that is say he's not doing so well they fall back on the argument that america's races are silly because they're alexander go ahead jump in there this is going to sing nobody ever sees is that he's able to just what it really is you go i was on you first of all go to steve go ahead alexander well just really quickly no one has reduced the tea party movement just to racism i don't again and no one has

done that here i don't think most people still think you have and you haven't were many around the obama as. in any case the people who are carrying the obama witch doctor posters are not the people that voted for him it's possible for there to be a segment a large segment of the modern republican party that is racist and to have obama elected by democrats and block of the independent vote which is what happened ok steve go ahead you want to jump you are not incompatible. i think alexander just took the words out of my mouth i'm a white man i am not attacking white man exactly the people who the people who are caring the witch doctor posters the people who are referring to a grown african-american man as boy which has a very deep racist context in the us dialogue are not the people who voted for him there's that there's no doubt there are polls that show that the tea party movement in its view of black people is more hostile to black people than the average

american is these are these are facts i don't believe that hearing i don't believe that for us and you know we're getting we're getting such a partial view of things from matthew first of all he says that obama is a leftist because he bail out the financial industries bush started that does that make bush a leftist does that make him bush was the left wing is what started that. isn't the media supposed to isn't the media supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable and shouldn't the media be challenging the president when we just got through with eight years of a fox news and talk radio wet kiss with the bush administration they wanted afflicting the comfortable come on you have to you have to look at this more they are in the handedly there is a lot harder it isn't bush had matthew jump in it's not a partisan if you in the last six months not a partisan view it's in the latter it isn't much like rats from a sinking ship yes that's true in the last six months there was criticism of bush for spending too much like rats from

a sinking ship yes they were they didn't want to be tied down republicans didn't want to be saddled with all of the baggage that bush had delivered to them. which they're now trying to put on obama and well no again i actually watching this and so you have been watching very closely no they're trying to put it on bill clinton . far back it goes do you want to respond to any of the matthew i think the idea that fox news is this. secret you know this shadow government this powerful entity that is pulling the strings in american society is ridiculous he said that it is a straw man well it is well you the left says that all the time whether you're saying it or not i don't know if you've read daily kos lately but the. i think is quite representative of the american left fox news that is just one media outlet in the united states and they don't call the shots.