In a shocking move, Fox News joined the biggest media outlets in the country in blasting the speech given by Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that he gave Wednesday at the Republican National Convention as “blatant lies.”
Fox News joined the likes of CNN, The Washington Post, New York Times, The Huffington Post, ThinkProgress and dozens of other media outlets in publishing fact-check stories, finding that the speech was full of lies and misleading assertions. She also knocked Ryan for pinning the blame for S&P’s downgrade of the U.S. debt on Obama, when Republicans in Congress helped precipitate the downgrade by threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling.
Fox News columnist Sally Kohn said vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s speech “was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”
The Washington Post stated simply: “Ryan misleads on GM plant closing.”
CNN joined the fray: “I marked seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward,” the pre-eminent political reporter Wolf Blitzer said. “I’m sure they will.” He did not specify what the points were.
The Washington Post also spoke with top Obama adviser David Axelrod jumped on the GM factory claim. “Again, Again Ryan blames Obama for a GM plant that closed under Bush. But then, they did say they wouldn’t ‘let fact checkers get in the way.'”
What were some of the lies? We only have room to list a few:
- Ryan then noted that Obama, while campaigning for president, promised that a GM plant in Wisconsin would not shut down. “That plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight,” Ryan said,” Fox News noted. Except Obama didn’t promise that. And the plant closed in December 2008 — while George W. Bush was president.
- Ryan, for his part, slammed the president for not supporting a deficit commission report without mentioning that he himself had voted against it, helping to kill it.
- He also made a cornerstone of his argument the claim that Obama “funneled” $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare. But he didn’t mention that his own budget plans relies on those very same savings, the Washington Post noted.
- Ryan also put responsibility for Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. government debt at Obama’s doorstep. But he didn’t mention that S&P itself, in explaining its downgrade, referred to the debt ceiling standoff. That process of raising the debt ceiling was only politicized in the last Congress, driven by House Republicans, led in the charge by Paul Ryan.
- This was just one of several striking and demonstrably misleading elements of Ryan’s much-anticipated acceptance speech, the HuffPost reports. And it comes just days after Romney pollster Neil Newhouse warned, defending the campaign’s demonstrably false ads claiming Obama removed work requirements from welfare, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
Below are just some of the national media who joined the loud chorus of condemnation of Ryan’s speech:
