Media Matters' 2008 Misinformer of the Year

Media Matters has named it's 2008 Misinformer of the Year, and this year it is Sean Hannerty. Honestly I think this was a runaway this year. Sean Hannerty has been pushing a line of BS this year about Barack Obama, and his aquaintences that was head and shoulders above what anyone else has done this year.

Because of the unending stream of falsehoods and character attacks that fueled the "Stop Obama Express," and the countless other distortions he promoted throughout 2008, Sean Hannity is Media Matters for America's Misinformer of the Year.

Media Matters has demonstrated time and again Sean Hannity of Fox News has been a dominant and inexhaustible outlet for every type of rightwing, nutball, conservative propaganda. Never before has he so enthusiastically applied his talents for spreading lies, half truths, fabrications, and innuendo as he did to the 2008 presidential race, focusing his energies primarily on President-elect Barack Obama.

Relentlessly, Hannity devoted his Fox News shows and his three-hour ABC Radio Networks program to "demonizing" the Democratic presidential candidates.

He was pretty open about it to, as he explaining in August:
"That's my job. ... I led the 'Stop Hillary Express.' By the way, now it's the 'Stop Obama Express.' "

Hannity's "Stop Obama Express" promoted and overstated and inflated a vast array of misleading attacks and bogus claims about Barack Obama. He uncritically adopted and pushed countless Republican talking points and rightwing smears. He played host to numerous credibility-challenged smear artists who painted Obama as a dangerous radical. When he was not going after Obama, Hannity attacked members of Obama's family, as well as Senator Hillary Clinton and other progressives, and denied all the while that he had unfairly attacked anyone.

Hannity's attacks have at times influenced mainstream media coverage. ABC News' George Stephanopoulos appeared on Hannity's radio program on April 15, during which Hannity suggested to Stephanopoulos that he ask Obama at the Democratic presidential debate the following evening about his "association with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist from the Weather Underground." Stephanopoulos assured Hannity that he was "taking notes right now." Stephanopoulos then did ask Obama at the debate to "explain that relationship for the voters, and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem," though he later denied that Hannity had exerted any influence on his questioning.

Report: US spied on Tony Blair

It is being reported that U.S. intelligence officials kept a file on former prime minister Tony Blair's "private life", a former U.S. Navy communications operator claimed today. ABCNews.com is reporting that David Murfee Faulk, who worked at a listening post in Fort Gordon Georgia, is claiming he saw the file on Blair back in 2006. However he has so far refused to provide any details of what the file contained, other than to say it was a file on his "private life" and included information of a personal nature. He claims that this file is held in an intelligence database called Anchory.

Faulk also said he heard "pillow talk" phone calls of Iraq's first interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer, another key US ally, when he worked as a US Army Arab linguist assigned to a US National Security Agency (NSA) facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia, between 2003 and 2007.While not illegal to collect information on foreign leaders, the US and the UK have pledged "not to collect on each other", several former US intelligence officials told ABC.