June 13, 2019

Fox News Update: Lying About Air Force One With Guest Darrell Issa

I’m trying out an updated exercise regime that happens to involve watching more TV. So this morning, after pulling out my new rowing machine, I tuned into Fox News and discovered that Darrell Issa was today’s guest on Outnumbered. The question of the moment was whether Democrats were being petty and ridiculous by trying to stop Donald Trump from redesigning Air Force One. (“We all agree,” Lisa Boothe burbled at the end, and I think you can all guess what they agreed on.)

So what did Issa say? Well, Air Force One is constantly being repainted, different colors, different designs, etc. Why, when Issa flew on the old 707 version of Air Force One as it was being delivered to the Reagan Museum, it was in the middle of being repainted! Every president has done this, so who cares if Trump does it too? Get a life, losers.

I have no life, so Issa got me curious: has the design of Air Force One changed over the years? It took a bit of sleuthing to find photos with clear dates and non-museum settings, but I did it. You can thank me later. Here are the results:

Air Force One in 1963
Air Force One in 1987
Air Force One in 2018

I can’t swear that the Pantone numbers of the paint jobs are literally identical, but these sure look the same to me. I don’t doubt that Air Force One has been repainted periodically, but the design hasn’t changed at all.

Later on, either Issa or one of the others also repeated the lie about Trump cutting $1.5 billion off the contract price of the new pair of 747s the Air Force is buying to replace the old ones. In reality, Trump cut $0 off the price.

Now, none of this matters much. But it’s literally what I saw after turning on Fox News at random and listening for five minutes. They repeated President Trump’s lies and then made up new lies of their own to add to them. They do this every minute of every day, no matter how trivial the subject. It’s hardly any wonder that regular viewers are so poorly informed even if they don’t stay up to watch the prime time shills.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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