

Former President Jimmy Carter slammed Fox News Channel for their coverage of President Barack Obama and said the Tea Party does not realize it is financed by oligarchs.

“With the discussion groups, for instance, on Fox News, that are totally biased, and they implant completely false images not only of the facts about legislation that’s passed, or doesn’t get passed, but also about the character of President Obama,” Carter told CNN’s Howard Kurtz on Sunday.

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Fox News’ opinion shows cater almost exclusively to conservative audiences and the network has been a vocal critic of Obama since he won the election in 2008.

“When conservatives such as myself and others pointed out that we felt Barack Obama had radical ties and socialist, radical views, we were laughed at, made fun of, people thought we were too harsh on the president,” Fox News’ host Sean Hannity said in October. “Now a full, you know, 60 percent of the American people view him as socialist.”

In July of 2009, another Fox News’ host, Glenn Beck, claimed that the president had “a deep-seated hatred of white people or white culture.”

Carter said Fox News has been “successful in projecting him as a person who is not a citizen of America, who is not a Christian, but a Muslim, and is not a Democrat, but he’s a socialist, and so forth.”

“And those seeds that are planted every day that they broadcast by the discussion, in the discussion groups, have found a harvest place in the minds of a lot of Americans,” he continued. “So I think they have completely twisted around what he has done, what he has accomplished, and his own personal character to his detriment.”

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Asked if the Tea Party movement has received enough media scrutiny, Carter said he has no criticism of members of the Tea Party movement, but claimed that they don’t know they are being financed by the oil industry.

“I think that this Tea Party doesn’t realize that they are financed by oligarchs and the oil industry, primarily, the Koch brothers and others, to want to avoid any sort of regulation of what they do, and also want to avoid compliance with improving environmental laws and so forth,” Carter said.

Koch Industries is the the second-largest private company in the United States and is credited with the creation of the conservative group Americans for Prosperity.

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According to The New Yorker, the group was instrumental in organizing and funding the Tea Party movement.

This video is from CNN’s Reliable Sources, broadcast Oct. 31, 2010.

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