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It’s déjà vu all over again at Fox News. Just a few hours before President Obama was sworn in for his second term, Fox took the same news that formed the basis for PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” – Mitt Romney’s false claim that Chrysler’s decision to build Jeeps in China would cost U.S. jobs – re-distorted the facts, declared Romney a truth teller and suggested President Obama had won re-election based on a lie. Oh, and while they were at it, attacked PolitiFact as leftist liars.

In case you’ve forgotten, Romney’s big lie was based on a truth – that Chrysler planned to produce Jeeps in China – but twisted to give the misimpression that the company would outsource American jobs there. Now that Chrysler has announced specific plans to do what it said it was going to do in the first place, Fox crowed that Romney was right all along.

As Karoli pointed out last month, Fox News and Karl Rove were equally responsible for spreading that lie and giving it so much traction. Here they go again.

In a Fox & Friends Weekend segment so laden with distortions and disingenuousness I can't name them all, Steve Doocy began with a false description of what made Romney’s lie a lie, saying that Romney’s campaign ad claimed Chrysler was “going to build Jeeps in China.” Doocy added, “But now it seems the joke is on them. Chrysler just announced that a hundred thousand Jeeps will actually be made in China starting next year. Just like Mitt Romney said.”

Um, not really.

In its original article rating Romney’s ad a “pants on fire” lie, PolitiFact wrote:

The ad ignores the return of American jobs to Chrysler Jeep plants in the United States, and it presents the manufacture of Jeeps in China as a threat, rather than an opportunity to sell cars made in China to Chinese consumers. It strings together facts in a way that presents an wholly inaccurate picture.

Furthermore, Romney originally said outright that Jeep planned to move all production to China. Rather than correct the lie, he doubled down with his campaign ad. As Jon Perr noted, this was all part of Romney's strategy to attack the auto bailout. The backfire was considered at least partially responsible for Romney's loss in November. Meanwhile, Chrysler has added 1,100 workers on a Jeep assembly line in Michigan in October and will add another 1,100 in Ohio in the fall. Not that any of that inconvenient truth came out during this segment.

To pile on to Fox’s lie about Romney's lie, Doocy introduced Seton Motley who, among other roles, is a columnist for Breitbart.com – which has its own issues with the truth. Not that Doocy mentioned that, either.

Instead, Doocy opened the discussion by saying Romney “knows a lot about the car companies” and that when he said, “Chrysler, they’re gonna wind up making Jeeps in China, the left-wing media just exploded, didn’t they?”

Seton came out of the gate with a falsehood, saying it was The Washington Post (instead of Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact) that had ruled this the Lie of the Year – as Doocy nodded in agreement.

Doocy feigned puzzlement as he “asked,” “So, you’ve got this fact-checking organization came in and said that that’s the ‘Lie of the Year.’ Why would a fact-checking organization say something like that? You, you would think that they would be non-political but in fact, sometimes they are a little political, aren’t they?” As if he didn’t know what Motley would say.

And sure enough, Motley said it: “I think the fact-checking movement is the latest in the ‘unbiased journalists’ movement which, prior to 1965 didn’t really exist… We created unbiased journalism to say, ‘Let’s pretend to be unbiased when we’re actually promoting leftism.’ I think the fact checkers is another advancement of that cause. And at the end of the day, they’re just leftists as they always have been.”

Now that Fox viewers had been warned that facts have a stinkin’ liberal bias, Doocy, more than three minutes into the segment, got around to reading a January 14 statement from Chrysler’s CEO that included these sentences: "We will keep the pillar cars of Jeep in the U.S. …Wrangler is one, The Grand Cherokee is another.”

Still, they ignored the significance. Fox posted a banner reading, “Chrysler backpedals.” And Motley made the completely unsubstantiated claim that $26.5 billion of the bailout was “a direct check written to the United Auto Workers union.”

Doocy closed the segment by saying, “Mitt Romney was right. Ironically, we find that out today, on the day the president’s sworn in for a second term.”

By the way, there’s reason to suspect Fox knows this was a bunch of baloney. Despite banners saying “PANTS ON FIRE” and “WHOOPS” (about PolitiFact) during the segment, FoxNews.com casts doubt on that by making the title of its video of the segment a question: PolitiFact's 'Lie of the Year' actually true?

Fox News: The network where lying liars lie about true lies.

It looks like Politifact got it right this year, or at least more right than the past. They have selected their "Lie of the Year", and it was definitely a doozy. For 2012, Politifact has named Mitt Romney's lie about Jeep moving jobs to China as the Big Lie.

People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, the most important state in the presidential election.

PolitiFact has selected Romney's claim that Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs as the 2012 Lie of the Year.

But as the Baltimore Sun points out, the real story is that Fox News and Karl Rove are equally responsible for that lie spreading and getting enough traction to land right smack dab in the middle of the 2012 election:

No, the news about Fox News that mattered Wednesday was connected to PolitiFact naming the Mitt Romney campaign ad that said Jeep was going to move production and ship jobs to China “Lie of the Year.” Lie of the year.

And why that matters in any discussion of Fox is that the Rupert-Murdoch-owned channel “fact checked” the ad during the campaign and vouched for its accuracy – not once but twice. And, furthermore, Fox did it in one instance with Jim Angle, who is part of the news operation not the host of an evening show, doing the vouching. The channel’s website describes Angle as “chief national correspondent.”

And that cuts to the heart of the lie Fox News tries to sell about its news operation being as journalistically sound and non-ideologically driven as anything on the networks or CNN. Sure, Fox executives have said to me, the prime-time shows have opinion in them – just like opinion pages in a newspaper. But not our news programs and the reports by our correspondents.

Except, I guess, when it’s an election year, and things are going badly for the Republican candidate. Then, you use your chief national correspondent to vouch for the essential accuracy of the ad that is the “Lie of the Year.”

For a fuller discussion of Fox’s role in helping create an echo chamber for this Jeep-jobs-to-China lie, check out Media Matters. I know it’s an ideologically-driven liberal website. I’ve fought with Media Matters and been denounced by some of the best folks there. But the research and reporting on this matter are detailed and accurate.

The first part of that article described how sad and disheartened Rove and O'Reilly were over, well, just everything. Good. They should be sad. They are not news; they are propagandists, and they undermine our democracy on a daily basis when they pretend they're "fair and balanced."

Congratulations to Rove, Fox News, and Mitt Romney! They've received an honor which finally matches the recipient: Lie and Liars of the year.

Much like the media it purports to oversee, PolitiFact occasionally gets caught in the "he said, she said" trap and completely blows it. This is one of those times, as Think Progress points out:

PolitiFact has just announced its finalists for 2011′s Lie of the Year. Oddly, the year’s most significant policy claim — the Democrats’ charge that the Paul Ryan budget will end Medicare — made the list, even though it’s 100 percent true!

Here is why: Ryan’s plan ends traditional fee-for-service program and forces seniors to ultimately enroll in private coverage.Under his proposal, beginning in 2022, people turning 65 will receive a pre-determined “premium support” payment to purchase private coverage. The insurers will offer a basic package of benefits, but traditional Medicare — the program that President Lyndon Johnson enacted in 1965 — will literally stop enrolling new beneficiaries. Rather than paying health care providers directly — and using its market clout to secure better bargains and other efficiencies for enrollees — the government would now pay multiple private health insurers pre-determined amounts per beneficiary to act as middle men between patients and providers.

It will no longer guarantee seniors a defined package of benefits, but will instead only offer a defined contribution towards their health care costs. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of Ryan’s proposal explains, “the payment for 65-year-olds in 2022 is specified to be $8,000, on average, which is approximately the same dollar amount as projected net federal spending per capita for 65-year-olds in traditional Medicare.” However every subsequent year, as health care costs increase, the government’s contribution “would grow at a slower rate,” inflation, and the age of the enrollee. By 2030, under the proposal, the premium support would “only cover 32 percent of a typical 65-year-old’s total health care spending” and would decrease every subsequent year.

PolitiFact concedes that this is, in fact, “a huge change to the current program.” But it’s more than that. Capping costs to beneficiaries, closing the traditional fee-for-service program, and forcing seniors to enroll in new private coverage, ends Medicare by eliminating everything that has defined the program for the last 46 years