Mar

“…we hold these truths to be self-evident, except…”

It’s become a sad fact that politics in America has become polarized. Moderates and centrists are now squeezed into a hairline dividing the left and right. The media has a part in this, cable television and the Internet especially. Take Fox News, claiming to be “fair and balanced”, and an evident mouthpiece for extreme right wing Republicans. At almost any turn, they bash Democrats, moderates, and the middle.

Judging by FoxNews accounts, George Bush was an excellent president who hardly ever made a mistake. Now 14 months into Barack Obama’s first term, they are telling us that everything wrong with our economy is Obama’s fault. They use Reagan’s famous catch phrase that he is all about “tax and spend”. They never mention that Bush presided over the bailout of AIG, Fannie Mae, Citicorp, et al, using $1 trillion to “borrow and spend”.

FoxNews opposes health care reform effort in knee-jerk fashion. They did the same thing with the job stimulus bill(ARRA), the energy bill, the carbon cap and trade proposal, and almost every other proposal coming from the President. Facts are hard to come by at Fox. Instead of constructive and intelligent criticism, they bitch and whine – and have wasted a whole year doing so. FoxNews supports the Republicans, who are the party of “NO”!

Their polls are slanted (and the numbers are often “out of range” compared to polls by others). They seem to be merely entertaining their right wing viewers. They feature weird celebrities like Karl Rove and Sarah Palin to distract. They hire sensationalists like Glenn Beck

and Geraldo Rivera

to expouse a point of view focused on trivia. They invent fabricated issues like health care “death panels”, what kids wear, religious expression issues, et al, to avoid reporting on the reality.

The most popular pundit at Fox, Bill O’Reilly, continuously scoffs at the idea of global warming. Glenn Beck calls global warming a left-wing plot. Strange. Their ultimate boss, CEO and founder of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, believes that global warming is a serious problem. Murdoch has directed his company to fight global warming by becoming “carbon neutral”. Murdoch’s own employees are undermining his directions!

FoxNews doesn’t discuss the health insurance industry itself. They prefer to broadcast people who bitch and complain about the legislators, including majority leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, calling them all kinds of names. Medical costs and health care premiums have been skyrocketing for years. Fox News omits this critical fact, except to tell us our taxes will go up if the reforms “take over” the supposedly free insurance market. But this insurance market is hardly free. It is out of control.

Truth: I know someone shopping for individual health insurance at this time. He paid $250 a month at his last employer for his group plan. Now he is looking at costs close to $1200 a month because he needs an individual policy. The insurers tell him that regulations set these insurance rates anyway. So what is Fox News talking about?! We need health care reform to control these costs. FoxNews must be fighting it because they are actually lobbying hard for the insurance companies.

Glenn Beck plays on the fears of the right-wing by repeating the word socialism over and over in reference to health care and energy policy reform by the Democrats. Glenn Beck may tell you that he cares about American families. I highly doubt it. He has an agenda to help the interests of big health care, not to mentions big banks, big insurance, big oil, and so on.

Voters who represent the center, should call out Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News for this mixed-up news and commentary. Maybe this is beginning to happen.

Howell Raines, in this March 14th Washington Post commentary, Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News? says that Ailes is “using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history.“

He goes on to say “Fox [is] turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: ‘The American people do not want health-care reform.’… For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party…”

Last, but not least, Raines makes the point that “The American people and many of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change.”

So, my question is, with truth out the window, “in whose back pocket is the News Corporation?”

Now about that $500 hearing aid tax credit …