The last time I called Fox unpatriotic — even though it was an ironic gesture to make a point about how absurd it is to say something like this — my story was censored by conservatives that cannot and will not tolerate political dissent in any form.
I don’t blame them, they can’t help but act the way they were taught to act by miscreant parents that were equally as stupid as the children they would come to raise. Who is most responsible for allowing that blatant censorship to stand is another story for another time, however.
The right cast the first stone by questioning the patriotism of liberals who refused to support the Iraq war when the justification was anything but persuasive, and then defamed them again as traitors when it became obvious that the occupation was a failure that we had to walk away from for the good of the country.
No one was a bigger cheerleader for the occupation than official PR firm of the Republican party: News Corp.
It’s only fitting that the offenders – Fox News and the Wall Street Journal – now find themselves on losing side of the smear game, attacking our President and our country as foreign, evil, and so undesirable that the only reasonable response is: A. an armed rebellion, slaughtering countless numbers of innocent Americans for the crime of political dissent; or B, secession from the country that conservatives professed to love more than anyone just a couple of years ago.
One can hardly love their country when they want to either wage armed war against it, or secede from it.
But Rupert Murdoch’s irrepressible hatred of real news and journalism when that news could possibly be bad for the GOP has not stopped at the waters edge. Most people have simply accepted the fact that Fox News is not a news organization so much as it is a conservative entertainment channel, a visual version of Rush Limbaugh all day and all night long. It’s gone and simply not coming back. The op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal have leaned so far to the right that people have been known to fall off the edge of the flat earth they all undoubtedly believe in, and after the purchase by News Corp, the news room has followed down that path just as everyone warned it would.
Not content with turning a news network into a press release factory for the Republican party, Murdoch has gone for the gold: he’s turned an otherwise non-partisan entertainment broadcast network with a legal duty to broadcast the news into yet another outlet for the Republican party.
For the third time in a row, Fox will be the only broadcast network refusing to air either a Presidential press conference, or a speech. At this rate it’s only reasonable to assume that Fox won’t air the State of the Union, either.
And I’m sorry for all the whiny conservatives on the far-right who will angrily disagree, but the only reasonable conclusion is that Fox simply doesn’t measure up to the other networks on the patriot scale – one their corporate parent created as a weapon against liberals.
If conservatives can sit in judgment on the patriotism of others, then it’s only fair and logical that others may do the same over conservatives. In the words of The Decider, you’re either with us, or against us.
One wonders where the firestorm of anger is. Can anyone imagine not seeing hundreds of blog posts from the right, op-eds in the conservative Washington Post, and endless news segments on Fox News dedicated to smearing NBC and its parent company General Electric if had dared to refuse to air even a single Bush press conference, much less three in a row?
The right already demonizes NBC as a liberal news network – without any substantive proof – while ignoring obvious evidence of political corruption under the guise of business decisions from networks that openly support them. But NBC has never dreamed of going as far as Fox already has.
Sure, Fox will shrug and say they’ll air it on FNC and Fox Business, but the audience of those two networks combined is a tiny fraction of what Fox sees, and you’ll have to pay to see them at all whereas the broadcast networks are free. Even though it’s available in something like 48 million homes (not even half of the total), barely 50,000 people watch Fox Business on any given day. And Fox News, while it stands tall amongst the other cable networks, is still a baby compared to the reach of Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC.
Even the lowest rated scripted show on Fox will double or triple the ratings of FNC on its very best night of the entire year.
That’s not a replacement, it’s political bias against a liberal administration by the nation’s most-watched broadcast network, one that gets to use the airwaves for free with the implicit understanding that it will serve the public good by broadcasting the news; a job that Fox has refused to do three times in a row — a job that Fox News refuses to do pretty much all of the time anyway.
I said this before and I’ll say it again, if Fox wants to escape its obligations to broadcast the news so badly, because it hates our President so badly, and doesn’t want to serve the public instead of its corporate political masters on the far right, it can write a $10,000,000,000 check to the FCC for the radio spectrum it’s currently getting for free.
Then it can do whatever it wants.
Or it can live up to its patriotic duty and serve the entire public interest by showing the news, not serving the corrupt political will of its corporate parent and a single divisive political party that has more in common with China and Russia in their state-sponsored news than it does America,.