On the Contrary

Okay, I admit it.  I am a news junkie.  Usually while I work in the afternoon I alternate between MSNBC and CNN depending on which one has interesting guests, or is not engaging in banal banter, or is not giving me advice about my health or my money which I don’t have any of.  Fox News I avoid like the plague because it does really represent a very biased point of view and the amount of miss reporting far exceeds the other two.

But in a New York Times article on Monday I find I am fairly out of step. The gist of the article was that with MSNBC tilting left, and Fox right, CNN, who they claim holds the middle, is losing viewership.  What was shocking if we look at the April numbers is that CNN has been fourth. Fox has 668,000 viewers; MSNBC has 300,000; and CNN has 271,000. HLN has 277,000.  Fox has over double the numbers of MSNBC.  So let’s do some critical thinking here.

First, is CNN really in the middle?  They get this label by claiming that they give both sides a fair hearing.  But as pointed out in yesterday’s blog and by Fareed Zakaria and others, we have 1 ½ political parties and the ½ are the Republicans.  So if you give the Flat Earthers the same credence in a debate with Round Earthers, isn’t the debate slanted?  If you are giving the Republican No Machine the same footing with the policies put forward by the Democrats, are you not actually giving more weight than is due to their arguments?  By not being aggressive enough at challenging these Republicans and their ideas and having the two pundit debate, CNN is actually more conservative leaning than middle of the road because they are lending credence to the arguments having equal weight.  Besides, remember where Glenn Beck came from, that Lou Dobbs continues to bash immigrants, and the business interviews are decidedly conservative and the net result is a right leaning news organization.

My point here is that if you are conservative you will watch Fox News, and if you are independent or liberal, you are probably going to watch MSNBC where old thinking is challenge by new thinking from Rachel Maddow, David Schuster, and Keith Olbermann.  Instead of just accepting their guest’s statements, they are well informed and ask penetrating questions.  CNN is really competing with Fox News for viewers.  Now in all fairness, this does not apply to CNN’s international reporting, which I don’t think anyone does a better job.  Lets just hope they continue to hold on to these reporters and journalists because they do a great service for us.

The article implied that one has to pick a bias to gain readership.  Is MSNBC really that left leaning or has the middle shifted which leaves CNN looking conservative?  I will give you that Keith Olbermann does very definitely have a bias, but Rachel and David reflect more what I think the younger nation is thinking.

But there is something else to consider about these numbers.  News junkies are old like me but the majority of our nation is younger and does not watch these shows.  What the 2:1 ratio of Fox watchers to MSNBC watchers tells me is that we have an older generation that is mostly conservative watching these shows.  Old people find change much more difficult to deal with and Fox reassures them that nothing is changing and the old ideas still are viable.  It’s a lie of course, but in the world of making money, it is profitable.  In the world of let the market place decide, if lies, shrillness, conflict and misinformation sell better than truth and rational consideration of reality, then that is what we get.  But some of us still like to use our brains, and MSNBC usually is better at questioning the conventional wisdom so it is my choice, the exception being Chris Mathews.

Yesterday it was reported by many news organizations that there were large protests against….well government, taxes, gun control, Obama, you name it.   What I found interesting based upon the numbers was that if this were a protest about global warming it would have been reported as a small turn out.  Why the deference to these fruit loops?  And fruit loops they are.  At least some liberal bloggers got it right:  “Fizzle in the Drizzle.”

Ever try to talk to one of these people rationally?  Basically everything about government except national defense and the interstate highway system (and some object to this) is bad and just burdens us.  They want fewer taxes, but they hold dearly to their Medicare.  They want to send their kids to private schools or home school them, but fail to see how public education has created the environment where the majority of the nations education has created a literate and prosperous society.  They fail to see that the food in the markets has been subsidized through water projects and investment by our government in agriculture.  Their great medical care is grossly subsidized by government aid and research.  In a word, they fail to see any connection between the myriad things that government does and their affluence today (as compared to most other nations).  It is denial and selfishness on the grandest of scales.

Let’s face it, these folks are not deep thinkers.  They decry our tax rate yet pay one of the lowest rates in the industrialized world.  They point out that we have one of highest corporate tax rates in the world, but they never look at the effective rate, what corporations actually pay.  They say we are being taxed to death when the reality is our taxes are lower than they have ever been, especially for the rich.  But even if their claims were true, the real question is are they part of the nation and have a responsibility to pay for services they demand or not?  Of course they would deny any services demanded until something tragic happens in their lives and then they demand to know where government is to help them out.

But there is a more disturbing element to this than just a bunch of nut cases on the fringe.  They are being pandered to by a failing opposition party and its noise machine, Fox News.  I guess that would be okay if these people were harmless, but if history is any guide, Timothy McVeigh was a product of just these sorts of fruitcakes.   The Governor of Texas suggested succession recently.  Morons such as Michelle Bachmann from Minnesota suggested rebellion.  Fox News actively stokes their fires.  It is survival by appealing to the irrational fringe masses.  It is the bankruptcy of their ideas and their desperation to hang onto power, any power, that they eschew any moral or intellectual integrity to attract anyone that will follow them.  Their ideas don’t make sense and in this crowd nobody cares.

The Republicans, and make no mistake, while these people may say they are independent, they vote Republican, are pandering to these folks in a very dangerous way.  Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) went after Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, when she issued a warning that with tough economic times, these groups could, as they have in the past, generate domestic terrorism.  What’s wrong, Representative Cantor, is the truth to hard to bear.  Veterans groups were offended because the warning also said that returning vets could be a problem if they found themselves on the street with no alternatives.  Wasn’t Timothy McVeigh a returning, disgruntled vet with lots of military training?  These are obvious conclusions yet we can’t say them because they reflect directly on the Republican’s base.

I guess what is really troubling to me and which shows how morally bankrupt the Republicans are, is that after 9/11 if you disagreed with the President you were a traitor.  But now we may face an even greater threat to our well being in our unraveling economy and their response is to sow discord every step of the way.  It exposes everything you want to know about conservative Republicans.  They only care about their beliefs and yours are irrelevant.  If the democratic process puts them out of office, then succession and rebellion is their answer.  They are the embodiment of the intolerance of their ideas.