No news like Fox News

I don’t watch FoxNews simply because I oppose it. I have friends who oppose it, but watch it to help keep an eye on the rhetoric, but I do not. However, yesterday I spent a great deal of time watching the most caustic pundits on Fox through YouTube. It truly amazes me that otherwise intelligent humans, who may differ with me politically, legitimize this hate rhetoric. Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and other Fox mouthpieces are race baiting fringe Americans and driving them to a frenzy. Examples:

• Glenn Beck calls the President of the United States a racist and no one bats an eye. As a matter of fact, many of them don’t even realize that this has happened. Beck then goes on to warn his fringe listeners that “one lunatic like Timothy McVeigh could ruin everything.”
• Ann Coulter writes book after book with factual errors and goes on TV repeating those same errors and yet she is a best selling author. She denigrates single mothers, teachers, and even the widows of those killed during September 11.
• Bill O’Reilly goes into the most famous restaurant in Harlem Sylvia’s Soul Food and says “no one was shouting m-fer, I want some more Iced Tea.” He went on to say that Sylvia’s was like any restaurant owned by whites in the city of New York.

I was trained as a journalist many years ago. It was, I thought at the time, a noble profession and something that I was very good at. I remember my professors teaching me ethics until my ears turned blue and honing my research and interview skills. However, it was not long after I moved to Los Angeles that I realized that television was not a place for me. Now, TV news has become the main source of most people’s information gathering process. Hence, a thirty-second sound bite becomes the catalyst for most of their political views.

Now, I can understand this from those who may lack education and I can understand this from those who want to hear what they want to hear. The latter can be educated, but the former is probably lost to us forever. However, I cannot understand how intelligent people would listen to and justify this hate speech on a regular basis. I cannot understand how rational human beings do not stand up and protest the hate with ever bone in their body whether it comes from Ann Coulter or a pulpit.

People often ask me what I believe. I am a Christian. I have been since I was 18-years-old. I have many friends who are not and we agree to disagree. However, I do not believe in church or organized religion because of racism I have experienced and the doctrines of hate of most right-winged religious organizations. I believe in the first amendment and I believe that the Bill O’s of the world have a right to say what they want as long as it does not damage the reputations of or hurt anyone else. Most of all, I believe that all people should be respected, journalist (all of them) have a duty to be fair and impartial when reporting the news, and that intelligent people should be able to separate the rhetoric from reality. Where are those caring people who profess to want justice in our world? Why don’t they stand up and say “This is wrong”? I know you are out there. Grow up America.

Watch some videos:

• http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200908050007
• http://jackrabbitcafe.blogspot.com/search?q=glenn+beck
• http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/07/entertainment/main1690954.shtml