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Why Don’t Honest Journalists Take On Roger Ailes & Fox News?
* Howell Raines The Washington Post *
One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?
Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox 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.”
Fox repeats this as gospel. But as a matter of historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News, this assertion ranks somewhere between debatable and untrue.
The American people and most 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. Yet congressional Republicans have managed effective campaigns against health-care changes favored variously by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. Now Fox News has given the party of Lincoln a free ride with its repetition of the unexamined claim that today’s Republican leadership really does want to overhaul health care — if only the effort could conform to Mitch McConnell’s ideas on portability and tort reform.
Read more at The Washington Post
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=21108
Posted by Bob Higgins on Mar 12 2010, With 0 Reads, Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Probably for the same reason that MSNBC uses their old school news outlet to canonize Obama,…after all, in their opinion, he cannot do wrong. I see a strong opposite opinion with MSNBC vrs. Fox news.
MSNBC’s Olbermann, Schultz, Maddow and Wallace are the only three who take on WGOP and its propagandists. But the press merely quotes some of WGOP’s windbags when they demonize the president. Limbaugh is also a favorite. Each day he spits out his scorn, sits back and laughs as the media rabidly quotes him.
Fox the voice of the GOP, relies on Rove, Cheney, his daughter, Perino, et al, all former Bush lackeys, to vent their distaste at the president.
Howell Raines understandably is at a loss to explain why the press is so scared to tell Americans what a phony station fox is. A lot of us can;t understand why anyone with any sense even bopthers to watch the idiotic clowns clamouring for attention
with the lies and deceit.