The U.S. House will vote today on a bill that would strip all federal funding from National Public Radio. NPR has been a favorite target of the Lying Right for years; Representative Michael Grimm (Republican–naturally–from New York) summarizes the conservative party-line:
“It is clear we cannot tolerate, or afford, the continued spending of tax dollars on this type of prejudice, intolerance and negative stereotyping,”
Hmmm. Let’s take a look at, oh, say, Fox News:
- It has employed Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum–all probable 2012 Republican presidential candidates–as paid “analysts”. (That’s a lot of free air time.)
- The Fox News parent company has donated, or coordinated donation of, millions of dollars to conservative political action committees and GOP fronts.
- Fox News regularly distorts and twists facts into lies to make reich-wing points
Here’s an interesting pair of videos about Fox News. They’re long but worth listening to:
My favorite quote? Fox News manager Dave: “We just spent three billion dollars on these television stations…the news is what we say it is”.
Are we funding Fox also?
Nope, we aren’t funding Fox, which is why they can be as biased as they want to be.
I’d have to take issue with allowing Fox News to be biased. They market themselves as a news journalism organization. To that end, journalism, defined as “the occupation of reporting, writing, editing, photographing, or broadcasting news or of conducting any news organization as a business”, deals with facts.
Fox Entertainment…er, News, for the most part deals with opinion, political agenda, and an unabashedly conservative distortion of facts and events. That’s not news–that’s ratings whoring.