I only caught glimpses of Wednesday Night's Daily Show episode but I did catch some of Fox's coverage on Tuesday night. Sadly Fox News will only see this as partisan media bias because, as any psychiatrist can tell you, people tend to see their own flaws in others. ENJOY!
"It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear."
This brings me to something I noticed a few years ago and never could find an answer for it. Where are the liberals in conservative media? Conservative Media always blames the mainstream media as having a liberal bias. Think of the "liberal media" for a second:
- MSNBC?A former Republican Congressman hosts a three-hour morning news show (which, in case you're wondering, is three hours more than any liberal hosts a show on Fox News).
- New York Times?David Brooks and Ross Douthat have regular columns in the Op-Ed pages.
- Washington Post?Same with Michael Gerson, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, George Will...
I ask again, where are the liberals in conservative media? Alan Colmes? Sure, he makes a token appearance from time-to-time on Fox News but it's not like he hosts his own TV show anymore (and even then, it was Hannity & Colmes). Thomas Frank? Nope, not with the Wall Street Journal anymore, and even when he was, his column printed less frequently than Brooks or Douthat do with the New York Times.
I'm not saying conservative media should swing to the ideological middle. There is a need for both, objective and partisan media. However, if you only offer your viewers partisanship without an intellectually honest counterpoint, you're likely to end up in the exact same place the Republican Party is sitting in today. And in the long term that's not good for the party or for the country.
PolitiFact does its usual fact check of the latest Republican debate. I don't know if it was because the candidates knew it would be Fox News viewers watching or if they were just having a very comfortable day but there were some whoppers in the debate.
New York magazine peels off a layer to reveal the paranoid schizophrenia that is Fox News:
"Going back to the 2008 campaign, [Obama advisor David]Axelrod had maintained an off-the-record dialogue with [Fox News chairman Roger] Ailes. He had faced off against Ailes in a U.S. Senate campaign in the early eighties and respected him as a fellow political warrior and shaper of narrative. But early on, Axelrod learned he couldn’t change Ailes’s outlook on Obama. In one meeting in 2008, Ailes told Axelrod that he was concerned that Obama wanted to create a national police force.
“You can’t be serious,” Axelrod replied. “What makes you think that?”
Ailes responded by e-mailing Axelrod a YouTube clip from a campaign speech Obama had given on national service, in which he called for the creation of a new civilian corps to work alongside the military on projects overseas.
Later, Axelrod related in a conversation that the exchange was the moment he realized Ailes truly believed what he was broadcasting."
It's a very, very long and enlightening read, as is the sidebar article to it.
““I’m a conservative,” he said. “I have a political philosophy that leans to the right. I know when I hear slanted reporting — and I do hear it sometimes on NPR. But on the whole, it’s very balanced and detailed.””
Unlike Fox News, which claims you can get women’s health services at Walgreens.
Great column by T.R. Reid in today's Washington Post. I liked this quote from a senior Roman Catholic Cardinal from the U.K. on why women have fewer abortions there than in the United States: "If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it's needed...she's more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn't it obvious?"
An unrelated column in today's Washington Post says "Fox News: unfair, unbalanced, unchecked." Well DUH.
When I started writing this blog, I intended it to be about sports and politics but I knew that eventually I would end up writing about religion, as I did with my last post. Religion is a topic I've always been fascinated by both for its ability to generate positive emotions in people and for its all-too-often ability to generate hate and intolerance. Now, thanks to Brit Hume at Fox News, I can converge all three topics into one post.
For those that didn't see Brit Hume's comment on Fox News Sunday, here it is:
Now I can understand Brit Hume's ignorance about Buddhism. Many people vilify Islam for being intolerant and then turn around and often say the same intolerant things except referring to Jesus instead of Allah. Frankly I could never understand Christianity's and Islam's obsession with religious conversions. They often seem like teenagers playing video games trying to score as many points as possible against each other when they should just turn the game off and go do their homework instead.
As far as the Christianity vs. Buddhism argument goes, the striking part is the similarity between the two faiths. As a result, there are many theories about how Jesus visited India and stayed in a Buddhist Monastery in Kashmir during his "missing years" from ages 12 to 29. Some believe Jesus did not travel to India but was influenced by Buddhist missionaries in the Middle East and ancient Greece that came west along the Silk Road. It is recorded that Alexander the Great encountered Buddhist monks and Hindu yoga masters, or Yogis, when he reached India. (The Greeks even had a name for the Yogis, "Gymnosophs", which means "Naked Philosopher" in Ancient Greek.) Emperor Ashoka of the Maurya Dynasty in northern India in the 3rd century BCE sent Buddhist missionaries across the then known world upon his conversion to Buddhism. The bottom line is Buddhist teachers had been in the Middle East and ancient Greece teaching meditation and spirituality for over 200 years before the birth of Christ. Some even theorize that Christianity was really a Middle Eastern adaptation of Buddhism but the message got lost along the way and offer the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas as its proof. On the flip side, if you ask most Buddhists about Jesus, they consider him to be an enlightened being, or a Buddha himself.
Regardless of whether or not you subscribe to any of these theories (remember, just like religion itself, these are just theories that cannot be proven or unproven) the point remains that Brit Hume, like most political commentators on the left and right, spoke from a position of ignorance about the topic on which he was speaking. That is the lesson that we all have to learn from this. You may not like someone else's religion or political ideology or sports team (I'm looking at you Yankee fans; I'm excited about the Mets signing Jason Bay!), but you cannot consider yourself an expert on your position unless you've heard the other positions and given them the consideration they deserve as you would expect them to give to you in hearing your point of view. Brit Hume was not debating someone in the discussion. He was simply giving his point of view based on his own biases and lack of understanding. We can jump off the deep end and criticize him but that misses the point and just leads to more misunderstanding.
My favorite quote (and last point) on this topic comes from Roy Sano, a Buddhist by birth that become a Methodist bishop later in life. "When I converted to Christianity I wondered how I could still be a Buddhist. As time goes by I now wonder how I can be a Christian and not be a Buddhist!" (Jim Willis, The Religion Book: The Encyclopedia of Places, Prophets, Saints, and Seers (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 2004), p. 82)
On a lighter note, Asif Mandvi captured the Brit Hume incident nicely in this clip from last night's Daily Show:
Thomas Frank's most recent column in the Wall Street Journal has this accurately written blurb:
"To point out that this network is different, that it is intensely politicized, that it inhabits an alternate reality defined by an imaginary conflict between noble heartland patriots and devious liberals—to be aware of these things is not the act of a scheming dictatorial personality. It is the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody with eyes and ears."
I saw something earlier today on Fox News that actually surprised me. At the top of the 3:00PM hour, anchor Shepard Smith was reporting stories about the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races. When he went to the reporter covering the Chris Christie campaign, the reporter had actually managed to get Chris Christie on the air for a brief interview. After completing the interview, Smith asked the reporter when Gov. Corzine would be interviewed. When the reporter replied that they were still waiting to hear back from the Corzine campaign, Smith said he had no idea the interview was to take place, apologized to the television audience that it happened, and said that if he had control of the situation, it would not have taken place at all.
I'm not sure if video of that segment is stored or saved on YouTube somewhere, but is it possible that by criticizing Fox News (appropriately so, in most cases) any responsible journalists on the network are actually losing their credibility? I've subscribed to the Alan Colmes podcast for months now and although he is put in an awkward situation as a liberal working for Fox News, he often cites Shepard Smith by name when defending the news programming on Fox News and distinguishing it from the opinion programming.
