Tag Archives: Fox News

Freedom of Speech should not undermine Freedom of Thought

Glenn Beck – Fox News Thursday 8/27/09 – 7 of 7

NEWS media should be an non-profit endeavor. It should be pluralist, independent of both government or political parties, but also independent of big corporate conglomerates. Being “independent” means dedicated to seeking the truth and informing the public of the findings independent of outside influence.
The media is not independent in present-day Russia for example, because of government meddling. That constitutes a democratic deficit. In America, the News Media is not independent because of private corporate meddling and that too constitutes a democratic deficit.

Democracy can not function without an informed citizenry. If the people decide – in a government by the people, their choice has less value if they are mostly ignorant of the subject on which they are asked to express a position (vote yea or nay). Similarly the people’s decision has no value if they have been victim of a misrepresentation on the matter.

Freedom of speech was established as a pre-eminent guarantee in order to protect those journalist, whose role it is to inform the citizenry, or indeed to protect any individual from the dangers of a tyrant muzzling or gaging dissenting opinions.
In the case of Glen Beck – all this blogger can think is: this trash ought to be off the air.

If corporations are bigger then the republic they undermine the republic. Vitriolic hate speeches and deliberate fear mongering should be tolerated from a man standing on a soap box in a public square. However, the power of television is such, that allowing this on a major broadcast medium has real ramification for the citizenry and therefore the republic itself.

Democracy can not function without an informed citizenry. Fox News is misinforming the public deliberately. The Fox audience are like the victims of a confidence trick. Even if they freely make a choice at the voting booth, they make that choice as freely as the con victim gives her money to the trickster.

Removing Beck from the air would not be a case of muzzling of a dissenting view and trampling freedom of speech. It would be shutting up a dangerous tyrant’s propaganda machine. In this case Glen Beck is the voice on Fox News. Fox News is promoting the interests of the tyrant: big for-profit corporations. Obama is the enemy. The goal: to instill mistrust and fear of the President of the United States of America – at all cost.

Oh, and by the way, they have so little care for what they put together that Mr Beck’s team can’t even spell Oligarchy!

Al Gore sued by over 30.000 Scientists for Global Warming fraud

Al Gore sued by over 30.000 Scientists for Global Warming fraud / John Coleman (via WakeUpCall4World)

There are many things wrong about what is going on in this segment of Red Eye, a show on Fox News, or as I like to call it Fox “News”.  Of course, my ears cringe when I hear Mr Coleman reduce the global warming position as the contention that the burning of fossil fuels “is going to turn the climate of earth into an oven and we’re all gonna bake and die” (just so we’re clear, thats a direct quote) followed by the argument that CO2 is a natural compound that we breath out all day long.

Again, here I must resist the temptation to criticize directly what Mr Coleman is saying and focus my attention on the question of why he is making these claims, and why Fox is providing him the platform on which to make them.  Check that, Fox is not just letting him express his view,  they are heavily sympathetic to it (most preciously, I’ve noted that the host refers to Vice President Gore simply as “Al”, what a douche).

so, why?

Can people really be so rotten?  I mean its easy to mock Mr Coleman for being so misguided.  Yet, we should not resort to rolling our eyes at the preposterous statements.  We must focus on the deliberate nature of what is going on here.

Whether Mr Coleman is delivering the message in good faith, can be doubted, but he must benefit from that doubt.  Maybe he’s just an old fart  with the mitigating circumstance that his understanding of mother earth’s delicate biosphere is based on his recollections of 1950s Earth science class through which he mostly slept.  What is NOT in doubt is that someone deliberately orchestrated all this movement (“there are 30.000 of us…”) and sought to find a spokesperson willing to bare the flag, no doubt with a fat consultancy contract attached with a bow.

I’m reading a book these days titled A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.  He has a chapter on how lead came to become ubiquitous in many industrial processes because it was very profitable to produce industrially.   It was well-known that lead was a nasty neurotoxin early in the century, yet in the 1920s it was introduced into gasoline and later into canned food products.  Lead was not significantly removed from mass distribution products until the 70s.  And this was after every effort was made to misinform the public and discredit eminent scientist that tried to speak against the use of lead.   Today we all have over 625 times more lead in our blood then our great grandparents because of this lead rush.  And this is just one of innumerable examples of moneyed interests conspiring against the public.   (CFCs, tobacco, auto safety, etc.)

My point is: there is nothing new under the sun.  Mr Coleman represents a particular breed of villainy.

To end on a lighter note:  I love that the Red Eye host, Greg Gutfeld, introduced Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel, by mentioning that its his favorite channel “cuz it has the hottest women there.” I guess they know their audience.