December 29, 2007
Fox News has made its bones off of being a fake news agency. Everyone knows it. While it worked for several years the shine has begun to diminish and the people are waking up to the real damage it can do to mainstream media. Granted, most mainstream media is really no better than Fox News, as they are all corporately controlled by companies that are in bed with the war machine. MSNBC is learning the lessons now as such obviously biased hosts such as Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson have failed miserably next to the more honest Keith Olbermann. America is slowly coming around to the notion that news should actually be fundamentally fair. Fox of course has been notoriously unfair and imbalanced for years now. Thus it should come as no surprise that Fox News has decided to once again try to subvert the democratic process by excluding Dr. Ron Paul from their upcoming GOP debate in New Hampshire.
This is what happens when people try to laugh off the power a Fox News can have. Because they have been tolerated as being “real”; they have been at the table to host debates. The first GOP debate hosted by Fox was a lesson in bias. On the stage were eight men who were battling over who could blow the world up better, and Dr. Paul. Fox tried their best to marginalize Paul as best they could. He received half the amount of questions as everyone else. You could hear Fox jack up the volume on the other candidates’ microphones when Paul was responding so the snickering could be heard loud and clear. At one point, in a moment that should be embarrassing for news professionals everywhere, the moderator asked a follow up question to Paul that said, “So you take your marching orders from al Qaeda?” Paul swiftly slapped Chris “fake news guy” Wallace back into line by saying he took his orders from the Constitution. Yet after all of this Fox also tried to stack the post debate against Paul as well. They had seen how Dr. Paul was winning all of the online polling after each previous debate so they switched the method. Instead of voting online, you had to text in who you thought won the Fox debate. Lo and behold, Ron Paul was crushing his competition yet again, much to the dismay of Sean Hannity who exclaimed, “Oh no not again, Ron Paul did not win this debate!”
Apparently Fox has figured out how to deal with the Paul phenomena this time around though; they have excluded him from the debates altogether. Never mind that he is polling higher in New Hampshire then some of the others who were invited. Never mind that he has out performed all of his competition in fundraising, WITHOUT taking lobbyist/corporate monies. Never mind that he raised six million dollars in one day. The issue is simply to subvert democracy and have a fake news agency tell you who you can listen to for presidential candidates. It is beyond appalling, it is sickening. I do not care if you are right or left, republican or progressive; you must be disgusted by this move to try and willfully interfere with our electoral processes.
Let’s face it; we know why Fox has taken this tact. First, Ron Paul is the only one who has a different opinion then the rest of the GOP crowd. Fox wants the consistent message of the neocon sent at the debates. Iraq is going great, Iran should be blown up next, and only the big strong republicans can protect you from the boogey-man…and Hillary. Fox does not want to hear Dr. Paul injecting sanity into the debate. They do not want to hear how it is unconstitutional to go to war without congressional approval. They do not want to hear about how the country is broke and we need to pay down the debt. They do not want to hear anything that diverts from the script they have orchestrated.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the machine is scared. They are scared of the momentum they see Ron Paul generating from a real grassroots effort. They are scared of the message that says it is not ok to blow up other countries for the profit of a few. They are scared of the message that says civil liberties matter. They are scared because they see that someone may get elected who understands the precarious situation we are in with our currency. They are scared because all of their efforts to mock and marginalize, to ignore and dismiss have only further emboldened the cause for liberty.
Regardless of the reasons though, it is a dark day for our democracy when any news agency, even a fake one, can purposefully and maliciously try to affect the outcome of a presidential election. I have read that Fox News will be embarrassed if Paul ends up winning the New Hampshire primary despite this blackout. Nonsense. Fox News does not care about being embarrassed. They have been an embarrassment for a decade and they do not care. That is how Rupert Murdoch operates. He does not care about appearance or reputation. He cares only about imposing his narrow-uber-conservative view upon the world. He does not care how he does it.
I would call for a boycott of Fox News but no one really takes them seriously. Just remember this point in history America. The machine is now telling you who you can even listen to and the rest of the media is complicit in their silence over it. There are many waypoints on the road to fascism and today we are staring at yet another. Dr. Paul has warned us repeatedly about the fascist state we are heading more deeply into. I guess that message was heard loud and clear by the fascists who have no decided to try and silence him. Liberty and freedom however have a way of rising above the white noise generated by the machine that seeks to stifle them. I pray that continues to happen in the face of the blatant undermining of everything we stand for as a nation.
