THE "FACTS" ARE VERY DIFFERENT BETWEEN FOX NEWS & MSNBC / CNN

Facts are Facts, right? Apparently they aren´t if you´re a Republican.

…What FOX offers should never be called "News".

Anyone who regularly reads my articles knows that I am no fan of Rupert Murdoch´s FOX NEWS. In fact, I personally feel that FOX NEWS is one organization that should be outlawed in the United States.

Yes, I am for "freedom of speech", but for a true democracy to survive, the voting population must receive "honest" information in order to make good, informed decisions. Therefore, it´s bad enough that the GOP politicians go around spouting their "lies & untruths". We now have a major network that offers "garbage information" to millions of viewers while treating their misinformation incorrectly as being facts and "Fair & Balanced".

A good friend recently told me a story that seriously explains the travesty in the sadness that can be brought on by this use of offering nothing but half-truths and misinformation while falsely stating that they are the unbiased truth.

This story starts with a family where the head of the household, then a widower, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Upon hearing the bad news, one of the devoted daughters of the widower then decided to come live with and to take care of her father in his final days. As with many individuals, as they age, the father had become much more conservative in his final years.

Now, in this man´s previous working years, he was a journeyman worker who had worked in electrical construction and he had also been a strong union leader. He had raised his family with strong family values and was a regular attendee of a local church.

In other words, he was a depression child that had fought in two wars, and was a positive recipient of FDR´s New Deal programs. He had at one time been a long time Democrat. The father was also from the early TV generation that believed in what is today becoming known as the "Walter Cronkite Syndrome". This is where a person believes that, "If it´s on TV news, it must be true."

As with many of his peers, and as a veteran of two wars, in his later years, and after 9/11, the father unfortunately became a believer in supporting the untruths of the Bush Administration and of Bush´s; "Fight them over there so we won´t have to fight them over here." He also believed Bush´s statement; "If you´re not with us, you´re against us." The father had also bought into Saddam having WMD´s and Bush´s potential "nuclear mushroom cloud" scenario and was a very strong supporter for invading Iraq. In other words, he bought into all of the right wing fear mongering, "hook, line and sinker".

What the daughter revealed was that in his early years, her father had been a very good parent and was an exceptional parental role model. She and her other siblings had adored both their mother and their father. And she never had one negative thought about giving up her own time for spending it in making her father as comfortable as possible in his final days.

However, what became extremely distressing was in those final days that she spent staying in his home. She then realized that her father had become a very angry and fearful old man. He had absorbed all of the vile and untrue statements that he heard from the talking heads on FOX NEWS. The daughter related to how after her mother had passed away, the big-screen television in the room where he spent the majority of his time was tuned 24 hours a day to FOX NEWS.

She later admitted how depressing it was to listen, day after day, to all of the misinformation being presented about and toward most middle-of-the-road Americans. This was all being spouted by the likes of FOX´s talking-heads such as; Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Bill O´Reilly and Michelle Malkin, and this would unnecessarily inflame her father.

After her father had finally passed away, the daughter admitted how the outlandish lies coming from FOX NEWS had affected her father. The negative effects on his mind were much more depressing to watch than that of her having to care for a parent dying of a terminal disease. She could deal with the natural effects of her father´s decline and that he would eventually be passing on. But she was very angry at the total effect of what the misinformation had on a mind that was not gone, but was slowly being poisoned as he lost his faith in all that he had lived and worked for his whole life. This was what was so devastating.

Now this is obviously a very sad story. Apparently though, this is just one example showing what happened to the father of a loving daughter. But could this possibly be happening today, all over America?

So, why would I be asking that question? Read on.......

A COMPARISON OF FOX & MSNBC / CNN:

It was recently presented on a the Rachael Maddow Show on MSNBC that the well known web site "Daily Kos" had commissioned some polling from a respected nonpartisan firm called Research 2000. The result of the polls, combined with some new data from the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, has allowed them to determine "massive intractable ignorance in the fight over American health care reform this summer".

The poll asked people whether or not they believe that "healthcare reform is definitely a secret plot to kill people". The following results come from the Research 2000 poll:

Of the Republican respondents to this poll, more than 25% said "yes"!

Among Independents, only 8% percent think that is the case.

With Democrats, it´s only 5%.

Unfortunately, when we talk about health care killing people, too many Americans actually believe these off-the-wall theories.

However, overall, it´s not that many average Americans who widely believe these bizarre concepts. It is mostly just the Republicans who believe this stuff. There is a major gap between what Republicans think are the real facts at issue and what the rest of the country thinks in general.

But why is that the case? Well, another Research 2000 poll from earlier this month found that 59% of Republicans say they watch FOX NEWS. That´s double the number of Republicans who watch MSNBC and CNN combined.

So, FOX NEWS is absolutely the dominant source of news for self-identified Republicans and that in itself is not exactly a surprise.

Now, the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll asked respondents whether they believed the "four big myths about healthcare reform". Then they asked those same respondents "what is your usual source of news"?

1. This poll found that the gap between MSNBC / CNN viewers and FOX viewers who wrongly believe "healthcare reform will give coverage to illegal immigrants" is 31-points.

2. The gap between MSNBC / CNN viewers and FOX viewers who wrongly believe "reform will lead to a government takeover of health care" is 40 points.

3. The gap between MSNBC / CNN viewers and FOX viewers who wrongly believe that "healthcare reform insures taxpayer-funded abortions" is 29-points.

4. The gap between MSNBC / CNN viewers and FOX viewers who wrongly believe that "the government will decide when to stop providing medical care to the elderly" is 45-points.

In other words, in this country, there is a debate between two different groups of people who are using two totally different sets of what both groups currently call "facts". As Americans, we like to think of the political universe as "all one big thing". As a place where everybody has different opinions. However, we are all at least supposed to agree on what the hell we´re fighting about.

That´s not the case here. Members of the Republican Party who identify themselves as Republicans have a different set of so called "facts" from the rest of the country. The GOP´s understanding of what we´re fighting about when it comes to health care is not only vastly different from the rest of the country, it´s totally flat wrong!

These Republicans believe things that are absolutely NOT true about what´s being proposed for America´s healthcare reform by the president and the Democrats in Congress.

As Rachael Maddow stated on her nightly news show on MSNBC, "They [these false facts] exist in their own fact-impaired "mini-verse" inside what we thought was a "universe". No wonder we´re not getting anywhere regarding health care reform."

Author´s Comment:

We usually expect that when we enter the last 1/3rd of our lives, we should be able to spend more time doing what we want to do, that we will have the time we didn´t have while we were working to participate in America´s politics. Unfortunately, the daughter whose father passed away had the bad situation of not only watching a loved one die, but she had to watch and listen to FOX NEWS poison his mind which eventually turned him into an angry and frightened old man.

What a waste of an honest man who had made the best of a tough life, who had raised a beautiful family, but then passed away with a falsely tainted point of view that his beloved country was now full of hate and fear. His final days shouldn´t have and didn´t have to end that way.

Copyright G.Ater 2009

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