The ‘Big Lie’ About Fox News Who really puts out the fake – and one-sided – news? Bruce Hendry
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/bruce-check-lib-guests-bruce-hendry/
Below is Part 7 of a new essay written by Bruce Hendry: Democrats, Progressives and Socialists. Stay tuned for the ensuing chapters. [See links to previous chapters below this article].
17. Global Warming.
There is probably no issue that better exposes all of the devices that Democrats use to advance their agendas than “global warming,” which is the ultimate “shiny object” distraction to what is really going on. There are only three choices on the matter; warming; cooling; or no change. Since the beginning of time, the planet’s climate has always been changing, so we rule out the no change opinion. Although this hasn’t prevented the warming crowd from re-naming their nemesis “climate change,” so they can avoid having to take a hard look at the facts and their implications. That leaves the real alternatives – warming or cooling.
The evidence that the earth is warming is convincing. This brings us head-to-head with their assumption that a warming planet is bad and that it is caused by humans. Without discussing the matter, the “climate change” alarmists just assume that the climate is warming and that’s bad. That leaves us with the single question of how to stop or reverse it.
The left is clear as to what to do about the problem, and that is to entrust governments with enough power to fix it. Sometimes it does make sense to give up some personal freedoms to give the government these powers. The powers given to the government to win World War II is a good example of that.
Agreeing that the planet is warming shouldn’t be the end of the discussion; it should start a dialogue about whether this is a good thing for the planet or a bad thing. If you look at history, a warm planet has promoted peace and a cooling planet, such as the weather condition known as the “little ice age” starting in about 1400 AD, promoted strife and violence as people started fighting over arable land. Obviously some people will be adversely affected by global warming and others will benefit, but on the left there is no discussion at all about who will benefit from global warming and whether the net longterm effect of global warming is good or bad or something in between. They are convinced that global warming is a disaster for everyone – an existential threat to the planet itself.
How much of global warming is caused by nature and how much is caused by man, is a critical question but for the left it’s not a question at all. A thousand years from now we may be able to answer the question. Here’s what we do know: that human activity is despoiling our planet in multiple ways, and whatever contribution humans make to climate change is just a small part of it.
Rivers and lakes are being polluted, not so much in the United States, but all over the world. Fisheries are being depleted all over the world. Forests are being chopped down and burned to create more farmland for a burgeoning population. Many countries use their rivers as a garbage dumps and sewers with all of the trash and pollution ending up in our oceans. The United States is not a major polluter in these senses. The one thing that we do, because of our dynamic economy, is that we put more CO2 into the atmosphere than other populations of our size. This might be bad – the science is still in question – and maybe we should do something about it. But this shouldn’t distract, as it does, from the overall problem of how human activity is destroying our natural bio-systems.
There is no real discussion on the root cause of of all of the problems, which is the rapidly expanding global population. Every year there are another 80 million mouths to feed, to provide with clean water, and to flush more waste into the system. All of those new mouths will need housing and heat. They’ll want to drive cars and so forth.
The root cause of global warming and the burning of forests for new farm land and the flushing of garbage into the ocean is too many people. This is never seriously discussed. The shiny object of CO2 emissions by the USA and other industrialized countries is used to distract audiences from this reality. If the United States reduced its CO-2 emissions to zero, it would be insignificant in the world’s production of CO-2.
If the world’s elite made birth control a major universal effort I would take their environmental concerns more seriously. What they do now is to talk about one aspect, global warming, as the major, some would say the only environmental concern. The population explosion is a taboo subject because it happens largely among two groups. Africans and Muslims. If you attack the real environmental problem, that of the population explosion, you are tarred as a racist and Islamophobe. The left with their “shiny object” diversion has successfully shut down discussion on the real causes of global warming, that of too many people.
18. Fox News.
You have probably heard that we all listen to the news that we want to hear and that because of that our respective opinions get hardened because we never hear an opposing view. There is some truth to that but it applies a lot more to leftwing media outlets than it does to the conservative ones. It’s an asymmetrical argument, and here is the reason why: Conservatives are bombarded every day with the liberal point of view if they go to the movies, if they watch network television or listen to Public Radio or Public Television, even Sesame Street. If they view any of the major news channels or read almost any newspaper, such as the Minneapolis StarTribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or even magazines like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Time and National Geographic, they are getting the Left’s view of the world.
The Fox News channel, a major source of news for conservatives, also features liberal points of view. It does so by featuring liberal anchors like Juan Williams and Chris Wallace, liberal and leftwing guests, liberal regulars like Democrat strategists Jessica Tarlov, Donna Brazile, Leslie Marshall and Mary Ann Marsh. It also gives respectful platforms to radicals and Democrats like Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and it replays clips from what has been broadcast on liberal channels.
In addition to being bombarded by liberal television, newspapers, magazines and movies, conservatives get a big dose of liberal thinking on Fox News. For example, The Tucker Carlson Show is on for an hour, five days a week, and Tucker has mostly liberal guests. Nothing, to my knowledge, occurs like that on any of the liberal channels.
I started watching Fox News two years ago when a liberal friend told me that Fox News is the channel for fake news. I’m a curious guy and so I wanted to find out what fake news is all about and so I started watching Fox. In three years, I haven’t seen a single fake news article on Fox. All I have found is the actual news, something that I wasn’t getting, although I didn’t know it at the time, on NBC. Real news reported on Fox that the liberals don’t like is labeled “fake news.”
I now have learned firsthand about how MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS shape the news in favor of the Left and present the absolute worst view of anything conservative. Omission bias is the number one tool of the leftwing press; it leaves out anything that looks good for President Trump or conservatives, and leaves out anything that looks bad for the Left. It’s actually disgusting and unless you take the effort to watch both liberal and conservative channels, you won’t see it.
The reason that the comparison of news inputs is asymmetrical is because liberals have no opportunity to consistently hear a conservative view unless they make an effort to do so, and very few make that effort.
Even on Facebook, Twitter and Google, anything that smacks of a conservative point of view is scrubbed from their sites and labeled “hate speech.” To give just one small personal example: Candace Owens, a young black conservative, was giving a talk to 450 conservatives at a luncheon I attended. Her talk was being broadcast by one of the attendees to his Twitter group and was taken off the air by Twitter, mid-speech.
Dennis Prager’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have been shut down, along with their platforms, because the Left accuses him of spreading “hate speech.” I listen to Prager on occasion and find that he is a mainline, effective, conservative, religiously-focused speaker. His sin is that he is effective in explaining the conservative view, not that he uses “hate speech.” Liberals can’t tolerate an effective conservative and feel compelled to silence him, as they obstruct and shut down conservative speakers who try to speak on college campuses today.
Democrats say that “hate speech” should be prohibited and is exempted from the First Amendment, which allows free speech to everyone. Sounds good except that Democrats get to decide what “hate speech” is. It turns out that hate speech is almost anything that conservatives say or believe. Saying that “hate speech” is exempt from the protection of the First Amendment is another way to stifle free speech.
David Horowitz, a well known former liberal and now conservative writer, was denied the use of Visa and Master Card for donations to his conservative think tank because of his “hate speech”. Horowitz is a particularly hated conservative writer because he was once a very vocal leftist who raised money for the Black Panthers. He reasoned his way out of his Marxist philosophy and realized that, if successful, progressives would take our country in a bad direction. He changed his emotional progressive views to a reasoned conservative perspective. Liberals consider him a traitor for switching sides and he has personally suffered enormously for that defection. His book Radical Son details his painful journey from the Left to the Right. This is an amazing book that everybody would enjoy reading. I have read it twice.
It turns out that my liberal friends who think that Fox News is fake news don’t actually watch Fox News on a regular basis. One liberal friend claimed to watch Fox News, but upon further discussion I found out that he counted watching Fox Sports as watching Fox News. My liberal friends may have watched Fox once or twice just to say that they did it, but they get most of their opinions on Fox News from other liberals, who don’t watch Fox either.
The Liberal view on Fox News is a perfect example of many things that is disturbing about the liberal Left, like trying to silence those whose views don’t conform to the liberal agenda. The liberal uniform opinion about Fox News is a perfect example of liberal Group Think. Another example is the “Big Lie” about Fox News being fake news. If you tell a lie over and over again, it becomes the truth. In addition to all of that, conservatives everywhere, on campus, or in the school board meetings, or in the neighborhood, are shouted down and not heard by liberals or even other conservatives. By contrast, conservatives are bombarded throughout the day with liberal thought through the media and there aren’t any conservatives shouting them down or trying to stop them from expressing themselves.
If you only read Time magazine, and other East Coast magazines and read the New York Times and the Minneapolis Tribune, and if you only listen to CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and MSNBC, you would have a completely distorted view of what’s going on in America. This is the unfortunate truth for many, maybe even most Americans who call themselves liberal or progressive. Not only is this truth sad, but it is dangerous for the long term outlook of our Republic.
Bruce Hendry is a retired businessman who began from humble origins to become a highly successful investor and captain of industry. He embodies the American dream, having earned his way to becoming the president and chairman of the Erie Lackawanna Railroad and Kaiser Steel. He is one of the leaders of the economic revolution that has made America the envy of the world, and also the target of resentful and spiteful leftists who want to destroy it.
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