PrintDecember 14, 2009
Poisoned Wells
The television program Law & Order recently had a character who connected psychotic murder with people who listen to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck. The wells of public life have all been poisoned. Television entertainment is just the last stage of a long, lingering illness.The grotesque bias of television network news and the national press media is a very old story. Forty years ago, Spiro Agnew gave his Des Moines Speech, in which he described how three powerful corporations -- CBS, NBC, and ABC -- through their television news division determined what the overwhelming majority of Americans got as "news." In the next few years, groups were formed like Accuracy in Media, which began to compile the powerful brief against leftist bias in the news.Often this bias was as blatant as bald-faced lying. In the infamous 1971 CBS documentary "Selling of the Pentagon," answers from an Assistant Secretary of Defense in an interview were sliced and edited so...(Read Full Article)
