Ignore Fox: Obama's right. It's time to stop taking the network's skewed news seriously

Last week, when White House communications director Anita Dunn charged the Fox News Channel with right-wing bias, Fox responded the way it always does. It denied the accusation with a straight face while proceeding to confirm it with its coverage.

All of the other so-called “news” programs reflect a liberal bias. Why is Fox the only bad actor in the whole bunch?

Monopoly Associated Press journalism is not independent, precisely because it is associated. Within the association, you have protection - but you also have to do some protecting yourself. You are protected from attacks on your credibility - your objectivity - but you also have to protect everyone else in the association the same way. So if a Dan Rather comes out with a cock-and-bull story about poor-quality "copies of Texas Air National Guard Memos" which supposedly were created in the 1970s and somehow only surfaced in 2004 during a G.W. Bush's last of 4 high-profile elections - and with fancy typeset qualities not found in the simple typewriters of the 1970s - you as a member of the association are obligated to abstain from pointing out the absurdity, but rather to facilitate the stonewalling of the damning evidence against a fellow member of the association.
In the association, you are entitled and expected to promote your own objectivity - the fact that claiming your own objectivity is inherently subjective notwithstanding.

These charges about Fox reveal the Left's general "misunderestimating" the intelligence of those "American people" they're so fond of citing to support their policies.

In their pseudo-intellectual world, their minions in academia, in the media, and politics have combined to "dumb down" the "little people" to the point they won't see through their claims. Such remarks by Dunn, Emanuel, and Axelrod show little to no understanding of the First Amendment's meaning of "freedom of the press."

Thomas Jefferson understood it though, and though he often was attacked by the press of his day, spoke out strongly in defense of freedom of the press. His passion, of course, was defending liberty, not government control, unlike that of the current Congress and Administration.

These are only a few of his remarks on that subject:

"The press [is] the only tocsin of a nation. [When it] is completely silenced... all means of a general effort [are] taken away." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, Nov 29, 1802. (*) ME 10:341

"Since truth and reason have maintained their ground against false opinions in league with false facts, the press confined to truth needs no other legal restraint. The public judgment will correct false reasonings and opinions on a full hearing of all parties, and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press and its demoralizing licentiousness. If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the censorship of public opinion." --Thomas Jefferson: 2nd Inaugural Address, 1805. ME 3:381

"The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384

"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786.

And, finally, but by no means the entirety of Jefferson's thoughts on the need for freedom of the press, no matter how critical its views:

"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions."(Underlining added for emphasis) --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1804. ME 11:33

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