In 1933, a small group of wealthy American businessmen devised a plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and install a fascist dictatorship.
The plan never came to fruition and the man to lead the dictatorship, a decorated general, testified against the conspirators before Congress in 1934.
The men behind the plot were captains of industry, businessmen threatened by Roosevelt’s strangulating regulations. Now, over 75 years later, the plot has thickened and reached its bony hand through the soil to grip America by the throat.
The days of corroborating in smoky boardrooms and country clubs are long past.
In today’s world, if the details of such a coup came to light, there would be a subset of Americans willing to not only defend the actions of the conspirators but to praise those involved for their patriotism and loyalty to the Constitution.
In the past year, electoral restrictions have been loosened and large corporations have been given the ability to flood elections with as much money as they desired.
In January, the Supreme Court overturned legislation on corporate spending limits in elections by ruling that money is a form of free speech and cannot be abridged. Since then, the case has been the basis for undoing other finance laws, such as laws that require political organizations to disclose the names of large donors.
If you’ve seen any media from the past 30 years (if you haven’t, I’m honored to be your first), you’d know that mobsters have a lawyer on-call for when they get arrested in the middle of the night.
With corporations, there are lobbyists who for the right paycheck are ready to take the fight to Washington. And with the right paycheck, they’ll bring the right argument, backed by the right research, provided by the right scientist.
Of course, a lobbyist’s argument gets more credence if a news organization exists to legitimize it and regards all claims to the contrary as the product of bias. Furthermore, if the news organization made the lobbyist into the politician, they can cut out the middleman and have their interests secured.
Recently, Politico reported that four of the five former Republican presidential candidates not currently in public office are currently working as contributors for Fox News.
Since Barack Obama’s inauguration, Fox News has seemingly given up any self-image as a non-partisan news agency.
From providing the Koch-financed Tea Party movement a microphone to preach from, to the donation of $1 million from Fox News’ parent company News Corp., to the Republican Governor’s Association, we can clearly see that Fox leans to the right.
Though none of the issues listed above are technically illegal, I ask you, my fellow Americans, to consider the philosophical ramifications of an editorialized news outlet in a democracy.
Thomas Jefferson believed that democracy’s survival depended on an informed populace. The belief that bias is incompatible with factual journalism is implied regularly among Fox News commentators whenever they deride the “liberal media.”
In the past, Fox News has confessed to having a conservative bias in its programming. By this logic, Fox News has effectively stated that portions of its programming are non-factual journalism by design.
Without factual journalism that the audience can trust, Fox News is helping to keep a population of voters misinformed, which is hazardous to a system that relies on information in order to operate properly.
So, whether the issue is the identity of foreign donors, or the omission of key facts about a candidate, Jefferson might say of the biased media, “There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
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