The most important issue facing us Americans after the economy, energy, and constitutional rule, is our lack of reliable news. All my life I have trusted our news services. Sure, during WWII there was a bit of propaganda about our enemies, but as it turned out in the long run it wasn’t that far off the mark.
You expect propaganda from both sides during a war, and you will most likely get it too. During peacetime we had no idea the stations or their announcers had a political affiliation. If the station owners supported a certain political party it didn’t affect their news; the news was pretty much objective.
Now the news is politically oriented, which is unfair to those listeners who still believe their news reporting is objective instead of being politically oriented. Most people do not think that the news service they listen too may be used to sell a political ideology; and that they may even get a bit of political propaganda mixed in with their news.
At the present time Fox News and a liberal organization called Media Matters seem to be locked in conflict. Fox News may be the last big time news organization with a conservative slant on the news. Some people say all the other networks have succumbed to a liberal bias.
A democracy can’t exist long without reliable news. Our government is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In order to make intelligent decisions it is critical that we have free and independent news organizations. How else will we know what our government is doing?
I have worked in places where the news was strictly censored by the government; places where you could pick up a copy of “Newsweek” and find almost all of the articles had been crossed out by government censors. In those places the government controlled the TV and radio stations, and the views that were broadcast were those of the government.
I have written about bias in our news agencies before, and you may be tired of hearing me talk about it, but it is one of the most dangerous situations in our country today. When it gets to the point where the only news you hear is the governments version of the news you will suddenly discover that you no longer live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
We cannot afford to sell our elected offices to the highest bidder; the candidate with the most campaign money. What will we do when a unified message is broadcast on every network telling us to vote for this fellow who has the most money?
Will we realize that what we are hearing or watching is only a political advertisement, which doesn’t have to be true, or perhaps even that the message we are watching is political propaganda designed to make one candidate look good and the rest look bad? Will we see it for what it is or will we accept it as news?
Will we have the diligence to research each candidate for ourselves and draw our own conclusions, or will we settle for the sugar coated diet the main stream media offers us? Will we make our own choices or blindly accept the opinion the talking heads on TV offer up every night?
We are being programed on every level, programs we watch strictly for entertainment are pushing a political agenda. Some shows attempt to demonstrate that our world view is wrong, that closely held beliefs of the church or our society are old fashioned or wrong.
Our schools teach our children about lifestyles we are reluctant to discuss in private. Any discussion of religion in one of our public schools may end up in a law suit. The schools can teach our children about Islam, but not our own religion.
Our schools have the greatest responsibility of any in the world. It is their purpose to make every citizen an informed member of our society, a person knowledgeable in the workings of our own government, and with a firm grasp of our history; a person capable of serving in that government. As our government is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; it is the role of our schools to prepare that citizen to participate in his own government.
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