Review: Fox Fair and Balanced Debate is Law-lover vs. feelings follower

A staple of Fox News Channel is their "Fair and Balanced Debate" in which, to show how unbiased they are, the network picks a current topic and then sets two talking heads against one another, monitored by the channel's various On Air Personalities.

As often as not, however, the viewpoints don't even pretend to represent opposing political views but they almost always represent different worldviews.

In a legal issue, for example, one side will be represented by a person with a hardcore, pragmatic, legalistic argument.

In this person's world "the law" is typically an absolutist fact of reality that has been inscribed on consecrated unicorn parchment and handed down to us mere mortals from godlike political-professional Master Law Givers whose word is sacrosanct and cannot be questioned.

While sometimes softened with "feelings" his or her position is that the law is the law is the law and that settles everything forever.

New twist in "too attractive" to work scandalNew twist in "too attractive" to work scandal

Inevitably, on the other side is a person who sees all life on earth through the prism of emotions, sensations, sympathies and impressions. Every issue is always and only about "fairness" and "social justice" and his or her personal feelings about how "things ought to be" with no thought given to rational considerations.

Although sprinkled with the token pixie dust of "logic" this person doesn't care about reality since his or her own sentiment is reality and should therefore be imposed on everyone else.

In the real world there are almost always more than two sides to an issue, but these "Fair and Balanced Debates" reduce even the most widely controversial and intricately nuanced questions to a cartoonish dispute between a law-worshipping rationalist vs. a mindless feelings-adoring emotionalist.

The only saving grace for Fox News is that they give a few libertarians a shot: John Stossel, Judge Andrew Napolitano, investment panelist Jonathan Hoenig and the occasional Ron Paul interview.

But the libertarian view is virtually never presented in any of the vacuous two-dimensional "Fair and Balanced" faux debates.

The law-worshipper seldom questions whether "The Law," that bastion of the absolutist corporatist-political state, should itself be judged as criminal and then rejected if it mandates coercion, intimidation or fraud against peaceful people, while the sensitivity addict almost never considers that reason rather than wish-fulfillment should be the basis for creating a just society.

Don't expect anything to change until a successful Libertarian News and Opinion Channel appears on the scene.

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