The Totalitarian Tendencies of the Left.

The left in America has totalitarian tendencies. I'm not talking about your average liberal, I'm talking the left which make up most of our mainstream media journalists. What is even more astonishing is that those very same leftist journalists claim to be fair and straight with the audience. A good example of a leftist who claims to be a straight newscaster is Keith Olbermann.

Keith Olbermann presents his MSDNC (er, MSNBC) show as a newscast but it isn't. He often demonizes Bill O'Reilly for allegedly lying to his audience but, at the very least, O'Reilly has never claimed that the O'Reilly Factor is a newscast (O'Reilly doesn't lie, either, but facts never get in the way of Olbermann). O'Reilly has repeatedly stated--from day one--that the Factor is a news analysis show, i.e. the television equivalent of the editorial page in your local paper. As for Olbermann's attacks on O'Reilly, they are virtually all ad hominem attacks and are demonstrably untrue.

It takes balls for a guy who claims to be a newscaster to ask for the president's resignation or impeachment. Olbermann does this daily and still has the hubris to call his show straight news. Yet it is Fox News that receives so much negative attention from the press. Now admittedly, no one watches Olbermann's silly little show so perhaps this is why it garners so little attention from the media. Still I find it absolutely hilarious that Olbermann is so worried about the O'Reilly Factor when, in fact, the evening newscasts of the big three networks are watched by far more viewers than the O'Reilly Factor (even Katie Couric has triple the viewership on an average night).

It is some sort of pathology that propels the Fox News bashers (including Olbermann) to be so obsessed by the only news network/newscast that may lean right Even if Fox News does lean right, what the heck is the big deal? CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, all the major newspapers, and NPR lean left (at the very least). So Fox News (and commercial talk radio) lean right. Why is this so threatening to the left?

The answer is simple. The left doesn't want other opinions heard. The left simply wants to silence those they disagree with. For forty years the left has controlled college campuses (campi?) across the nation. College campuses have speech codes which proponents claim are used to go after hate speech but, in fact, are a tool to silence conservative voices. After all, any speech the left doesn't like is hate speech.

It's funny that the left claims President Bush is using stuff like the Patriot Act to silence those the administration disagrees with. Never mind that no one--no one--has had their speech rights--or any other rights--violated by this administration. Yet it is the left that endorses, enforces and approves speech codes at our universities. It is the left that is trying to reinstate the Fascist (er, Fairness) Doctrine. It is the left that uses terms like homophobe, racist and sexist to try and silence opponents. Show me where anyone on the right has tried to institute anything remotely akin to speech codes and fascist doctrines.

Contrary to the left, the right love open debate. I listen to conservative talk radio. While different hosts have different formats, those that do have guests on (which is a majority of nationally syndicated conservative talk shows) have guests they disagree with every day. Michael Medved goes out of his way to have guests with opposing views (those with whom Michael agrees with makeup a distinct minority of his guests). Dennis Prager has an extremely wide range of guests, many of whom are left of center. Even the shrill Laura Ingraham (I dislike her program immensely) has guests on who are at the other end of the political spectrum.

I'm not a fan of Bill O'Reilly's program (I used to be but he makes far to many emotionally appealing arguments when reason would better serve those same arguments) nor am I fan of most conservative talk radio hosts (too many are demagogues like Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, and, especially, that fraud Michael Savage). But, please, let us have commercial talk radio and Fox News. You guys on the left have everything else.