Fox News, a News Corp subsidiary
Honestly, I am think that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and most at that network live in a reality that is different than mine.
I was just pointed to an interview with Howard Kurtz in which he said that President Obama “has a different belief system than most Americans” and that on his recent travels he “told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.” I don’t know if Ailes believes this or if it is part of the continuing campaign of the right to paint the President as so radically different from us that he is somehow threatening, but the statements are not simply wrong, they are absurd.
President Obama is a capitalist and he believes in our system of representative, Constitutional democracy. He has given no indication otherwise. He would not have risen in the party system were that not the case and he certainly would not have got elected to the highest office in the land, either. The Presidents differences with the the opposition are differences of degree, not belief systems.
As for France and Germany telling him that his socialism is to far left, well that is ridiculous. Germany, France and the United States do have differences on approaches necessary to stimulate their economies because in a global economy what is done in one country impacts the others, but the questions concern the means and scale of intervention and have nothing to do with ideology. France and Germany are also democratic, capitalist states, but both are fundamentally more socialist in character then the US. Both have and have had for some time, state funded systems of education, government owned rail systems, universal health care, strong labor movements, etc.
While the Ailes is inaccurately using the term socialism in this case, I can understand it. He’s going for rhetorical effect. The economic policies of the administration are not socialist, they are “liberal.” While that word has been effectively demonized in the eyes of many by conservative media, it still doesn’t have the impact of Socialist or Communist after nearly half a century of Cold War conditioning. It’s much more effective to label the health care legislation that just passed Congress socialist legislation, even though it leaves health care almost entirely in the hands of private insurers, institutions and practitioners. He’s going to effect. He should be called on it, but it’s not all that offensive.
But it is Ailes reckless us of the terms Nazi that is so. In commenting on the misguided dismissal of Juan Williams from NPR, Ailes says of the networks executives:
They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”
Of course they are Nazis! Anyone who disagrees with conservatives these days is a Nazi, right? We’ve heard the word used so often recently that most of us don’t even react to it anymore. In fact we ought to be feeling is the kind of outrage the Barney Frank expressed at a Town Hall meeting Dartmouth, MA about a year ago.
Hitler’s rise to power, World War II, and the Holocause were not that long ago. Do we really need to be reminded what Nazism is? Here are two definitions:
the body of political and economic doctrines held and put into effect by the Nazis in Germany from 1933 to 1945 including the totalitarian principle of government, predominance of especially Germanic groups assumed to be racially superior, and supremacy of the führer –Merriem Webster
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a unique variety of fascism that involved biological racism and antisemitism. Nazism presented itself as politically syncretic, incorporating policies, tactics and philosophies from right- and left-wing ideologies; in practice, Nazism was a far right form of politics. –Wikipedia
Nazism is a reprehensible ideology that led to one of the darkest episodes in human history. In its name the state rounded up and attempted the extermination of an entire people as well as all undesirables, such as the handicapped, homosexuals, gypsies, and others. Yet both sides have used this to insult one another. More recently, however, it is the right that has been brandishing it so freely and recklessly, especially against our legitimately elected President, Democrats in Congress, and anyone who agrees with his agenda.
President Obama has not once overextended his executive authority to a degree that comes anywhere close to the abuses of a Nazi state. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the claims of this administration of Executive Privilege and the number of Executive Orders he has issued lag far behind those of George W. Bush at a comparable point in his administration. In fact, the wishes of the President have constantly been checked by an elected Congress, even though that Congress has been controlled by his own party!
Moreover, how can anyone be anything but flabbergasted by the irony of anyone ascribing to a mixed-race President an authoritarian ideology based, at least in part, on racial purity? It is unacceptable to call someone a Nazi simply because they disagree with you. Perhaps Roger Ailes needs to review his history lessons.
He might be more informed if he listened to public broadcasting, and he might be less inclined to avoid listening to it if he didn’t have such wrong ideas about its nature. NPR receives only a small fraction of its funding from the government. I was surprised to find out Just how little. The funding picture is a bit too complicated, to explain in this short post, but there is a good graph that lays it out clearly in the NPR site.
NPR gets its funding from a variety of sources and almost 1/3 of it comes from individuals. About 20% is corporate sponsorship from a variety of companies.
The rest comes from universities (for those licensed to a college or university), foundation grants and major gifts, grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and in some cases state and local governments.
Compare that to Fox News, which is owned entirely by one very large corporation, News Corp.
the world’s third-largest media conglomerate (behind The Walt Disney Company and the Time Warner Company) as of 2008, and the world’s third largest in entertainment as of 2009. The company’s Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder is Rupert Murdoch.–Wikipedia
Their holdings are impressive.
News Corporation is a diversified global media company with operations in six industry segments: cable network programming; filmed entertainment; television; direct broadcast satellite television; publishing; and other. The activities of News Corporation are conducted principally in the United States, Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, Asia and Latin America. –News Corp. Site
Ailes and Fox News depict themselves as the voice of the people, and NPR as this government funded entity. But it simply isn’t true. News Corps could completely carry Fox News, even if it began hemorrhaging money. NPR literally would not exist were it not for the direct support of its listeners. Fox News has great ratings, but I have to wonder if its viewers would directly shoulder a third of its operations if they had to.