I don’t normally talk much about politics even though I spend a fair amount of time watching the American political scene. Much of that scene lately has been either direct attacks by Glenn Beck against the president by calling him a racist or to incite the latest campaign against the president’s choice to head a green jobs initiative – Van Jones .
Now I don’t proclaim to know much about Van Jones but in the current climate of news organization partisanship it is highly unlikely that any truth about the man could be found at this point. It has all boiled down to a case of they said – he said from which finding any truth is next to impossible.
What is interesting to watch is how this news organization driven partisanship is being used increasingly to create even bigger dividing lines between the American people. It seems that in the current environment people like Glenn Beck have become less the journalists they laughably claim to be and more the lightening rod for a movement that seems bent on splitting the country even further apart.
Sure organizations like FOX News can hide behind the “he’s a commentator and therefore given the freedom to express his opinions” but that doesn’t change the fact that while <cough>news</cough> organizations like FOX are getting rich from this kind of so-called commentary they are also contributing to the split of the country.
With people like Beck at the helm of carefully worded incendiary comments that are spread around the world one has to wonder if people like Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy would ever have achieved all the great things that they did. After all they weren’t perfect people either and I am sure that people like Beck and the public pulpit provided by companies like FOX would have done everything they could have to tear those men down – just as they are try with Obama, and have done with Van Jones.
Rather than hide behind white hoods and a hangman’s noose people like Beck use the power of words to incite a society filled with fear to ignore their commonsense and become nothing more than attack dogs. In the process people like Beck make a shame and mockery of our news. They can couch those words all they like in terms of just being commentary in order to protect the companies that employee them with big paychecks; but in the end they are making a joke of the news and of the people who follow them like blind little sheep.
