“Fox News: Fair and Balanced.”
For approximately the past six months, my bedside radio has been permanently tuned to 1120 KPNW, on which I am able to hear Coast to Coast AM while falling asleep at night and forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News while waking up in the morning.
Before this tryst with the world of conservative talk radio, Limbaugh had been a voiceless figurehead for hypocritical Conservatives who preach individual responsibility but end up in drug rehab. Now, Limbaugh’s vocal tenor as well as his values have been permanently imprinted into the crevices of my mind, and it’s about time to evaluate whether I’ve appreciated these mornings with Fox News.
That catchy phrase “Fox News: Fair and Balanced” is a sentence I have come to despise. The radio station airs that slogan as though it were a disclaimer, probably because some people have the notion that Fox News is generally considered a conservative news source. “Fox News: Fair and Balanced” signifies the opposite of what it states, because a truly fair and balanced news media source would not need to create a defensive slogan. Fox News has chosen to define itself as the news source that is accused of leaning to the right rather than defining itself as the news source that has, for example, good reporting and informative commentary.
Regardless of the Fox News slogan, when Limbaugh gets on the air, there is no doubt that he is conservative radio show host preaching to a conservative radio audience (although that is not to say that Limbaugh does not often engage in a rant directed toward liberal-leaning citizens). Limbaugh uses the term illegal alien more than he does illegal immigrant, and acts personally offended that he should change his use of language due to connotations of the word “alien.”
When discussing the Duke lacrosse incident wherein a stripper alleged she was raped at a team party,Limbaugh defended the team and made multiple references to the intoxicated state of the woman, failing to produce even one argument that at least addressed the fact that sex cannot be legally consented to while drunk.
Limbaugh has claimed that European conquerors did Native Americans a favor by invading their land because if it weren’t for the Europeans, cures for certain diseases would never have emerged and the Native American population would not have survived as well as it has today. Limbaugh ignores the possibility that Native Americans themselves might have produced their own forms of healthcare, sans assistance, and that perhaps it was native citizens who shared their knowledge of medicine with the Europeans.
Limbaugh is an extreme, catty, often cruel man. Yet past the abrasive exterior is a man I still look forward to waking up with.
Limbaugh seems to me the exact opposite of a liberal female college student, and I therefore find much satisfaction upon the realization that in the end, Limbaugh and I are coming from the same place, wanting the same things for our social and political world. I understand that when Limbaugh calls pro-choice women “feminazis,” it is due to his own feelings of powerlessness to stop what he sees as murder. Rush uses the term feminazi in the same vein that I might refer to George W. Bush as a mentally challenged chimpanzee. I too express my powerlessness by way of insulting the side that is currently winning in the fight between my values and opposing values.
I can’t help but enjoy the fact that Limbaugh presents some of the most well-warranted arguments I have ever heard in political discussion. Not to say that Limbaugh doesn’t ignore the facts when they don’t agree with him (if feminism is for unattractive women, why was Gloria Steinem such a babe?), but Rush does consider historical information and detailed research. As long as there are scientific facts to back up his Conservative arguments, such as research stating that sulfur-dioxide is a preventative agent rather than a cause of global warming, Rush will keep on making those arguments.
I’ve appreciated the teaching style of Fox News and Limbaugh; when I’m not learning something new about my own political beliefs, I’m learning how to better address the other side. In the end, we’d all prefer a world of easy peaceful lives where death only occurred naturally and every person had enough food and land to survive. Rush and I just have different ideas about how to get there.
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