Keith Olbermann calls for a boycott of Fox News. Boycott how? Here’s how: when you find yourself in a bar or restaurant with the TV set to Fox News, find an owner or manager and tell him you’ll take your business elsewhere if he doesn’t change the channel, and calmly explain why. Keith then lists several reasons, most of them having to do with Fox’s propensity to air hate speech.
Personally, I refuse to watch Fox or listen to right-wing radio. It’s not that I can’t handle being exposed to right-wing views, but because I’ve concluded, along with Keith Olbermann, that much of what the right coyly calls “entertainment” is in fact hate speech, meant to whip up resentment and violence toward others.
And when it comes to TV news and reporting, Fox is specifically the problem. Granted, objective reportage in America is tits up. With a few exceptions, the other networks (and more and more, newspapers too) have replaced reportage with stenography, dutifully passing on government and corporate propaganda. But while that may be negligence, it’s not hate speech.
The recent murder of the abortion doctor in Kansas is at least partially a product of right-wing hate speech, much of it coming from Fox commentators like Bill O’Reilly. So is the recent attack on a blameless black woman on the streets of Washington DC by one of former senator Tom Tancredo’s staffers.
Yeah, Keith Olbermann is as relentlessly partisan in his own way as anyone on Fox. But he doesn’t tell his viewers that right-wingers spread leprosy, or that they’re traitors. Let me know when some MSNBC fan murders a picketer in front of a family-planning clinic or kills churchgoers with a shotgun at a fundamentalist revival meeting, okay?
Sometimes I’ll walk into the clinic at Davis-Monthan AFB and they’ll have the lobby TV set to Fox. There used to be an Air Force regulation stating that public area TVs must be set to CNN, and I’m pretty sure it’s still in effect. From now on I’ll register a complaint, and I’ll tell them why: not only does Fox air hate speech, it explicitly opposes and tries to undermine our democratically-elected president, who is, I’ll remind them, the commander-in-chief of our nation’s military forces.
Keith, old buddy, you’re on.