Link: http://gawker.com/5332558/whats-bad-for-the-gop-is-good-for-fox-news

Rupert Murdoch
Chair and CEO
The News Corporation
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036

Dear Mr. Murdoch:

The speech President Obama gave about health care last night was one of his best to my ears. It has been a long summer for us progressives, and some of us had begun to wonder if the candidate we worked so hard to elect had somehow lost his moxie or, in the words of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, we had been punked.

Since our politics spring from very different experiences, I have no idea how you view the president’s performance. But since you gave him your endorsement, I assume you saw something in the man that speaks of greatness.

Last night’s speech demonstrated for me that Obama still understands that change must come, and it must come under his watch. But I must confess that when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie,” to the president’s claim that health care reform would not extend coverage to undocumented immigrants, I held my breath while the president took his measure of the man and stood his ground.

Follow up:

Like many Americans, I live in fear that some intemperate person will shoot President Obama. At first I told myself that I had been traumatized by the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X during my youth. Since you did not live in the United States during this period of civil unrest, I wonder if you can know how deeply it affected us; the funeral of Senator Edward Kennedy brought back to me the sense of certainty and safety we lost in those years.

Ever since Barack Obama announced his candidacy, I’ve taken pains to avoid the A word, as if voicing the notion that he courted martyrdom would add to the cosmic possibility. If he and Michelle can live with the threats on his life, I would say, I guess I can, too. It was she who said that the fact that he was a black man always raised the possibility that he was a target, even before he was a public figure.

Events of the past few weeks have made me think again, because it’s clear that racial hatred is fueling a call to arms. First was the revelation by the Secret Service that no less than 12 armed white men had attended the president’s address to the VFW in Phoenix on August 17. Turns out that Chris Broughton, the man arrested with an assault rifle, had attended a service at the Faithful World Baptist Church, where the minister, Steven Anderson, had wished Obama dead.

Then, there was the email message that landed in my mailbox. I clicked on it before I noted the subject line: Don’t Piss Off the White Folks. In the email was a link to a YouTube video with the rantings of the Rev. James David Manning. Manning has a church in Harlem less than a mile from where I live, but the email wasn’t local. It was a recruitment for the Louisiana chapter of the National Rifle Association. What better call to arms than hearing an African American man say that white folks have been kicked to the curb and are going to riot, and that he is going to riot with them? (I’m deliberately not including the link, because I don’t want to contribute to the number of hits Manning gets.)

In his new book, Inside the President’s Secret Service, Ron Kessler points out that threats on President Obama’s life have risen to 30 per day, a 400 percent increase over those on George W. Bush. Kessler also says that the Secret Service has suffered since its inclusion in the Department of Homeland Security and that it lacks the resources to protect the president.

Yesterday, I signed a petition calling for Secretary Janet Napolitano to boost the resources of the Secret Service. Last week, I switched to a generic antihistamine because I learned the brand I was using sponsored the racist Fox commentator Glenn Beck. But these actions seemed puny and ineffectual by comparison to the forces on the right, and I asked myself what change might really make a difference in the precarious climate in which we live where free-floating hatred clings to every attempt to build a better society.

And the answer that came to me was: eliminate Fox News and the mentality that it engenders.

I know, I know, Fox is not the only network that gives air time to notions like the idea that Barack Obama was not born in America or that the speech he gave to young people urging them to stay in school and do well was somehow socialist or that his healthcare plan is fascist or that there will be death squads under the plan waiting to kill off the old and infirm or that the president wants to circumcise your baby whether you agree to it or not.

But we must admit that Fox dominates this market of lunacy and that much of the responsibility goes to the president of Fox News, Roger Ailes, who first left the news business to promote Republican candidates, beginning with Richard Nixon, and the ideology of the right, beginning with producing Rush Limbaugh’s first shows.

Radio stations change format with some regularity, so that offers one possibility. You might actually run a cable network that delivers the fair and balanced news it touts. Or you might simply take the whole thing down.

This, of course, runs counter to the immense pressure to keep building capital regardless of the consequences, to deliver for advertisers whatever the damage to truth and objectivity, and to extend your influence to the pinnacles of world power.

Please ask yourself if this is the legacy you intend. Is your fortune, reputed to be around $4 billion, not sufficient? How do you feel about the signs that right wingers are arming in unprecedented numbers has already led to the deaths of two churchgoers in Knoxville, a doctor in Kansas and three women in a Pennsylvania health club? Were you as shocked as I was by Rep. Wilson’s intemperate remarks on the House floor?

Shutting down the stream of hateful innuendo and accusations from Fox would still leave you plenty to do. You’d lose some profits, but looking at your org chart, it wouldn’t be fatal. By all reports, profits at the Wall Street Journal are exceeding expectations, and you still have your other newspapers and media holdings. And My Space.

This would leave the cable news field to CNN and CNBC, I know, but perhaps they would be shamed a bit by your example and the level of hatred could be toned down.

President Obama has made it clear he does not support the return of the Fairness Doctrine, which gave equal air time to opposing candidates and points of view. I understand his commitment to a free market of ideas, but I don’t think there’s anything free about the relentlessly cynical chatter that comes from highly-paid intemperate talk show hosts and "moderators".

As we approach the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I urge you to pull the plug on hate. It would be a terrific contribution to the nation that has granted you citizenship, and it might lay the way for a return to civil discourse.

Yours truly,
Carolyn Jackson,
Progwoman