Left or Right, Opinion is NOT News

Haven’t written in a while, so here is my next post, which I thought of in the car while listening to Rush Limbaugh on KTLK. Yes, I know, I just wrote a post about how Barack Obama said people should stop listening to Rush, but its just too much fun to listen to him rant and meltdown on a daily basis. Also, I don’t buy into Rush’s dogma, so Obama’s comments weren’t aimed at people like me!

Anyways, back to the point. While listening to Rush, I heard a commercial for a different program, the Jason Lewis show, for which I have much more respect. The gist of the message was “Listen to Jason Lewis – He knows the news so you don’t have to.” Sounds innocuous enough, right? “Listen to Jason Lewis and you’ll hear everything you need to know about what is going on in the state and the nation.” Except that exactly is what Barack Obama was railing against.

I’m an independent voter (little i here, I am not affiliated with the Independent Party), so I listen to and read from nearly every source I can. I listen to MPR and KTLK and some of the lesser known AM stations that add just a little too much religion into their politics. I am just as likely to turn on Fox News as I am to turn on MSNBC, though my favorites really are Headline News and CNN. I feel that once I’ve dug around and heard or read as many aspects of the story as I can, I will have somewhat of an understanding of what is really going on and I can then make a decision for myself.

The problem with just listening to Rush or Jason or Bill O’Reilly or just listening to lefties like Bill Press or Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow is that you only get their perspectives. You’re relying on them to do their homework to give you all of the information, when in so many instances they are leaving out part of the story.

What really burns me is when Rush and Jason rail on the media for not reporting all of the facts – and they themselves leave out a huge chunk of the story because it doesn’t suit their viewpoint. Then they’re just as bad as the “drive-by” or “Left-wing” media for which they have such disdain.

Worse yet, neither left wing nor right wing pundits ever make it a point to tell their listeners when they’ve stopped reporting on the news and started editorializing. This can mislead people into believing that what they say is fact and not opinion.

Example: I can't find a transcript yet, but Rush Limbaugh yesterday railed against the idea of putting limits on executive pay, saying that it meddles too much in the private sector. He said that he would be particularly critical of any CEO willing to take a pay cut because they would be bending to Obama’s will instead of exerting their freedom. What he did not make clear was that only organizations that were accepting financial assistance would need to limit their incomes, meaning that companies that do not require assistance can still set the CEO pay to whatever they want to. He neglected to mention organizations which already received bailout money, and later paid their executives millions as their companies were failing, a misuse of taxpayer money. He outright failed to say that the companies accepting federal assistance can jack their salaries and bonuses back up after they’ve done their duty to pay back the taxpayers.

So the question is, is Rush Limbaugh cutting out elements of the truth to suit his needs, not doing his research, or taking an adversarial stance simply for the sake of arguing / entertaining? Here are some Rush Limbaugh quotes which may lead you to an opinion.

Conclusion: Left wing, right wing, if the source leans heavily in one way or the other, odds are the information being conveyed is missing important elements. If you want to know what is really going on with a particular political subject, you have to consult multiple respected news sources and pundit viewpoints. Only then will you likely have a good understanding of the issue.

I’ve always tried to write my political pieces in a way that leads the reader to reach their own conclusions. In the cases where my articles took an obvious tone, I would make sure to label it “editorial” or “opinion”. But in all cases, I made sure to gain information from a wide variety of news and other resources before I formed that opinion. For the sake of steering this country back towards common sense and away from the divisive politics that have plagued it in recent years, I ask that other citizens do the same. Left, right: We’re all in this mess together and we’ll have to work as a team to dig out.