Fox News And Its Truth Deniers

The dueling-perspectives political panel is compatible with the aims of CNN, MSNBC, and the other progressive broadcasters. Here is how it works: You invite a member of the Republican establishment—often a RINO, preferably a bimbo—to do battle with a lefty from similar circles. The sides are ideologically so close, that, in all likelihood, the panelists hang out after the show.

This format is positively postmodernist. Why? Because, by presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.

The one parallel universe is represented on Fox Business by the likes of Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, and others.

Skinner is a Democratic talk show host. The description is self-explanatory. Heldman is a professor at Occidental College whose considered opinion is that “the “private sector” put us in “the economic position we are in.” Heldman, who resembles the popular caricature of Mary Antoinette, calls regularly for the heads of business people. Dowdell is one of many fast-talking Democratic strategists to plump for every imaginable assault on private property issued by Washington. Sibilia is a successful CEO who—in his monumental ignorance of the benefits that redound to society when “both capital and labor are … permitted to make their own free choices”—is demanding that corporations “be designed for the common good.” Erika Payne, among other evils, is the author of what Jonathan Alter of Newsweek endorsed as “a blueprint for a progressive conspiracy to help save the country.”

The philosophical filth spewed by such characters—almost nightly on freedom-promoting programing, no less—is that government can spend and lend to good effect; that it can tax without discouraging and disrupting production; and that our overlords in DC can regulate “better” (read energy squandering) industries into being, by steering capital and labor away from bad (energy efficient) industries (oil and gas).

You expect such illusionary presentations in the liberal media. But those whose fidelity is to reality, the founders’ Constitution, and the natural laws of economics should not have to vie for precious seconds with central planners and thieves-by-proxy on magnificent libertarian programs like the “John Stossel Show” or the Judge’s “Freedom Watch.”

In 2004, a member of Bush 43’s fantasy-based community justified the delusions and consequent budget deficits of that administration thus: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Impossible!

Certainly there is but one economic reality. And it was described by Henry Hazlitt in “Economics in One Lesson”:

• “The government’s funds all come from taxes.”
• “The government can give no financial help to business that it does not first or finally take from business.
• “When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”Government lending is as destructive as its spending.
• “The whole argument for [the government] entering the lending business, in fact, is that it will make loans to people who could not get them from private lenders. This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with other people’s money (the taxpayers’) that private lenders will not take with their own money.”
• “The private lenders … are selected by a cruel market test … a process of survival of the fittest. The government lenders, on the other hand, are … those who can give the most plausible reasons for making loans and the most plausible explanations of why it wasn’t their fault that the loans failed. But the net result remains; private loans will utilize existing resources and capital far better than government loans. … Government loans, in short, as compared with private loans, will reduce production, not increase it. … a lowering of production which must reflect itself in a lower average living standard.”

These natural laws apply to all state endeavors.

The truth is that truth is immutable, never relative. The little truth there is in mainstream media should not be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth. The above Fox News fixtures no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.

With an exception: Libraries have long since engaged in a robust debate as to how to classify Holocaust-denying literature. While admirably advocating for unfettered free access, Professor of Library Services John A. Drobnicki has suggested moving Holocaust denial out of the History section in US libraries and closer to the “Bigfoot books,” so that Holocaust denial’s Dewey Decimal designation is with “hoax materials.”

Indeed, hacks are not historians. Although the dueling-perspectives panel format would suggest it is—the economic bunk spewed by the likes of Skinner, Heldman, Dowdell, Jeffers, Sibila, and Erika Payne is no version of the truth, but a perversion of it.

A Homeric contest is underway in the USA. Rome is burning. Now is not the time to fiddle or to unwittingly defraud the public.