Who in the media have ‘perspective’?

Among the remarks by spokesmen for the Obama administration in its war against Fox News was David Axelrod's observation that Fox was not a news organization because it had a "perspective" on the news.T hat deserves analysis on more than one level. First, there is the political angle. Obviously, Obama’s quarrel with Fox has everything to do with its "perspective." Unlike CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC and NPR, Fox is not in the tank for the current occupant of the White House. Nothing like Chris Matthew’s "tingling sensation" up his leg excites Fox journalists.

Second, there is a distinction to be made, of sorts, between straight news people and commentators at Fox, as White House press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged, when he subsequently singled out a couple of Fox time slots for the latter. Fox, like other media, distinguishes news from opinion.

Third, Fox’s slogans are not just marketing ploys. Compared to other media, Fox is "fair and balanced," as there are more presentations of opposing viewpoints there than in the "mainstream media." The other networks give little time to the conservative point of view.

At least one intrepid journalist at a Gibbs press conference did question the wisdom of the President singling out one television network for criticism. One is reminded of the famous quotation from Martin Niemoller, a victim of Nazi oppression, about how "they came for the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew, so I didn’t speak up." One hopes that lesson has been learned.

So, although it is thuggish from my "perspective" for a President to condemn one news organization and practically demand that others not follow its example of exposing, for example, ACORN’s corruption or the extremist views of a number of Obama’s "Czars," it looks like he made other journalists uncomfortable.

Although presidents have frequently been critical of media coverage for both good reasons and bad, nothing compares to the current situation so much as Vice President Spiro Agnew’s criticism of the major media in 1969. But then the obvious difference is that Agnew took on the entire New York-Washington media axis, rather than picking on only one network..

Yet there is a great similarity between the media’s hostility to the Nixon Administration 40 years ago and their opposition to George W. Bush up until less than a year ago, and that was both administrations’ prosecution of a war that most leading journalists were opposed to.

All this is interesting stuff, but let’s get back to "perspective." What’s wrong with it? More to the point, how does any journalistic organization succeed without it? Determining what is news is not merely record keeping. Each day someone must decide that some event or development is news, mindful of the fact that if it is determined to be news, it will be on the public agenda.

Years ago U.S. News did a lengthy piece on the New York Times. In their daily conferences, it was pointed out, Times editors, conscious that it was the nation’s leading newspaper which influences the television networks in their own selection of news, were very careful about what they printed, especially on the front page. They understood that more people read the front page more than the editorial page, and they were reluctant to give more publicity to an issue or cause than it deserved.

As shocking as this may sound, this is what all news organizations do, although the smaller the staff the less likely that long deliberations precede their news decisions. If politics, war, commerce, law and entertainment loom large in our media, it is not because of arbitrary editors but because these things matter to most people in a democratic republic.

No less shocking perhaps to many may be the fact that, because journalists are American citizens with opinions, some things are more important to them than others. Without that "perspective," there is no reason for anyone to be in journalism; it is part of politics even if journalists do not hold public office.

Thus, Fox was singled out not because it had a "perspective," but because its "perspective" differs from Obama’s and his friends’ in other media. We need a free media to enable us to know what our leaders are doing and to discuss the wisdom of their policies. Lacking such "perspective," self government is impossible.

No ruler of a free people should condemn any media because they have a "perspective." That is but the prelude to a controlled media and despotic government

The Case for TABOR

By Bill Moloney States with constitutional and/or statutory restraints on taxing and spending have strong financial foundations because those restraints greatly militate toward the positive business climate and robust economy that invariably generate increased revenues across the board. Colorado, which has had such restraints since 1992, is a prime example of their great benefits. California -- today having the nation’s most disastrous state economy -- once had such restraints but cast them aside some years ago and consequently has become the poster child for what happens to states that fall into the trap of unrestrained taxing and spending. Editor: Last week, contributor Bill Moloney took the TABOR success story on a speaking tour of Maine, where taxpayer advocates are fighting for passage of a similar amendment on Nov. 3. Here is the rest of his message from that trip:

Prior to my decade as Colorado’s Education Commissioner I served as a senior school administrator in five other states-Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland- and in all of them had extensive experience regarding the interplay of taxation and spending and how they impacted the financial health of my district, and the state as a whole. These experiences over thirty years in rural, suburban, and urban settings led me to the firm convictions stated above.

In a nation wracked by recession, ballooning budget deficits and soaring public debt the issue of fiscal restraint has an urgency greater than at any time in our history.

Attempts to promote fiscal restraint through constitutional or statutory means however have been a guarantee of bitter political conflict in every state they have occurred.

An ordinary citizen might ask: “Who would be against fiscal restraint, particularly in these perilous economic times?”

The answer is: All special interests that profit greatly from unchecked taxing and spending, most prominently giant labor unions like the National Education Association (NEA), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The main tactics of these special interests opposing efforts at fiscal restraint are always the same i.e. Predict devastating hardship if voters or legislators irresponsibly support mechanisms of fiscal restraint, and flood the state with money from their national organizations to be spent on saturation media advertising, direct mail etc. aimed at scaring people about the dire consequences of any legal barriers to unchecked taxing and spending.

The dire consequences are skillfully invented and invariably include impoverished schools (“This will hurt the little children”) and the disappearance of critical public services like Meals on Wheels (“This will hurt the poor senior citizens”).

These tactics are the equivalent of resisting restraints on a local school budget by threatening the abolition of the band and the football team. Amazingly when citizens restrain the budget anyways the band and the football team somehow survive thus exposing the scare tactics as just that.

In 1992 when Colorado voters were presented with a constitutional amendment- Taxpayers Bill of Rights(TABOR)- to limit the growth of state revenue and spending to the sum of inflation plus population growth they were bombarded with special interest media advertisements predicting a doom and gloom economic future if TABOR passed.

When the voters went ahead and passed TABOR not only did the “dire consequences” fail to occur but instead Colorado entered a period of economic growth and prosperity unequalled in its history.

Since 1992 Colorado has gone from a boom-and- bust-prone economy overly dependent on the energy industry to one that is much more stable, balanced, and diversified. This rapid transformation derived from the state’s growing reputation as a low tax business and investment friendly environment that was generating economic opportunity for companies and citizens alike. A particular success story was the burgeoning high tech industry that ironically owed much of its rapid growth to companies fleeing Silicon Valley owing to California’s steady undermining of those very same fiscal restraints that had been a model for Colorado’s TABOR law.

Among the principal beneficiaries of this new prosperity were the schools of Colorado which had known wide spread hardship during the energy industry bust of the nineteen eighties. After 1992 school district revenues surged owing to the growth and job creation fueling local and state prosperity in the wake of TABOR.

Today following the national economic meltdown of 2008 Colorado is facing the same kind of severe challenges as every other state. However, absolutely none of those challenges are traceable to TABOR.

On the contrary because of the enduring benefits of TABOR Colorado’s economic challenges are markedly less than most other states, and disproportionally less than those states-like California- which have ignored the clear track record and economic wisdom of fiscal restraint.

William Moloney was Colorado Education Commissioner,1997-2007, and is now an international education consultant as well as a Centennial Institute Fellow. His columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. His e-mail address is moloneyvision@aol.com

Over the climate cliff with Bennet & Udall

(Denver Post, Oct. 25) The year is 2030. The scene, an assembly joining Michael Bennet High School and Mark Udall Middle School in Denver. The occasion, a talk on Colorado history in the early 21st century by Prof. Cody Hawkins, the onetime Buffs quarterback who is now a popular CU faculty member. Let’s listen: “During the Obama years, back when your parents were young and football was still allowed in this country, before the UN banned all violent sports, I wasn’t the only big star who was humiliatingly benched. The two famous senators whom your schools are named for, had their political careers terminated by voters in the same way my NFL hopes were snuffed by angry alumni and the coach. (Dad and I later made up, of course.) “Economic hardship in Colorado following passage of the 2009 cap-and-trade energy tax did them in. Sen. Michael Bennet served only a two-year appointive term before going down in the Republican landslide of 2010. Sen. Mark Udall plugged along in unpopularity until announcing in early 2013, just after Barack and Michelle vacated the White House, that one term would do it for him as it had for them.

“Why did the never-elected Bennet get his name on this high school, home of the Mighty Preble Mice? (Cheers and applause.) Because of the fine job he had done earlier as Denver school superintendent. He never should have left that post. Laurence Peter’s axiom about rising to your level of incompetence was thereafter renamed the Bennet Principle.

“If Michael Bennet had just kept it real in that stormy autumn of 2009, and followed the facts where they led, instead of bowing to the superstitions of the climate alarmists, he would not have cast the deciding vote for cap-and-trade. Colorado and the country would have been spared an economic body slam that worsened the Obama-Pelosi recession just when recovery was starting. And he might have hung onto his seat.

“In Boulder back then, if I had dared label global-warming doomsday fears as superstitions, Al Gore would have leveled me like a Longhorn linebacker. But Americans later realized that’s all they were. Not only did supporters of the legislation admit it would yield less than a 1-degree reduction in warming during this century. Scientists like the EPA’s own Alan Carlin could prove carbon dioxide, the alleged culprit that senators voted to curb, wasn’t even to blame for warming. And with the late-1990s cooling trend unbroken to this day, skeptics have laughed last.

“Sen. Udall still gushed that the cap-and-trade bill was ‘ideal,’ in spite of Heritage Foundation warnings that it would cause a doubling of electricity prices and a 50-percent jump in prices for gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, by the 2030s. Those trends, now fully realized, started soon enough to hurt Udall badly. Colorado’s annual loss of 20,000 jobs and $1000 per person in gross state product, predicted in an ALEC study, was felt from 2012 onward, with public backlash leading to the senator’s retirement.

“Sen. Bennet was long gone by then, of course, comfortable in a salary-capped job on Wall Street. His agonizing vote for the Kerry-Boxer bill (similar to the House version, Waxman-Markey, but worse) got the incumbent past fellow Democrat Andrew Romanoff in August 2010. But he lost in November to the Republican argument that recessionary hard times were the worst moment to raise energy taxes. The GOP, echoing 1946, asked ‘Had Enough?’ Voters decided they had.

“You students have read of the superstitious Aztecs sacrificing lives to appease the rain god, Tlatoc. They didn’t know better. But imagine the perversity of leaders here in our own state, in our own time, sacrificing both prosperity and political careers to a climate deity equally mythical, equally cruel.”

Myth Busters

Slated on Backbone Radio, Oct. 25 Listen every Sunday, 5-8pm on 710 KNUS, Denver... 1460 KZNT, Colorado Springs... and streaming live at 710knus.com.

What people think they know that isn't so, even more than what they simply don't know, is often the biggest problem in self-government, Ronald Reagan liked to say. Our show this Sunday takes on five overheated myths, correcting them with cold fact to help you make a difference politically. Is global warming a crisis and our fault? Is Islam a religion of peace? Is light rail the ideal transportation solution? Are old white guys the face of the Republican Party? Does public education put the public interest first? The answers would be no, no, no, no, and no. Tune in and call in... the number is 303.696.1971... as I do some myth-busting with:

5:10 Laura Boggs, Republican for Jefferson County School Board

5:20 David Petteys, Act for America chapter chairman

5:30 Ryan Frazier, Republican for 7th Congressional District

6:00 Phelim McAleer, the film producer climate alarmists fear most

6:30 Dennis Polhill, expert on the debacle that is FasTracks

7:00 Susan Brown, researcher on Muslim Brotherhood subversion (plus David Petteys again)

Yours for guiltless carbon dioxide, JOHN ANDREWS

Jihad in Colorado: Hear the Podcast

With the Zazi terrorist plot uncovered in Aurora, suddenly Sept. 11 doesn't seem so long ago and Afghanistan doesn't seem so far away. Gov. Ritter has called on Coloradans to be vigilant. Such Islamic doctrines as jihad and sharia aren't merely religious concepts, they are a political agenda. We dare not ignore the radical Muslim goals of bringing the war to our homeland and ultimately dominating America. Listeners got a sobering closeup of this life-and-death issue from my Oct. 22 issue special on 710 KNUS in Denver. Click to hear the podcast.

"Under the Dome: Jihad Comes to Colorado" is my conversation with David Petteys, chairman of the Denver chapter of Act for America (the citizens lobby led by Brigitte Gabriel) and Centennial Institute policy analyst Susan Brown.

This is the latest edition of a citizens alert we're now doing monthly for Colorado conservatives. Thanks for listening!