Getting To the Source

Zeroing in what is behind the tea bagger confusion of many of today's issues and topics is a reasonable reaction to why the health care debate went the way it did.

I personally believe the media has a responsibility to report issues as factual items and not merely as what one side says about the other. For example, reporting what the GOP or Dems say about Issue A is not objective journalism. Reporting what the two parties may say about Issue A while including the non-spin of party politics is. Democrats bear a large brunt of the blame as well. They too get their talking points out there as fast as anyone. But reporting talking points is not journalism. That is simply making the MSM a carrier pigeon for political parties.

Here's a great example of how political parties control media coverage and subvert national debates simply because the media fails to separate talking points from journalism.

A recent Harris Poll found the following:

67% of Republicans believe President Obama is a socialist.
57% believe he is a Muslim
45% believe he is a domestic enemy
42% believe he is a racist

There's more findings at their website, but these numbers largely answer how we got where we are today.

Where do Republicans get their beliefs that Obama is a socialist? The most watched media outlet in the world routinely has its hosts and guests call him that. Where would Republicans learn to believe such an untrue thing like the president is a Muslim? Well, Fox News is no stranger to repeating such tripe. How is it possible such a large number of Republicans believe the President of the United States is an actual enemy of the country? Those very words are repeated daily by Fox News and other Republican talking heads that get serious airtime on their outlets. The polls findings are directly related to media failing to decipher political talking points from issues causing propaganda to be trusted by huge crowds of people.

There's no doubt Republicans get their news from Fox News. It's also the very place that is shamefully and dishonestly helping to spread lies, fear, anger and hostility toward the American government. But the poll sheds more than just light on Republican news sources. The public as a whole is eerily similar to Republican beliefs, most of which are just not true. This leads to mass confusion like the people mentioned in the posts below who think that their very own government assistance programs are dissimilar to the one they are now opposing and one that would largely benefit them as well.