Even Fox News’s original slogans—“We Report, You Decide” and “Fair and Balanced”—caused outrage in the leftist circles I was in during my time as a left-wing community organizer in the mid-1990s. It was heresy to believe average Americans could come to their own conclusions about issues in the news without the “guidance” of enlightened liberals telling them what to think. Even the suggestion that regular people could decide on the issues for themselves was an empowering reminder of reality and was damaging to the decades-long inculcation of helplessness and fear doled out by the leftist media.
In 1996, I was in the midst of my tenure as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women. I distinctly remember when Fox News launched, as there were ads with their slogan plastered all over the city at bus stop shelters. As a friend of mine and I were driving by one such shelter, she said with a mash-up of disdain and mockery: “Oh, look, I’ve heard about that. It’s conservative,” replete with an eye roll and sigh. The more the merrier, I opined. After shooting me a disapproving side-eye, her response surprised me and stayed with me all these years. “What do they mean, ‘We report, you decide’? Decide what? What is there to decide?” she asked in all seriousness and with the added mockery of scary air quotes.
Generally, then and now, many liberals in deep-blue cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., live in leftist news and information bubbles, watching and reading only news stories that support their oh-so-progressive worldview. The only way they can encounter different opinions that will provoke them to think, reexamine, and even refine their long-held beliefs is to take a detour in the media ecosystem to destinations like talk radio, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, or—beginning in 1996—Fox News. Before 1996, with the exception of talk radio, there were no media platforms offering programming that approached the conservative point of view fairly or seriously. Back then, the internet was in its infancy, and most conservative websites did not yet exist.
Having lived most of my adult life in Los Angeles—a city where everything people hear and see reflects the liberal or leftist point of view—I, like millions of others, never considered my opinions or their being echoed back to me as “biased.” It was simply the only reality we knew, like people growing up on a remote tropical island believing everyone on Earth lived in the idyllic midst of beaches, palm trees, with an average temperature of 73 degrees in the winter. My friends consisted of liberal activists, journalists, and actors, and we all held the same beliefs. When those opinions (truly considered the Truth) are never challenged, and you never encounter an alternative point of view, those beliefs become even more reinforced as unassailable.
My exchange passing the bus shelter with my friend was a few years after I had started my radio show in Los Angeles, and I had already realized that there was more to be said and more perspectives than our own. “Yes, what is there to decide?” I quizzically answered back and laughed. She didn’t get it. She then warned me that, considering my work for years as a feminist community organizer, this new “weird” network, as she called it, would probably call me for interviews. She stated as a given that I would not grant any Fox News interview requests. “You don’t want to give them any legitimacy!” she warned. On the contrary, I told her, it would be fun to talk with people who needed a talking-to.
She was, and still is, an actress. We’re both older, and she is quite a bit more famous now than she was then. It has been decades, and we are still good friends. Our politics actually haven’t changed, but our commitment to personal freedom and civil liberties has grown, and is now considered “conservative.” To this day, we laugh at our Fox News bus-shelter exchange.
While being open about my political predilections, if she were to “come out of the political closet,” so to speak, her career would be over. She, like many of my friends in a similar situation, leaves it to me to be vocal about the issues and the conservatism that will not just save our nation but return us to the values we all embrace—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from government intrusion into our lives, and the freedom to be ourselves without being threatened or canceled.
Just six years after noticing those Fox News ads, it became clear I wasn’t the only one who thought hearing more perspectives on the news was a good idea. As Forbes reported in February 2022:
The latest cable news ratings show that, every year since January 2002 [emphasis mine], Fox has been #1 in total day and primetime viewership as well as #1 in the key 25–54 demo. A 20-year record that, while not only unprecedented across the cable news landscape, is also likely to continue this year. . . . Last month alone, Fox had 95 of the top 100 cable news telecasts for the month, including the top 91 cable news telecasts.41
The cable network ended 2023 by announcing it was finishing the year as the “most watched network for the 8th straight year.”42 The powerhouse then began 2024 with an even more remarkable achievement—at the end of January the Fox News Channel was officially number one for twenty-two consecutive years in all four key categories of news ratings measurement,43 confirming again that Americans are not afraid of differences of opinion, and very much prefer to decide for themselves what to make of the news of the day.
Fox News presented a disturbing new reality not just for leftist progressives but also for center-left liberals who never really had to accidentally encounter or entertain ideas other than their own. Talk radio was the only real outlet for genuine debate and conversation, and that was furiously being marginalized by the left’s Thought Police. Fox News represented a challenge to the status quo in that conservative ideas and arguments would suddenly be available on television for millions of Americans. This presented an immediate threat to the near-universal media control the Democrats had enjoyed since the 1960s, fueling the Democrat-Media Axis.
The liberal media and their narrative of fear is so fragile that the creation of one alternative network providing genuinely diverse opinions on the issues continues to be seen by the comfortable progressive establishment as an existential threat. The left’s fight against intellectual freedom and a marketplace of ideas has intensified over the years as it seeks to demonize conservative ideas and traditional American values in order to generate fear.
Contrary to the belief of many that Fox News only attracts Republicans, it actually draws a significant number of Democrats and independents to its cable network, a fact noticed in 2021 when data first showed more Democrats watched Fox News than CNN during prime time.44 That’s because people other than conservatives also want reliable information, understand the difference between news and opinion, and can handle disagreements and opinions that contradict their own. Go figure.
The left knows they can’t survive politically with free speech and people are able to hear and engage in a vibrant debate of issues and ideas, which is why they’re desperate to squelch it. Americans, however, are voting with their clickers. In December 2023 it became clear that voters had made their choice about who they could trust: “The latest New York Times/Siena poll found that Fox News was the single news source voters said they ‘turn to most often,’ beating out CNN, MSNBC, and a host of other news sources in the December survey.”45
While we know these days it’s impossible to avoid news that can be frightening, Americans have been through a lot and are a tough bunch. We saved the world in two world wars, and were born of dreams, revolution, and taking chances. We want information and news so we can properly assess what’s happening in the country, and more confidently determine how it impacts our lives and the future. With whatever the news brings, we choose information over ignorance, and determination over fear.
Today, we are at a crossroads and must decide which path our nation will choose—freedom from fear itself and its tiny tyrant boosters, or surrender to the controlled predictability of totalitarianism. In other words, we will continue to observe, learn, and . . . decide.
Chapter 8 Manipulating Reality
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY1
It’s funny how much can change in just a few decades. Like shapeshifters, in sixty years, the Democrats have gone from embracing President Kennedy’s support for freedom of speech and trusting the American people to transforming into bullies, censors, and authoritarians working to crush the life out of both. In the last half century, Democrats have joined forces with liberal media to form what amounts to a Democrat-Media Axis that is the antithesis of the Democratic Party in the Kennedy era.
Kennedy’s quote comes from his remarks delivered in February 1962 on the twentieth anniversary of the Voice of America (VOA). The Kennedy Library explains the intent of his speech was to reinforce “the necessity of freedom of information and complete truthfulness of the media.”2 We still embrace that objective, but for today’s Democrats and progressive media, his comments would be condemned as a defense of hurtful, racist, and violent expressions.
Kennedy uttered these words with a purpose. He had witnessed the spread of the virus of communism from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and elsewhere. He understood that communist dictatorships—like the dictatorships he and millions of others in the American military bravely battled in World War II—all seized control of the media to spread their poisonous propaganda. In 1962, we were only seventeen years out of World War II, twenty years from the founding of the VOA, and in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
The new president was of a generation that watched the Office for War Information and its offshoot (the VOA) become infested with influential leadership and staff harboring pro-Soviet and communist views and knew this was affecting VOA operations and programming.3 Kennedy also believed strongly that the “open market” of ideas was critical and that media honesty with the American people centered on facts was vital to maintain the nation’s strength and founding principles.
Ted Lipien, a former officer with the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during the Trump administration, writes: “Previously classified US government documents show that following the start of Voice of America radio broadcasts in February 1942 in response to the dangers and the turmoil of the Second World War, the first group of VOA managers and journalists uncritically embraced and eagerly promoted various Soviet propaganda lies.”4
Moreover, he notes, “Almost all of VOA’s early pro-Soviet propagandists in the 1940s were radically left-wing US federal government officials, employees, and contractors who were hired without extensive security and background checks.”5
Through the first half of the twentieth century, it became abundantly clear to Kennedy’s generation that radio was a harbinger of the power and importance of mass media. Like any object, depending on whose hands it was in, it could be a force for good or a weapon inducing misery and fear.
Communist propaganda aimed at the American people was not in the United States, or humanity’s, best interest. The left, however, operates within the presumption that the American people are drooling infants who need to be manipulated and controlled. For our own good, of course.
Kennedy’s argument, as is mine, is the complete opposite of the miscreants on the left. We are part of the majority of Americans who understand and expect that the people can handle a myriad of ideas and make their own decisions accordingly. We also summarily reject the left’s reliance on gaslighting, lies, and fear, all nursed by contempt for those enjoying life. In the age of modern media, actively confronting and condemning the propagation of fear and lies by Marxists and their fellow travelers is even more vital.
Leftists in particular, and people devoted to Big Government in general, don’t have the same regard for the average person as Kennedy did. They are afraid of the people because they have contempt for us. We have now come full circle from what the most beloved Democratic president in the modern age wanted to accomplish—reforming the VOA into an entity that respected American values and relied on the truth. Instead, over the next sixty years, the left doubled down on its successful efforts to control government media while spreading its infection into the private broadcast networks and media writ large. Kennedy is gone, but the left is still here and remains obsessively committed to destroying anyone who refuses to conform and bend a knee.
This matters because what I term the Democrat-Media Axis—the Democratic Party, liberal journalists, and Big Tech media enablers—are as obsessed with controlling what we think, say, and do as in Kennedy’s time. The world’s leftists are still incompetent, miserable, and unhinged in their pursuit of power and money, tormenting everyone around them, yet they remain singularly focused on destroying everything the United States stands for—especially individual freedom and Western values.
Marxist totalitarian leaders believe they must exercise total control of public messaging and communication. They use public humiliation, shame, and executions of inspirational individuals to ruthlessly stay in power. While regimes can’t directly control each individual in a nation, they expect populations to submit if they see enough examples of harm inflicted on those who dare not to conform.
“Good Night and Good Luck”
As we fight to stop Marxist totalitarian madness from destroying our country, it’s important to remember that most news organizations haven’t always been lapdogs of the left. Some are still committed to bringing all information for a variety of points of view to the public discussion. Knowing this history is important because it reminds us that journalism can attract good people and that human nature is not predominantly bad or disturbed.
When it comes to inspiration about journalism and news, many of us think about Edward R. Murrow, the CBS radio and later TV journalist who rose to fame reporting on World War II from Europe. His signature sign-off, “Good night and good luck,” created a bonding of trust with his listeners as he broadcast from London during the Nazi bombing “Blitz” on the city.
Murrow gave us wise guidance when he said in a 1954 TV broadcast: “We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”6
Journalists like Murrow (and they still exist) have long enjoyed trust and respect in the United States and are meant to be protected from governmental control by the First Amendment to the Constitution. They provide us with vital information about our communities, states, nation, and the world—everything from storm warnings to alerts about criminals on the loose, to actions by government at every level, to wars.
Objectivity was embraced as a goal when radio news began on August 31, 1920, with what is believed to be the first broadcast newscast on a station in Detroit.7 Radio news gradually spread across the nation as other stations sprouted up.
Little did we know how powerful (and influential) the first coast-to-coast news report broadcast by NBC would be. The highly emotional recorded description by announcer Herb Morrison of the May 6, 1937, explosion of the hydrogen-filled German dirigible Hindenburg8 shocked and arguably changed the way Americans viewed the world around them and defined the power of news reports. Airing the day after the catastrophe, listeners could imagine themselves there as the passenger zeppelin attempted to land during an afternoon of periodic thunderstorms in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing thirty-six passengers and crew members.9
“The effect of the Hindenburg recordings on audiences was startling,” Cary O’Dell wrote in a 2002 essay for the Library of Congress. “Never before had such a large audience heard such a blow-by-blow description of such a horrific occurrence. For listeners, the news of the day suddenly became active, proximate, and real. News gathering and reporting was altered too.”10 The immediacy of radio news and the ability of listeners to hear events unfolding enhanced the credibility of reports.
War of the Worlds
