Hello to all. This is my first diary, so a brief introduction. I'm a 19 year old Music Composition student in the (moderately) deep South. I've been a lurker for a good long time, joined over the summer, and am here to stay through the campaign season and beyond.
Besides the morass of partisan bullshit Sarah Palin was gladly wading through last night, I heard that Obama is going to be taking part in the Thursday Night edition of The O'Reilly Factor. As if my blood wasn't boiling enough.
I understand his decision to go on the Factor, to show himself to a conservative audience in front of John McCain's speech, but I think that the initial rejection of Fox News was a much better choice. Fox is not a news network, but a propaganda machine for George W. Bush and his conservative idealism. Going on Bill O'Reilly's show does more than give him credibility, it legitimizes Fox News' coverage of the election, which has been biased at best, and at times proffering blatant lies under the guise of news.
Over the summer, my 83 year old grandmother, born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina, stayed at our house. Out of deference to her the TV stayed on Fox News constantly: through the course of the day, during dinner, and into the wee small hours of the morning. As a musician, I need my time to practice, and as fate would have it, the TV is in the next room from the piano. It was miserable.
Aside from the conversations I had with my grandmother where she argued that only white men should be elected president, why George Bush was "ineffective" but didn't really do anything bad "like Bill Clinton," and giving gay couples the right to adopt children was ridiculous because they would grow up with all kinds of perversions (and the lack of a woman or man in the home, to say nothing of divorce), I had to put up with Fox. "Well, it's fair and balanced, not like the liberals over at NBC and CNN. I can't stand them."
I had to put up with Fox and Friends, with Brit Hume, with a TV station that is too busy spouting ideology that it can't see the facts. And, quite possibly worst of all, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, two men who are filled with so much hate and dogmatic voracity that they trip over themselves trying to find something to get worked up about. I was tempted to call the sattelite company and have them remove the channel from our package behind my parents' backs.
Barack Obama's call for a civilized discourse, an end to the idea that because a person has different opinions and ideals does not mean they are somehow smaller of character, and an honest debate of the candidates' policies and their merits was a breather in the extreme. I sat in my dorm room with 10 other people, all of us silently watching the speech with rapt attention, and I realized that Barack Obama is the person that can break people my age out of the abiding notion of cynicism about the political process that has infected mainstream thinking among people my age, propagated by George W. Bush and the demagogues at Fox News.
Palin's speech last night brought that all back to me, what this election means, and what we are all fighting for. It's not a choice between "Good Change and Bad Change," it's a choice between ideological debates and rational ones, shouting and discussion, bickering and compromise. It's not hard to pick which one I want.
As much as I would love to see Barack Obama show Bill O'Reilly the meaning of civilized discourse, I'm not watching Fox News again for a long time.