Public opinions can be fun !

On Saturday, a letter to the editor in the local Santa Rosa newspaper sent me over the edge enough to fire back my own letter to the editor.    The premise of the original letter was to assert that the reason that Fox News has higher ratings than the other news channels is that the public at large realizes that they can only get the 'truth' from Fox and not CNN or MSNBC.     My response follows:

Editor:   A Mr. Cox of Sonoma opined that somehow the higher ratings at Fox News vs. CNN and MSNBC is a relevant factor on what is true and what is not.   Remember that majorities of humans once thought it appropriate to own as personal property those they deemed 'lesser', or to burn at the stake a neighbor whose behavior was thought to cause death and disease.  Fox now regularly features folks who believe that man lived concurrently with dinosaurs, New Hampshire was the site of the first shots of the Revolutionary War, that the millions of tons of pollutants we have pumped into the atmosphere and water supply have no direct link to the state of the planet, and that somehow Hawaii isn't really a part of the United States.  These things are all patently false. To insist upon them as facts makes you either ignorant or a liar.   My only conclusion is that the masses have become intellectually lazy and can be led along by their most base instinct of fear.   And no, most of us are not following anything related to Michael Moore.   Except perhaps for the notion that the rich and powerful are leading us all down a slope few will ever have the means to climb up.   That's the speech I want to hear from one of our leaders.

Bill Klausing

Santa Rosa