Howell Raines in the 14 March 2010 Washington Post writes, Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?.

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Here is one snip (out of many) from the article:

It is true that, after 14 months of Fox’s relentless pounding of President Obama’s idea of sweeping reform, the latest Gallup poll shows opinion running 48 to 45 percent against the current legislation. Fox invariably stresses such recent dips in support for the legislation, disregarding the majorities in favor of various individual aspects of the reform effort. Along the way, the network has sold a falsified image of the professional standards that developed in American newsrooms and university journalism departments in the last half of the 20th century.

The bolded phrase in the above paragraph refers to the 23 February 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) report titled, Americans Remain Split On Stalled Health Care Legislation, but Some Provisions Popular Among Majorities of Democrats, Independents and Republicans

Read the whole Raines article and the KFF report.  In your heart, you know this material … but it’s nice to see it spelled out.

-RichardH