A few years ago, I was with my Dad, whom I knew to be a listener of the Rush Limbaugh program. Some show came on TV...or perhaps it was a radio program...anyway, its intent was to debunk some of the things Rush had said on previous programs, showing them to be distortions.
We listened to a couple, then my dad turned it off. He had no interest in discovering if Rush actually had lied or distorted the truth. As far as he was concerned, I guess, the people debunking him were the ones making up the lies.
I, on the other hand, approach this from a different perspective. I want the truth.
For example, Rush is often commenting that the various news agencies that quote him, in order to make him look bad, take snippets of his show out of context. (And that's true, by the way. I've listened to his shows, and then sesen the one or two sentences aired on MSNBC, et al, and they do distort the intent of his words.)
But on the other hand, Limbaugh does the same thing to Obama and other politicians, choosing to air only one or two sentences out of a 10-minute speech that may or may not what the politiian was actually talking about.
Hannity does this too. On the opening of every show he's got a clip of Obama saying, "Just words, just speeches," as if Obama is saying that what he says is "Just words, just speeches" and not the truth or not what he really intends to do. When in actual fact, if you listen to that entire quote, his meaning is the exact opposite of what Hannity and others say it means when they mock him for saying it.
So wheneve I hear a soundbite from anyone, on any side of the aisle, that sounds kid of bad, I always make it a point to track down the entire text of the speech, so that I can put that sound bite in context and see if it's true or if its been distorted.
And in future I'll share those observatons here in this blog.
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