The Daily show yesterday did a great job of showing how both the left and the right portray the protest to their own agendas. I think I posted the video at one point. Fox slammed the union protesters but praised the tea party for pretty much the same thing. MSNBC did the opposite.
Protests are very american. Its what makes us different than most of the world. We can have these without people getting hurt or killed most of the time. Protesting is patriotic imo, its what the troops fight for. Your right to protest the war, protest the taxes, protest watever. Well minus military funerals. Those westboro baptist F*cks should be shot. No one go to anyones funeral looking to cause problems, let alone a military funeral with a family morning a tragic ending of their loved one.
In my opinion, FNC is about the only network that gives anything
approaching a fair shake to the right - I think that's why people on the left think it's so slanted. They're so used to
no one else doing it, at
all. There are a lot of liberals on FNC (I can name a bunch, but you probably know who they are) as well, but people don't like to talk about that.
I have seen a lot of people on the left openly say they would like to shut it down completely. I have never heard anyone suggest the same about other television media (though I have heard plenty of people celebrate the financial decline of the
New York Times, for example...but celebrating media's self-inflicted decline is a different thing than someone trying to take steps to shut someone else up by using the force of law, as some on the left, like Al Sharpton, have attempted to do with Rush Limbaugh, for example).
Every other network leans left, in my view - some (MSNBC, which I regard as about as far left as television news gets - and CNN) more than others. But even ABC, CBS, NBC - they just all lean left. I mean, something like 80 to 90% of journalists polled
say they're Democrats (I might be low-balling that, actually) - and it's pretty obvious to people who
aren't Democrats where they're coming from.
I got a lot of my news about what it was like at the capitol from Ann Althouse, a blogger who is a law professor at UW Madison. She voted for Obama, but a good many of her views are right-leaning. I view her as a centrist, mostly. I love her blog. I think she's fair-minded, and objective. I don't agree with every single thing she says, but no one could say she isn't thoughtful and fair.
Anyway:
Hard to imagine you'd ever find anyone, left or right, who thinks there are any redeeming qualities to Westboro Baptist...though I would stop short of calling for anyone (except someone who physically harmed others) to be shot.
P.S. By the way - a union sympathizer went on Althouse's YouTube channel and said
she should be shot, for blogging video of something during the protests. Oh - and you may have seen the YouTube where someone put together a collection of tweets, all with people threatening to shoot or wishing for the death of Scott Walker (much like the Palin one that was put together - which was truly breathtaking). I actually know people who have insisted nothing like this ever comes from the left (hell, that's what Bill Maher says, right?) - which is, of course, demonstrably absurd.
P.P.S. I get probably 95% of my own news from reading, in case I need to make that clear. When I watch television these days, I watch it to escape the news - but I am familiar with the primary personalities on FNC, CNN, and MSNBC as well as other networks.