Season 4, Episode 12 March 19, 2023

Hello! Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube! I’m your host, Bob Woodley. On this episode, we’ll hear about being burned at the stake, Coxy’s army, fascism. But first, (not the headlines)!

A lot of people complain that medical costs are too high, and they probably are, but if it saves your life, how can you put a price on it? Well, you can add up the cost of all the bandages and bags of liquid they pump into you and the price of the people who do the poking and prodding plus the price of the people who decipher the poking and prodding. Not to mention the people who ask you what your name and birthday are when you get there and anytime anybody new walks into the room. There’s a price on healthcare, and a very large industry has been built around keeping people alive. However, some of those businesses have been masquerading as non-profit entities, and a recent court decision is being called a “warning shot” to other medical companies that claim to be non-profit organizations. For the person who’s life is saved, the difference may be irrelevant, but to the people who live where these organizations operate, it often leads to other illnesses, the kind that are caused by municipalities not having the funds to maintain the schools and other civic responsibilities people expect when they pay their taxes. But some medical companies are using non-profit status to avoid paying taxes that in some places add up to millions of dollars. Millions of dollars that would normally go to schools and other municipal responsibilities are reduced to a fraction of that, and used for other programs that are charities but not municipal responsibilities. Property taxes alone account for large sums of money that can’t be collected because of a non-profit status. But in Pennsylvania, five requirements must be met in order to be considered a non-profit entity. The organization must: 

(a) Advance a charitable purpose;

(b) Donate or render gratuitously a substantial portion of its services;

(c) Benefit a substantial and indefinite class of persons who are legitimate subjects of charity;

(d) Relieve the government of some of its burden;

(e) Operate entirely free from private profit motive.

The hospital in question was deemed by the court to be operating with a goal of making a profit, based on exorbitant management fees and rewarding executives for meeting certain goals of financial success. Now, the judge in the case didn’t just take it upon herself to charge the hospital with pretending to be a non-profit. Noooo. A local school district sued the hospital. After all, it was the school district that was being denied funds it should have. To the tune of 900-thousand dollars a year. As the school superintendent said, “That’s, you know, 10, 12 teachers.” He might not have been a math major, but he’s in the ballpark. 

Some hospitals avoid litigation by agreeing to what’s called Payments in Lieu of Taxes. The acronym PILOTS is used in the jargon, but what it amounts to is hospitals donating money to charitable organizations instead of paying taxes. While that may sound like a fair trade on the surface, it still often takes dollars away from our schools and moves it to wherever the hospital deems worthy. Instead of it being the taxpayers money, to be used as determined by local government, it’s often put to use for programs that have little value to society as a whole, and can often be beneficial only to those already being served by the hospital. So, while it looks like charity, it is in fact not relieving the government of some of its burden, but only the burden of the hospital itself.

Meanwhile, private hospitals are paying all the taxes that non-profit hospitals aren’t, plus the private hospitals often do as much or more charity work than the non-profit hospitals. So while the Pottstown School District had to do the work to get the Pottstown Hospital and Tower Health to pony up, in Pittsburgh, it’s been used as a political stance to get the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to do the same. The story from the Center Daily Times spends less column inches on the Pottstown story than it does on UPMC, which is expanding its reach at an impressive level for a non-profit entity. UPMC now operates facilities all over Pennsylvania, in western New York and Maryland. A Lowe institute report says UPMC saves about 601-million dollars a year by claiming to be a non-profit and not paying taxes on properties and other taxes regular businesses pay. That’s money that’s used by local municipalities for quality of life and education purposes on the local level. UPMC says they make up for it in other ways, but the math doesn’t add up when it comes to serving the entire community, rather than specific charities. Not that specific charities aren’t important, but tax dollars are a different category. And it seems that hospitals across the country are using tax-exempt status to grease the palms of special interest groups instead of paying taxes like a profit-driven company. Which, if you make more than you need, you are. 

Personally, I know this happens, because a non-profit hospital once charged me more than 4-thousand dollars for an MRI, while the average price for one in the United States is 12-hundred dollars. There were only two ladies on duty that day, so unless they were making 2-thousand dollars an hour each, I’m not sure how a 4-thousand dollar charge can be justified by a non-profit hospital group. 

It’s a shame a school district had to take a hospital to court to correct this discrepancy of the tax code. Well, discrepancy may not be the correct word to describe it. This is an outright abuse of tax code by hospital boards and leadership. Unfortunately, the hospitals have the upper hand. Remember, it’s they who have the ability to save our lives. If we make them pay taxes like other legitimate companies, they may decide to take that ability elsewhere. In other words, if the hospitals don’t get their way, certain politicians or policy-makers may not last as long as they might have under other circumstances. Nobody’s saying the hospital might let you die out of spite, but they can certainly make your live more painful. The judge in the Pottstown School District case should probably not get sick any time soon. She may have cost that organization a million dollars a year, but if it’s operating as a company, then so be it. Should the hospital continue to operate as is, it will benefit the communities in which it operates much more moving forward than it did. The “warning shot” might not just be for the hospital systems operating as non-profits, but also for the health-care system as it is. If the hospitals are required to pay taxes like any other company, they’ll threaten us with less research and more lives lost. But what we’ll really be losing is the health-care industry’s ability to self-promote on the taxpayer’s dime. Healthcare and relate research will go on because, after all, it’s a profitable business.

There are certain types of health care that’s not as profitable as it’s hope it will become. That’s the medical advice and procedures, both medicinal and surgical, related to gender transitioning. While there are many who think of sex change operations as sinful or otherwise regretful, there are medical professionals ready and willing to help and do the procedures, or as some might see it, the harm, to the patient who is convinced nature got them wrong and want to use science to correct it. Or maybe just alter it in some way. For whatever reason. It’s a very personal thing, I’m sure. But it doesn’t stay very personal when the whole state high school athletics program is thrown into upheaval when a boy decides he’s a girl, and another team doesn’t think it’s fair to play against a team with a boy, so the state of Vermont has excluded all teams from that school from participating in any Vermont Principal’s Association sponsored competition. Not just the girls basketball team, but all teams from the Mid Vermont Christian School, including boys teams, have been banned from competition because of the forfeit. The Vermont Principal’s Association is the governing body that makes the rules, and they said the Mid Vermont Christian School violated two human rights policies when they refused to play a team with a boy on it. Now, there’s no indication that the boy has undergone any types of therapies or surgeries to become a girl, he just identifies as a girl. I’m just going to address the elephant in the room right now and say that this isn’t right in a number of ways. First of all, just because a boy thinks he’s a girl doesn’t mean everybody else has to believe it, too. If it looks like a duck and walks like duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Having a boy on a team that’s supposed to be all girls is an unfair advantage for his team. Even if he’s not a good basketball player, he’s still a boy on a girls team. And another team didn’t think that was fair, and refused to play, forfeiting the game. But then the governing body declares that the school violated two human-rights policies. One concerning gender identity, and a violation of a “commitment to racial, gender-fair, and disability awareness.” So, they lump “gender-fair” in with race and disability. Well, you can’t decide your race, and you probably didn’t choose to have a disability, but this boy merely identifies as a girl. That’s a choice he made. And maybe someday he’ll go through the transition to become a girl. Maybe they’ll let her play in the WNBA, but as for right now, he’s a boy trying to play on a girls basketball team, and he’s ruining the athletic department of an entire school with his selfishness. When the other team declared it unfair to play a team with a boy on it, he should have volunteered to sit out the game. That would have been the sportsman like thing to do. If this boy weren’t so selfish, he would recognize the way he makes other girls teams uncomfortable. If he were a true sport, he would want his team to win fair and square, and he would sacrifice his own personal gain for the good of the sport. Now, his team moves on to the next level of the tournament knowing they got there because they have a boy on a girls team, even if it didn’t give them a competitive advantage, it gave them a regulatory one. If the human-rights policies include “gender-fair” then what’s fair about having a boy on a girls team? Is “gender-fair” only fair to those who aren’t sure about their gender? What about the girls on the teams who know they’re girls, are happy to be girls, and wish to continue to be girls? What part of this is fair to them? Why should one boy who thinks he’s a girl, or pretends to be a girl, or identifies as a girl, have more rights than the actual girls? By the way, the team with the boy on it was the Long Train Mountain Lions. Maybe if they were the Lioness’ the boy would realize he’s on the wrong team. Because of the forfeit, they went to the Championship game, where they got their balls busted, 45 to 26 by the Arlington Memorial Eagles. The story in National Review says Vermont has laws that permit transgender females to compete on teams that correspond to their gender identity. But that’s really two different things. If your transgender, then you must be under some type of medical supervision, especially if you’re a high-school student. Otherwise, you’re not transgendered, you’re just a guy who thinks he’s a girl. That’s gender identity. You may identify with the opposite gender, but you haven’t yet become it. Transgender and gender identity are not, and should not be confused as, the same thing. What happens if the boy on the girls basketball team, who identifies as female, graduates from high school and then decides he identifies as a man again. Will the basketball team be forced to vacate any wins they accumulated with a boy on the team? I should hope so. Because it wasn’t fair to begin with. Not fair to the sports community, not fair to the opposing teams, and not gender-fair to all the girls on those teams. Instead, why doesn’t Vermont make a law that says if you don’t think you were born with the right sex organs, then don’t try to join a sports team until you’re sure. Play the guitar instead. Learn to paint, or find some other hobby that you can enjoy with anyone, regardless of gender, and stop ruining sports for people who are confident in the bodies they were born with. Am I sorry that you can’t play sports because you can’t confirm your sex? No. There are a lot of people who want to play sport who can’t. You know why they can’t? Because they’re not built for it! They’re not big enough or strong enough or agile enough or fast enough. We don’t feel sorry for those people, and nobody should feel sorry for the person who’s a boy and wants to play on the girls team. And the state of Vermont, and more precisely the Vermont Principal’s Association, needs to take a closer look at the harm their doing to the thousands of girls who are secure in their bodies in order to appease one boy who isn’t.

Well, he’s not the only boy. In October of last year, a girls soccer coach was suspended for “misgendering” a transgender student. Well, if a student doesn’t know what sex they are, how is anybody else supposed to know? This isn’t a new problem, though. I grew up in the 70’s, and a lot of men had long hair back then. There were plenty of occasions when a guy was behind what he thought was a woman because of the Jordache Jeans and the long hair. He might have even whistled or said something like, “Hey baby, you got a porch to go with that swing?” only to have the long-haired person up ahead turn around to display his beard and mustache. Oops. Sorry, man. Men got misgendered all the time in the 70’s, but nobody got suspended over it. In fact, what was more likely to happen was some old timer shakin’ his fist at you, telling you to get a haircut. Ya hippie. 

Let’s go back liner

1556

In Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer is burned at the stake. You might wonder what somebody could possibly do to warrant being burned at the stake as a fitting punishment. Who would have the authority in 1556 to order somebody to be executed in such a fashion? In today’s civil society, the places that allow capital punishment are required by law to make the ordeal as quick and painless as possible. Sometimes executions have been delayed or permanently postponed because of lawsuits protesting the manner of execution. But in 1556, Queen Mary I was a Catholic, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was a Protestant, and promoting his beliefs was considered heresy by the queen. While it seems like cruel and unusual punishment to modern society, there are those among us today who believe it to be a fitting punishment for those who have different political views. From Margaret Sanger to John Boehner to Sunny Hostin, there’s been too much division politically. But religions have been killing each other for far longer. Fewer young people are following any religion at all, and I can’t blame them. Religion has led to more death and destruction than any political party in the last 500 years. But politics and religion are often combined. Some religions are political systems as well. 

1765

The British Parliament passes the Stamp Act that introduces a tax to be levied directly on its American colonies. You see, a war England had with some other country left them a little short on cash, so they came up with this idea that they would tax any paper correspondence in the North American colonies. You know, just to generate some revenue. Well, the people of the colonies didn’t like the idea at all, and used violence against the tax collectors to intimidate them into resigning, according to history dot com. The Stamp Act was repealed the following year, but the legislation included a Declaratory Act that said the British could make any law in the colonies it wanted. Later that week, also in 1765, The Kingdom of Great Britain passes the Quartering Act that requires the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops. That meant that any British troop who came to your door was allowed to stay there. So, we won’t tax your documents, but you’ll have to let British soldiers live in your house. Needless to say, most 18th century homes didn’t have guest rooms, so letting British soldiers stay with you just might be an inconvenience. On the other hand, I’ve been a member of the military stationed in far away places. There were several times when I was welcomed into the home of a local. Now that I look back on it, it was always a woman who allowed me to spend the night at her domicile, while there was no mandate to do so. Maybe American troops are more polite than British troops. We didn’t need a law to get quartered in a local domicile. Thank goodness for the women of Guam and West Berlin for allowing me to stay with you when there was no law requiring you do so. Your hospitality is in stark contrast to the colonists who had issue with providing space for British troops of 1765. In fact, the British troops were so unwelcome, that ten years later, in 1775, Patrick Henry delivers his speech that included the phrase, “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia. It’s not long, so please allow me to recite it for you here: 

“Gentlemen may cry, ‘Peace, Peace,’ but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? ... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"

It seems like a lot of people today are happy with the government controlling their lives and paying them for the privilege to do so through social programs that keep track of your life in a way that would impress the data collectors in China. Certain parts of the government want you to be dependant upon them. Patrick Henry’s plea has been forgotten by a large part of our society. You’ve relinquished liberty for security, which means you have neither. Patrick Henry would rather die than live like those of us who rely on the government for our sustenance; for our survival. Liberty means different things to different people, but when you’re trapped in a program run by the government, you don’t have it, regardless of your definition. 

This week in 1857, Elisha Otis’s first elevator is installed at 488 Broadway in New York City. He’s also the first guy to look a woman straight in the eye and ask, “Going down?”

1863

The SS Georgiana, said to have been the most powerful Confederate cruiser, is destroyed on her maiden voyage with a cargo of munitions, medicines and merchandise then valued at over $1,000,000. I wonder how much that would be worth in the 1960’s? When one-million dollars was a lot. I’ll have the answer for you in just a bit.

1894

Coxey’s Army, the first significant American protest march, departs Massillon, Ohio for Washington D.C. It’s mostly known because it was the only one of several similar marches to actually reach the nation’s capital. It was all for an effort to get the government to put more money into circulation, and to use the money to build more roads. Jacob Coxey and some of his followers were arrested for trespassing on the lawn of the Capitol, and his effort had no real impact on public opinion nor government policy. But because it was the first of its kind, we remember and revere the occasion by giving it a military nickname like Coxey’s Army. Unlike actual armies, it grew in number as it got closer to its target. It began with about a hundred men in Ohio, and grew to about 500 by the time it got to Washington, D.C. If it were a battle of attrition, Coxey would have won...

1913

Over 360 are killed and 20,000 homes destroyed in the Great Dayton Flood in Dayton, Ohio. A series of storms had already soaked the ground when nearly a foot of rain fell in a three-day period. According to wikipedia, 90 percent of it was runoff, and The Great Miami River overflowed, levees failed, and downtown Dayton was filled with up to 20 feet of water. The storms that caused the great flood in Dayton effected other states, too, including Indiana, Kentucky, New York and Pennsylvania. Climate change! Said nobody. 

1915

Pluto is photographed for the first time but is not recognized as a planet. It’s not recognized as a planet now, either, but back in 1915, they just didn’t know what it was they were looking at. Pluto is so far away from the sun that it still hasn’t made an orbit around it since it was discovered. And it won’t for another 175 years! Talk about a slacker…. Anyway, Pluto’s not even considered a planet anymore, even though it has an orbit around the sun just like Earth does. But it is rather small, so the powers that be relieved Pluto of planet status, and now consider it a minor or dwarf planet, whichever is more politically correct. 

1916

Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity. The general theory of relativity is different from the special theory of relativity. His special relativity theory came out over a decade earlier, and you’re probably familiar with it. E=mc2. It shows that matter and energy are interchangeable, and that more mass equals more energy. The general theory of relativity took another decade of work, and is much more complicated than the celebrated special theory. General relativity explains the curvature of space and time as effected by mass. Speaking of warping time, it was this week in 1918 that the U.S. Congress establishes time zones and approves daylight saving time. While daylight savings time is not practiced everywhere, and not even everywhere in the United States, there is a push to get rid of it. I have to admit, I’ve had a little bit of a tougher time getting out of bed in the days following the annual “spring forward” ritual. The good thing is, many of our electronic gadgets change the time all by themselves. But I do have a few that I have to do by hand. The hard part is getting the clock on the stove to match the clock on the microwave above it. If I can’t get them within a second of each other, it bothers me. They can be difficult times.

1919

In Milan, Italy, Benito Mussolini founds his Fascist political movement. He took the name from the Latin word, fasces, which, according to wikipedia, referred to a bundle of elm or birch rods meant to symbolize penal authority in ancient Rome. Many of the early fascist movements were brought to us by people like Mussolini, Hitler and others in places like Austria, Portugal, Greece, and even in Norway, although for only a week. Japan also became fascist under the military of supervision of Tojo Hideki. Back then, it was conservatives who were always the spoilermakers for fascist governments. But today, the wikipedia definition of fascism says it’s, “a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.” I’m not sure how the definition began with the words, “far-right.” Because the rest of the definition seems more like the far-left we see today. It may not be ultranationalist, but we have a dictatorial leader who doesn’t believe he has to answer questions of reporters, he leads a party which subordinates the interests of the individual for the perceived good of the nation and race. Although the nation and race might be China and the Chinese. And the Biden administration is taking control of our movements, our appliances, our currency, and our economy. Most of us don’t like the direction of our economy, but the left has a plan that doesn’t include you or me. If you need a definition of fascism, look no further than the current government of the United States of America. Yet fascism is what the left accuses the right of being. Historically, it has always been the conservatives who defeat fascism. Don’t be fooled into thinking the conservatives are fascism. Wikipedia says fascists are far-right, but a closer look at today’s political directions would indicate the left is now leading the way toward fascism. The wikipedia page shows a photograph of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. When you examine the direction of the two American political parties, it’s the Democrats and the citizens who follow their doctrine who are less accepting, more exclusionary, more militaristic in their approach to social acceptance and law. The hallmarks of fascism have become the practices of left-wing protesters. Nearly two dozen people were arrested protesting a police training site in Georgia recently. Only two of them were from Georgia. One was from Canada. These people are brought in on somebody’s dollar to disrupt whatever the people bankrolling the operation deem needs disruption, and the troops set in motion. The definition of fascism includes nationalization, so you might want to try to figure out which nation these violent protesters in Georgia are fighting for, because it isn’t the United States of America. While many Americans agree the police need more training, these people are protesting a police training site. With rocks and fireworks and molotov cocktails. That sounds like fascism to me. And it’s the left wing doing it, not the right wing, as the wikipedia definition might lead you to believe. 

1935

Shah Reza Pahlavi formally asks the international community to call Persia by its native name, Iran. I once met a very pretty girl on the campus of UC Santa Barbara, and when I asked her where she was from, she said she was from Persia. This was in the mid 1980’s, and the Iran hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days until Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President of the United States, was still fresh in the minds of most Americans. So this young lady felt it necessary to fudge a little with the name of her home country. It had probably worked on many of her college friends, but having recently served in the U.S. Air Force, I was familiar with world politics and history. When I said, “Don’t you mean Iran?” she looked a little surprised and admitted I was correct. With a smile, she knew I wasn’t the type to hold her accountable for the actions of her government. 

1965

The wreck of the SS Georgiana, valued at over $50,000,000 and said to have been the most powerful Confederate cruiser, is discovered by then teenage diver and pioneer underwater archaeologist E. Lee Spence, exactly 102 years after its destruction. So that answers the question from earlier in the program. When the ship sunk, her cargo was worth one million dollars, by 1965, the value appreciated to 50-million dollars. That’s a 49-million dollar increase over 102 years. That’s almost a half a million dollars interest a year on a one-million dollar investment. I’d like to see a bank match that. I guess it just goes to show you that the best place to invest your wealth is at the bottom of the sea. 

1972

The United States Congress sends the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification. Originally written in 1923, it finally was sent after being introduced again in 1971. States had until 1979 to ratify it, but not enough did to make it an amendment. The deadline was extended to 1982, but still didn’t get enough states to support it. Believe it or not, there were a lot of women who didn’t want the Equal Rights Amendment passed for various reasons. But the amendment got new life after 2010, and Nevada, Illinois and Virginia all ratified it. But because of the deadline, and other states that had previously ratified the amendment but then backed out, there hasn’t yet been an Equal Rights Amendment added to the U.S. Constitution. 

1989

Exxon Valdez oil spill: In Prince William Sound in Alaska, the Exxon Valdez spills 240,000 barrels of petroleum after running aground. It was certainly an environmental disaster. Wild life was badly effected, and a lot of it were killed off by the toxic liquid. Coverage of the accident brought the pollution into our homes on the television, and changed a lot of minds about the importance of conservation and the effects of industry on the environment. As it turns out, pipelines are the cleanest and safest way to transport petroleum products. While President Biden ended the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office, The Biden administration has surprisingly given the green light to oil drilling in northern Alaska. His promise to the progressive wing of his party that there would be no more drilling for oil on federal lands has them up in arms, while several lawsuits have already been filed to stop the move. The fact is, even with electric cars, we still have a huge need for oil and gasoline. Obviously, our government is trying to ween us off of it, but perhaps they’re now realizing we’re not quite as ready for the transition as they thought we were. 

Phone and email liner

One of the reasons I started this podcast was because I was tired of the partisan bickering between political movements, and how the press was taking advantage of our emotions by the way they were reporting what they called news. Well, it turns out, I’m not alone. Why, yes, everybody else did start a podcast, but that’s not what I meant. A story in the Hill says an organization named Starts with Us commissioned a survey that showed 87 percent of Americans are tired of partisan politics. It cites other unattributed surveys as backing up the view with statistics that only two-fifths of Americans have a favorable opinion of either political party. It goes on to say that a majority of Republicans, and a large majority of Democrats would like to see their elected representatives work with the other party instead of being obstructionist. Well, the Hill wanted to find out just how much more press coverage the hyper-partisan politicians were getting than the bipartisan ones. In order to do that, they first had to identify who the most hyper-partisan politicians were, and who the most bipartisan politicians were. They say they did this by studying their promotion of bipartisanship and attempts to work with the opposing party in 2021 and in 2022. Then, they tallied the total number of times each one was covered in the press during a two-month period in late 2022. The story says they added up all new hits from what they describe as the most popular news platforms, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and the major broadcast and cable news outlets, which I would imagine include Fox News, CNN, MSNBC as well as ABC, NBC and CBS news programs. What they discovered is that the most hyper-partisan got four times as much coverage as the bipartisan. So it’s our media that’s fomenting the division Americans are feeling. And the Hill has exposed it with their article, right? So, does the author, Daniel De Vise deserve credit for exposing how the media is playing us, keeping us divided at the request of the politicians who make the most noise and bring the media the most attention? Sure, we can give Daniel some credit. But he’s just as guilty of the rest of the media he’s exposing. Let’s start by recognizing that most of the news outlets used in the study are liberal news outlets. Let me quote a part of the story for you: “ Fox News rose to dominate cable news largely by fomenting partisan anger among Republicans. Partisan sparring on both sides now dominates the broadcast news cycle, critics say, and it has spread to the world of print.” Fox news may have fomented anger among Republicans, to to call it partisan anger adds the intent of meaning the anger is somehow wrong, when it may be entirely justified. And partisan sparring doesn’t exist on what he called the broadcast news cycle, because broadcast news, meaning network news as opposed to cable news, is all liberal. I don’t know what critics he’s talking about. He also says it’s spread to the world of print, as if the print media is somehow just waking up to partisan politics as a way to sell newspapers. I got news for you, Daniel, print media is way ahead of broadcast and cable news when it comes to hyper-partisan politics. A couple hundred years ahead. Still, the author goes on to say, “The New York Times, a publication sometimes accused of a liberal slant, covered Marjorie Taylor Greene 84 times in the two months considered in the study. The Times covered Rep. Matt Gaetz, a hyperpartisan Florida Republican, 15 times. Don Bacon, the bipartisan Republican, drew coverage only seven times. (Florida Republican) Bilirakis drew no coverage at all. So he’s trying to convince us that the New York Times isn’t liberal by telling us how many time they covered hyper-partisan Republicans? When he wrote that the New York Times is sometimes accused of a liberal slant, I almost did a spit-take! It might just be the most liberal newspaper in the country. Even the authors use of fraction two-fifths instead of the more common 40 percent is a way to try to deceive the reader. He says a majority of Republicans and a large majority of Democrats want to see their representative reach across the aisle. So what’s the difference between a majority and a large majority? Well, one sounds better than the other.

I thing it’s sad that even a story that’s supposed to caution us about hyper-partisanship can’t seem to be written without hyper-partisanship, however the attempt to make it cleverly disguised as neutral reporting. It’s true, Americans are tired of the great divide between our elected officials. Maybe if the press stopped covering the hyper-partisan politicians instead of the bipartisan politicians, we’d be better off as a country. However, the media can’t sell newspapers or get eyes on the television or ears on the radio if they cover how we get along. Until we start believing the world we see around us instead of the one we see in the media, we’ll continue to think the other side, whomever that may be, is only trying to hurt us.

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly. Copyright 2023. Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube. I’m your host, Bob Woodley for thou ad infinitum.