Balance requires giving examples

To the editor:
I had to laugh when I read Larry Chittum’s response to my last letter recommending FOX News for people who wanted to hear both sides of the issues.
Larry talks about the “propaganda spewed forth by FOX News when it has been proven time and again that FOX has been fast and loose with actual facts on a regular basis.” Clearly Larry doesn’t have a clue and has probably gotten his view of FOX from extreme left wing web sites or the competing liberal networks who combined can’t match Fox’s ratings.
I note that Larry takes a page from the Democrat playbook and doesn’t cite a single one of the “lies” being told on FOX. At least Leonard Pitts cites a handful of pitiful examples on this editorial page once or twice a year. Of course that is a handful of sentences and phrases out of thousands of hours of programming. And most have proven to be either taken out of context or errors that were retracted on a timely basis.
It was Joking Joe Biden and his anti-gun friends who taught the liberal news shows in the ’70s and ’80s that they could get away with letting the Dems tell lies about an issue without providing the actual facts. One example was Biden all over the Sunday news shows telling us that the Glock was an “all plastic terrorist handgun only good for hijacking airplanes.” It is now the most popular law enforcement handgun in the country.
Another favorite example of liberal bias came on ABC morning news three days before the election. They showed about 20 seconds of President George H.W. Bush talking about the improving economic indicators followed by a long interview with an economist who explained how the improving indicators didn’t actually mean the economy was getting better. They finished off by interviewing two people who were unemployed. Three days after the election the same anchor told us the improving economy would help jump start Bill Clinton’s presidency.
Larry also says, “It would be more interesting for Mr. Erwin to explain why, under a failed President, this country is more prosperous now than at any time in the last 10 years.”
What?
In 2006 the economic growth rate was 6.5 percent. The unemployment rate was 4.6 and the labor participation rate was over 66 percent. One has to wonder what world he is living in.
The first four of those 10 years the Dems controlled both houses of Congress, wrote the laws, made the rules, and Obama, as a senator, literally voted for the economy he inherited. He has presided over the slowest recovery since World War II. We have record numbers on food stamps, and the median income has actually gone down.
Trump and Sanders are doing great because people are sick of the lousy economy and the sorry excuses we have for leaders in both parties in Washington.
And yes Larry, Dubya did lead us into the worst recession in 80 years, but he did it with the help of a Democrat-controlled Congress.
That’s called “Fair and Balanced.”
Stephen Erwin
Portland