There is a new book out about Rupert Mur­doch, The Man Who Owns the News, writ­ten by Michael Wolff, which details the evo­lu­tion of Fox News and its right wing bent. In essence, it is all about money and Mur­doch acknowl­edges a dis­like of Bill O’Reilly but keeps him because he makes money. (You can watch the video below).

As some­one who believes very strongly that the media failed mis­er­ably to do their job dur­ing the build up to war in Iraq and fully inves­ti­gate claims made by the admin­is­tra­tion I have a strong neg­a­tive reac­tion to Mur­doch and Fox. Toss­ing jour­nal­is­tic respon­si­bil­ity aside for a media for­mula that makes money and costs Amer­i­can lives is repel­lent. Worse, Fox News delib­er­ately upsets view­ers, riles them up, agi­tates them and plays on their fears… and their actions have been harm­ful to the public.

Of course, Fox was not alone, the NY Times and other main­stream media were just as com­plicit in tak­ing our nation to war as the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. Had they done more than cut and paste White House press releases and done the inves­ti­ga­tions that many inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists and blog­gers had done and used their resources and pub­lic access to inform the pub­lic that US intel­li­gence was wrong, we very likely would not be in that quag­mire and more than 4,000 US troops would not have died.

The very same can be said of small town papers on local issues, for exam­ple, I do not believe that The World has prop­erly inves­ti­gated the claims of ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ being sold by Jor­dan Cove with respect to the new LNG ter­mi­nal. They have left it to cit­i­zens to do the dig­ging up of sta­tis­ti­cal and empir­i­cal evi­dence and analy­sis of other projects and eval­u­ate the like­li­hood of real long term ben­e­fits to the community.

In today’s profit dri­ven news indus­try, inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists and blog­gers are often on point in these inves­ti­ga­tions and now work closely with main­stream media to dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion to the pub­lic. Blog­gers may not have all the resources of big media nor do they have the over­head and to a great degree they are not lim­ited to the same constraints.

Locally, I write a weekly col­umn for The Sen­tinel, an opin­ion col­umn and occa­sion­ally do polit­i­cal report­ing or report on other mat­ters when I have the oppor­tu­nity. While I enjoy writ­ing for the paper and shar­ing infor­ma­tion about energy and other mat­ters, obvi­ously I can­not be as down to earth or free with my opin­ions as I am on this blog.

For exam­ple, the paper would never pub­lish the image of the ‘harpy’ that I found (though sev­eral peo­ple have told me it is a stun­ning like­ness). For that mat­ter, I wouldn’t pub­lish that pic­ture or the accom­pa­ny­ing com­men­tary in the paper any­way because that is what this blog is for. This is an opinion/news blog… my opin­ion about the news.

While writ­ing for small town papers is much dif­fer­ent than other large papers and jour­nals I have writ­ten for, in each case, the pub­li­ca­tion hopes to inform or enter­tain their read­ers. Small town papers may not be as glitzy and not have mul­ti­ple edi­tors and fact check­ers as their big city brethren but they do inform their read­ers, accept past dead­line sub­mis­sions, last minute photo sub­mis­sions, late ads and clas­si­fieds and impart the spirit of the story.

Every­one is pleased and happy that the city coun­cil made a quick deci­sion, rather than drag­ging the process out, to bring Dian Cour­tright onto the coun­cil to fill the seat vacated by Kathy Hagan. Every­one that is, except two bit­ter old cur­mud­geons with overt per­sonal agen­das or more accu­rately, per­sonal vendet­tas. With­out any regard for the city, the mayor, the coun­cil or Dian Cour­tright and the peo­ple who voted for her, these two want to use the unusual cir­cum­stances of Hagan’s depar­ture to set­tle old scores that have noth­ing, absolutely noth­ing to do with Dian.

Des­per­ate peo­ple do des­per­ate things and often despi­ca­ble things. Per­haps they will try a few tricks from the Fox play­book and suc­ceed in work­ing up the com­mu­nity, per­haps not. So far, every­one is just dis­gusted with them.