We should keep in mind that RFK Jr. wasn’t just saying this about Fox by itself. He made a cogent point that it’s a complete echo chamber of right wing AM radio hosts like Limbaugh, who the fans listen to every day, and at night they get the same opinion material from the television on Fox, all of which reinforces itself.

Greta van Susteren’s show now takes this to the level of including Limbaugh’s rants as part of her daily mash-up of right wing attacks on Obama, including several GOP congresspeople looking serious and concerned, and then including Limbaugh as though his musings had any weight.

There’s definitely something off about a situation where you have Limbaugh, who has no formal education to know anything about tax law, constitutional law or about the history and politics of this country outside of his own limited feelings about such things. being held up as some kind of expert on conservative philosophy and an authoritative voice for GOP politicians to hear. The same goes even farther for Sean Hannity, who dropped out of school. Add to that multiple personalities on Fox who are completely uninformed or are just bitter (Gutfeld, Bolling, Huckabee) and one former schoolteacher who left that profession very quickly to be a TV personality (O’Reilly) and a former lawyer turned pundit who conveniently forgets the law when opining about right wing positions.

The result is that you have a lot of people who know very little about history and politics repeating right wing talking points to each other and to a hard-line fan base that just wants to hear those talking points repeated to them. The result is the kind of polarization we’ve been seeing in this country for at least 25 years. Things were already in a nasty place by the time Nixon took office, but having this intense echo chamber amplifying the anger has taken the nastiness into the stratosphere.

I agree 100% that FOX has divided the country with many false stories and half truths. They have contributed to hatred and bigotry against various groups that will damgae relationships for years to come.

@patrick: The only problem with that theory is that HuffPo has, for several years now, given ample space to right-wingers to spew their BS. And when Arianna engaged in that little deal with AOL (disclosure moment here: I use AOL as my primary internet browser and e-mail account; I also have a HuffPo user account), she opened up HuffPo to AOL’s unbelievable right-wing nutcases.

I can’t remember the specifics, but a year or two ago, there was a blog entry or whatever that openly endorsed/supported some right-wing economic scheme as though there was really no viable alternative. I wish I could recall who the author of the piece was but I know it was some fool connected with Cato Institute or Heritage (I’m more inclined to say Cato but it’s not like there’s any real difference) and I posted a comment expressing my shock that HuffPo would allow such right-wing tripe on the site. And yet, you’ve got the right-wing nutcases hanging out there who genuinely believe (or are seriously deluded) that HuffPo is a “liberal tool.” Usually when I encounter some RWNC who’s decrying HuffPo’s “liberalism,” I can’t help but ask why the fool is bothering with the site. (What’s even funnier are the RWNCs who’ve obviously been there a while—it’s hard to post thousands of comments and garner hundreds and hundreds of fans unless you’ve been hanging out/trolling for a significant period of time.)

As Ed Asner would say, piss on KKKlannity.

I expect the invitation to Huffingtonpost is part of the same phenomenon of the SCLM bending over backwards to not appear one-sided or biased.At least at Huffpo I’d expect Shun to be asked about his waterboard pledge.