Many of you may have noticed a peculiar trend occurring among the talk radio opinion mongers. It seems that many of them have taken to besmirching Mike Huckabee while giving repeated passes to Mitt Romney. This trend has puzzled me for some time. I just couldn't figure out why these hosts would come down harder on one candidate than another when they are claiming to be unbiased and only giving the listener “the best election coverage”. These are people that I, along with millions of other rely on daily to give us a greater insight into the world around than the main-stream-media is reporting. Well, the answer to this dilema has become clear and a level of my trust has been dashed.
On November 16th 2006, Clear Channel, the company that owns the radio stations that most of these talk radio political gurus are contracted to, announced that they were entering into a merger agreement with Bain Capital. “So what?” you may ask, “corporate mergers happen all the time”. Well it just so happens that the founder and, at that time, CEO of Bain Capital was none other than Mitt Romney. Governor Romney is no longer CEO, however he remains a silent partner and recieves an income from the company.
What does this mean? It means that, essentially, Mitt Romney owns the contracts of Glenn Beck, Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh (among other), all of whom have spent significant time on their respective shows denigrating Mike Huckabee. However, they all have a vested interest in doing so. Mike Huckabee is challenging their boss for the Republican nomination for President. One would think, at least, in the interest of fair disclosure, each of these pundits would announce their conflict of interest at the outset of their anti-Huckabee diatribes.
Another concern I have with this information is that it has never made it into the major media. Why is that? It really needs to be there.
Oh, one other thing: Almost all Clear Channel stations are also affiliated with Fox News. So much for fair and balanced. More like - Skewed and biased.
Sources:
http://www.clearchannel.com/Corporate/PressRelease.aspx?PressReleaseID=1824
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_Capital
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/017694.html
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Thursday, January 3, 2008
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