Dear Commons Community,

More fallout from the Republican Presidential Primary.  Fox News, the Republican Party’s major media mouthpiece, has take a couple of knocks from the Republcian candidates.  The latest is Newt Gingrich who tore into Fox News yesterday during a meeting with Tea Party leaders in Delaware, saying that his former network home has been deeply biased against him.  The Huffington Post reported:

“I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said, according to Real Clear Politics. “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That’s just a fact.”

Gingrich’s comments echo those of Rick Santorum, another former Fox News contributor. Both were dropped by the network when they began their presidential bids, and both have accused Fox News of favoring frontrunner Romney over them. Santorum even said it directly to Fox News host Brian Kilmeade.

“He has Fox News shilling for him every day — no offense, Brian, but I see it,” he told Kilmeade.

What is all the more remarkable is that, for a long time, Romney had near-poisonous relations with Fox News.

In his remarks, Gingrich said that he thinks Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch made the call to favor Romney. “I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point said, ‘I want Romney,’ … “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches Fox.”

And we thought that Fox News was the “fair and balanced” network!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Justice is being served by the decision of a special state prosecutor to bring second-degree murder charges against George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager. A New York Times editorial comments:

“It is critically important for the prosecution and the defense to present the fullest explanation of the shooting before an impartial jury. The need for a thorough investigation of Mr. Zimmerman’s conduct has been obvious since the day of the shooting in February.

The killing stirred national outrage after the local police department failed to bring charges and accepted Mr. Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense under the state’s dangerous Stand Your Ground law. This law — a sop to the gun lobby by state politicians — foolishly gave licensed gun owners the benefit of the doubt in shootings if they “reasonably believed” their lives were threatened. It has hobbled the work of prosecutors by requiring them to disprove a shooter’s claim of self-defense when a slain victim cannot contradict that claim.

Angela Corey, the special prosecutor, declined to discuss details of the case but said that if the Stand Your Ground law is invoked by the defense, “we will fight it” with evidence that the shooting was unjustified. In this case, Mr. Zimmerman exited his car to follow the teenager despite a 911 dispatcher’s warning: “We don’t need you to do that…”

As the case proceeds, the Stand Your Ground law should be on trial as well. It has invited gun owners to flirt with vigilantism by eliminating the traditional requirement to seek a path of retreat before resorting to force in self-defense cases. Claims of justifiable homicide have tripled in Florida since 2005, when the state became the first in the country to enact such a law. A score of other states have followed suit.

That the Police Department in Sanford, Fla., did not bring charges weeks ago shows how this law undermines the justice system and harms public safety. It must be repealed if the Trayvon Martin case is to advance the meaning of justice.”

Undermine indeed!

Tony