Fraud in Fox News

In a very well-written passage in a classmates blog, Fox News Saves the Day, Cristina discusses a seemingly controversial contribution from News Corp. to the Republican Governors Association. Her arguement is very well developed and she is quite informed about the details and owners of the different organizations. Her arguement raises many good points; some of which were also discussed in the textbook. I lean republican, but even I agree that there are definitly problems with the rules regarding donating to political campaigns.
We all know that Fox (and it's parent company, News Corp.) leans right and CNN leans left, but such an obvious and large donation does stand out. When I first thought about it, I thought it made sense, Fox is conservative, so whats the problem with them donating to a conservative cause? But as Cristina continued to make her point I agreed that sure, you can donate, but don't make it blantantly obvious! The whole point of news companies, oringinally at least, was indeed to provide the public with reliable and objective news,facts, and stories. However, I think it was inevitable that as more and more sources of news appeared, some would decide to lean one way or the other in order to compete and be different. She argues that this deters regular citizens from trusting in their source of news, but I disagree. Whether biased or not, Fox will still provide the news, and the most important thing is that as viewers we understand that that source will have a slant. Unless they are a commited conservative, an average citizen can be just as knowledgeable if they regularily turn to multiple different sources to verify a statistic or story, and find different perspectives on political ideas.
 Cristina's second major point deals with the concept of allowing large corporations to donate huge ammounts of money to a campaign organization. I had to read the section in the book twice before I even began to understand the rules concerning how much and when different groups and individuals could make contributions, it was so complicated. I agree that even candidates seem to contradict themselves, accepting the money and then, if elected, trying to write laws to lessen the influence of those same corporate donations! Candidates seem to be worried that by accepting contributions they then owe the group some benefit in return, which I think really is the unspoken, traditional assumption. All in all, I think to much money is spent on getting our officials elected, and the entire donation process could use reform, but it does work, so I'm not about to complain that terribly. There are so many problems with so many aspects of the governing process that its impossible to fix every one. The important thing is that we continue to learn all we can so that we can make informed decisions on the things we can change.