"Independent" in Name Only

Critics have fits when Fox News claims that it's "fair and balanced."

They go nuts when O'Reilly welcomes them into the "no spin zone."

But Fox isn't the only news outlet that doesn't quite live up to billing.

It's odd, for instance, that so many publications with the name "Independent" are so far from independent in terms of their thinking and editorial content. There's The Independent of Great Britain, which is slavishly left-wing, as I learned first-hand last week. There's The Colorado Independent, an online news site -- and it also closely toes the liberal party line. Finally, of course, there's our own Colorado Springs Independent -- and we all know where it's coming from.

All three publications call themselves "independent" but seem so vested in ideas that lead not to independence, or self-reliance, but to the expansion of government power and dependence of the individual. And what exactly are they independent of, since they're on such warm and friendly terms with the state? Statism, collectivism, liberalism, whatever you want to call it -- it's a philosophy that destroys true independence by making government the master. There's little room for true independence in a world built by collectivists. This misuse of the term, and inversion of its meaning, is nothing short of Orwellian.

I'll insist that Fox dump "fair and balanced" when these publications change their names to something more honest, like "The Dependent."