Carl Koslowski at Hollywood In Toto reports leftist actor Ed Asner recently took an hour from his busy schedule to discuss both his career and political involvements with The Campaign with Ernie Powell on the Radio Titans podcast network.
Asner played journalist Lou Grant, but he bizarrely thinks the media are not liberal at all. In our country, there’s only right-wing newspapers and “at best centrist TV networks.” Forget MSNBC or PBS or The New York Times....
First of all, media for the most part is under the control of center to right owners. Fox News dominates in terms of television. I don’t know if people watch it for its carnival aspect. The news is not a progressive-based news, it’s centrist at best. Every other country in the world has papers that reflect very different political parties – France, England, you name it. Not here. All you’ve got here is Republican-dominated newspapers, at best centrist TV networks and in some cases right wing. People are not broad thinkers in our country, but they’re not coached to be.
Asner also can pretty easily compare radical Islam to American religious conservatives:
I’m fighting for the First Amendment, which is freedom of speech, but in these times of extreme Muslims as we see in Europe, freedom of speech when it involves speaking against religion, that freedom gets challenged. Challenged in Holland and Denmark, and those chickens are coming home to roost in terms of world politics.
This country has a heavy theological imprint on it. We inserted “Under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s. A recent survey was taken that showed that for all of the extreme right wing pressures brought to bear, when you remove the evangelical percentage from that, the extreme right wing dries up pretty rapidly. The evangelicals create the agitation for right-wing activity.
On the economy, Asner went on his usual bender about how America’s so capitalist and labor unions are so powerless, that we’re setting conditions for socialist revolution:
Everything with government help and guidance is all due to the help of organized labor, yet this country has done all it can to destroy organized labor. Taft-Hartley law. What used to be the middle class is becoming rapidly the poor class of citizens in this country. They’re doing a wonderful job of creating the grounds for revolution in this country. If that’s what they want, I hope they get it.
