Today’s recommendation toward more informed voting and citizen participation: Turn off your cable TV news - C-SPAN and some special events like debates excepted. Really. Put a block on those channels. You too can recover from past exposure to this trash masquerading as news: Your take on the world as it actually is will rapidly recover from the endless distortion those operators purvey.

The reasons for that rant are enough to fill several books (and several have been written). Today it is brought to you by one particularly trashy, idiotic and hateful stunt pulled by one of the worst offenders, Bill O’Reilly, one that has a distinct Northwest connection.

It starts [and see this post too from Firedoglake] with two men, business consultants, from the European Union who flew to Seattle to transact business. They’ve been described as appearing as if they might have some Middle Eastern background (to our eyes, based on the photos, they could’ve come from a whole bunch of countries round the globe, including this one). After their business wrapped in Seattle, they decided to have a look around, and hopped a ferry ride.

Their appearance was enough to draw the attention of another passenger, who in turn notified Washington State Ferries officials. Someone followed the two men around, snapped pictures of them (this should start to get a little spooky right about here), and someone apparently concluded they “showed an inordinate interest in the operation of the shipboard systems.” (Tip to ferry passengers: Avert your eyes from the machinery, not that this will be easy since it happens to be all around you.)

The men flew back to Europe, unaware they even been watched. But in the meantime, pictures of the two were printed, and an international manhunt was on. Bear in mind, as Joel Connelly writes in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today, that “No crime was committed. No illegal act by the two men was ever alleged or attributed. No effort to sabotage Washington’s marine highway was ever found.”

In that context, some news organizations were handed the photos and asked the publicize them because, well, these seemed like suspicious people, not that we have any idea what those suspicions are. Among those rejecting the request was the Post-Intelligencer. For all the paper knew, the two men - accused of nothing at all - might be in the area and might turn up after the wrong person saw the pictures, and decided to exact her or her own sense of justice. (We do know the Seattle Times and Fox News, likely among others, did run them.)

Such was the situation (minus the actual identity of the two men) put before O’Reilly, who handed it with just the kind of judgment and insight we’ve come to expect from cable TV news. He sent a producer to Seattle to ambush the P-I’s publisher and ask, “Are you proud of that decision, sir? I mean, they still haven’t found those guys.” They were, he warned America, “still on the loose.”

O’Reilly’s concluding question: “Why is the far left putting the military and all Americans in danger?”

Word of the uproar crossed the pond and got back to the two men, who walked into an American embassy and - concerned they might be arrested (for no reason) the next time they flew to the United States - explained the details of their trip. The FBI concluded there wasn’t, and hadn’t been, a problem.

Connelly was in full lather in today’s column: “It may be Fox News’ goal to whip up hysteria: It’s good for ratings. Our town, by contrast, is a ‘Hate Free Zone.’ Fox News also has a record of broadcasting stuff that turns out to be untrue, such as the claim that Sen. Barack Obama attended a madrass (Muslim religious) school as a boy in Indonesia. CNN actually visited the school, checked out the rumor, and verified that it was false. Does Fox ever apologize for this stuff?”

It was a rhetorical question. Hence the rant at the top of this post. Once again: The best way to deal with this nonsense is to turn it off.

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