To the Editor:

One of the most alarming developments in the last several years is our inability to agree on basic facts.  Yes, there have always been widely varying political viewpoints, but not to the extremes that we see today.

I remember when there were only a very few news sources. We watched Walter Cronkite report the national news and that basically concurred with what you could hear on the other TV channels and what you read in the newspapers.

But now we have Fox and several other sources which, to a large extent, report a very different reality to millions of Americans. I often wonder why their reporting and their opinions differ so from the mainstream media.

Despite the agreement among 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists that we are facing man-made catastrophic climate change, Fox regularly casts doubt on it. Who benefits? The fossil-fuel industry does. Who loses? Our children do.

They characterize any attempt to enact common-sense gun reform as proof that the government wants to take away all guns. It simply isn’t true and it is the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers who benefit from the reporting of this misinformation. (In fact, 60 to 70 percent of Americans favor common-sense reform to help insure the safety of our students and our communities in general.)

The recent Republican tax cut went overwhelmingly to the wealthy. Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 saw a savings of $870, while households making over a million dollars received a tax cut of $69,660. If you made between $20,000 and $30,000, you received a mere $180.

Meanwhile, the resulting expansion of the national debt is being used to frame the need to cut back our Social Security and Medicare, the programs that we have paid into our whole lives. This is verifiable information, but I never seem to hear it reported on Fox.

The Republican Party that our fathers and grandfathers voted for has moved far to the right, serving big corporations and the ultra wealthy, instead of people like you and me. There is too much at stake for the average citizen to not question some of his or her long-held beliefs and allegiances.

Let’s not vote against our own self-interests. Take a few minutes and do some of your own fact-checking online. You might be very surprised at what you find.

Paul Scilipoti

Knox