Chain Chain Chain...Chain of...

While on my lunch break the other night I got on Politifact.org just to see what kind of silliness was going on in the world. Seems a woman, a Ms. McCaughey, appeared on Fred Thompson's talk show, telling about a section of the new health care bill where seniors enrolled in medicare would be required to attend counselling on how to end their lives in order to save the system money. Totally bogus, of course--got a "pants-on-fire" rating. But sure enough, the next day, my Dad sends an email about this very topic, which he prefaces with this comment:

If you are satisfied that NBC and ABC are telling you all you need to know about what the government is doing, you need to start listening to other sources of information.

Funny, since he believes that FoxNews is the only network telling us all we need to know about what the government is doing. Like in 1938 when CBS was the only network reporting that Martians had landed in New Jersey.

It seems sometimes that his thirst for knowledge begins and ends with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and chain email.
Network news is not what I consider my primary source of information. I prefer to hear from several different kinds of voices with several different points of view. I like PBS and NPR particularly, but the networks and USAToday will suffice for a quick overview. And I don't trust any partisan website regardless of whose side they are on. But in spite of their brevity, I expect the reporting on NBC and ABC, etc., to be at least accurate, something Fox doesn't seem concerned with. (This isn't the only time I've gotten something from my Dad that originated from Fox, and then turned out to be less than factual.)
Politifact.org and Factcheck.org and Snopes.com have teams of people who investigate the stuff that goes out on the internet, and Politifact even goes to the trouble of explaining how they came by their information. Usually it's pretty simple, like a phone call or two. So why is it so hard for Fox to do the same thing?