Tonight on Countdown Keith Olbermann awarded the coveted “Worst Person in the World” trophy to Rupert Murdoch (again) and the president of the Fox Stations Group, Dennis Swanson. The honor was attributed to a new initiative to extend the Fox propaganda down the line to their local affiliates:

“For a long time, the one saving grace of the Fixed News propaganda machine was that it did not extend to the local stations Murdoch owns, like Channel 5 in New York, Channel 11 in Los Angeles. Well, you can forget the one saving grace. Multiple industry sources say that within the last six weeks or so, local news directors at the local Fox O&Os have been receiving memoranda and e-mails from Swanson and other executives, and even from Murdoch himself. ‘Content directives,” they’re called, to make the local news on Fox broadcast stations around the country look and sound just as shaded, just as biased as that on Fox News Channel.”

Fox Television controls one of the largest station groups in the country with 27 stations, including nine of the top ten markets. The combined audience for local news programming nationwide is far greater than that of the cable Fox News Channel. Local viewers are often more engaged by content that impacts their daily lives and thus, more vulnerable to disinformation. The potential for propagandizing is enormous and apparently this has not escaped Murdoch’s attention.

This is precisely why media reform is so critical to our fragile democracy. With giant, multinational corporations forming media monopolies, the threat to independent and diverse opinion is growing. Fox not only owns stations that cover a third of the country, in some markets they own TV stations, radio stations, and the major daily newspapers. And that doesn’t even include their affiliate relationships with independent stations and station groups throughout the country. This is an obvious impediment to the free marketplace of ideas. It is the reason that it is so imperative to roll back the corporate consolidation that has taken place in the last couple of decades, and to restore reasonable media ownership regulations.

If we, the people, don’t stand up and take action to preserve a free and unfettered press, we are likely to see more of these “content directives” from Fox and others. Before long we will have mini-Beck’s and Hannity’s in every city, delivering the local news in their typically dishonest and self-serving style. And the last thing this country needs is more of the lies, divisiveness, and manufactured ignorance that Fox is so good at disseminating.