He's not with us.
Posted on 01/20/2013 11:04:47 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Let’s pretend that in the spring of 2012 Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, John Engler of the Business Roundtable, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity, and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association began to organize an assembly of right-leaning groups.
Let’s pretend that in the months since there had been not one but two meetings where these luminaries joined with representatives of Christians United For Israel, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Tea Party Express, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the American Petroleum Institute to discuss strategy and promote a series of “structural reforms” that would make it easier for them to advance conservative goals in Congress.
Let’s pretend that by the time of the second meeting, which was held within sight of the White House, the coalition had grown to encompass some 36 different interest groups pledging millions of dollars.
How much press coverage would be devoted to this fictive cabal?
It is impossible to say. But is it not unreasonable to assume that our pretend meeting of the vast right-wing conspiracy would attract far more scrutiny than was devoted to the actual, real-life, believe-it-or-not inaugural meetings of the progressive “Democracy Initiative”? After all, no one seemed to know anything about those meetings, held in June and December 2012, until a writer for Mother Jones named Andy Kroll broke the story on Wednesday. As of this writing exactly two other people, a blogger for the Washington Monthly and a blogger for The Ed Show, have picked up Kroll’s story...
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
Three extraordinary FReepers who have done outstanding/continuous/consistent work on this forum on the MSM target. (there are several others out there)
Well let the new media do the job instead then.
He's not with us.
And not found anywhere in U.S. MSM news:
Algeria hostage crisis: death toll rises to 81
David Cameron is due to update MPs on the aftermath of the Algerian hostage crisis as officials worked to establish the fate of the final missing Britons from the gas plant, and the death toll climbed to at least 81.
The MSM is not going to “cover” the cabal. They ARE the cabal.
This is like expecting the fox that is guarding the henhouse to admit guilt in the recent disaapearance of chickens...
Instead of mainstream media maybe we can call them the low information media.
1) It is not a conspiracy, it is a plan - an AGENDA. Conspiracy definition: “A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
The action of plotting or conspiring.”
Their plans are wide out in the open for any who read and have their eyes open. They are ticking off the items one by one, and are almost completely finished with the plans they made 60-70 years ago. These plans are published, in books, on the web and easily found, they have not tried to hide the evil plans they have.
2) Agree with every one of you, the MSM is PART of the communist cabal, we can expect no help there. The problem is, how to take them down and replace with a legitimate press that actually wants to find the truth?
3) We need to stop calling them progressives. They are COMMUNISTS! I wish Rush and everyone else would have the courage to call them exactly what they are. They want to call themselves progressives because it sounds so much “nicer” and so “forward” thinking, but they are outright 100% communists.
4) I think the above mentioned documentary is so good, that every conservative should buy 10 copies to hand out to friends who are not yet “awake”. Ask them that if they are shocked and disturbed by what they learn, to buy 10 more and pass out to additional friends who have not yet seen it. The information is nothing new to well informed freepers, but would definitely be something new to many half asleep low information voters and packaged in a way to get a lot of information across in an interesting way. My teens really loved it and I think finally understood some of the things we’ve been talking about at the dinner table for years.
Exactly.The only conceivable way to put any pressure at all on them, however, is to first simply be able to say their name. It’s not “the media,” it’s Associated Press journalism. The AP, and the journalism outlets which are members of the AP. Newspapers used to be a fractiously independent bunch, famous for not agreeing about much of anything. But as Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations,
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices.”The inevitable result of connecting all the members of the AP continually via the AP newswire is far more than a single event of “meet[ing] together . . . for merriment and diversion.” The virtual meeting which has gone on continuously via “the wire” since the Civil War era had subverted the independence of the journalism outlets long before you or I were even born. I obviously do not mean that every newspaper has exactly the same editorial stance as every other. But I do mean that such differences as may exist on editorial pages have next to nothing to do with the ideological cast of the part of the newspaper which is likely to be read by a “low information voter."In the absence of ideological competition, journalism devolved into the function, not of explaining the world, but to its lowest common denominator function of entertainment. And it does so in a dystopian way. We all know the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!” Well, that is what the journalist does, whether or not an actual wolf is in sight.
In college I was required to read and comment on the story,
The tale is about a community which has a lottery every year, and everyone looks forward to it with excitement. But as the tale proceeds, we realize that something is amiss. The winner of the lottery is announced, and everyone is happy except the “winner.” The “winner” protests that the lottery wasn’t conducted fairly. What’s wrong with this picture? And it turns out that the “prize” in this lottery is to be stoned to death by all the “losers” of the lottery!
- The Lottery
- Shirley Jackson
As a young man reading that story, it left me cold; I didn’t see the point. Half a century later, I realize that it is a perfect metaphor for the behavior of journalism in America. The public anticipates being entertained by journalism, unmindful of the fact that the people whose reputations are shredded daily are, like as not, not guilty. Or at least, not guilty as charged. The Duke Lacrosse case is a fine illustration of the point. About nine months after the start of it, someone in authority finally stated what had been obvious, reading between the lines of the reporting, within a week of the start of the kerfuffle. The guys were guilty of acting like members of a college fraternity, nothing more. Dragging their names through the mud, and putting their futures in real and serious jeopardy, was all entertainment.
But but similar things go on in journalism all the time. The character assassination of Mitt Romney was a scheduled event. It followed like clockwork the years of calumny against George Bush, and of his father before him. Why would they do that to the Republican, and not to the Democrat? Professional courtesy. The Democrats are in the same business as the journalists, and go along with journalists in their smears of people who make good targets. The Republicans do not. Only a Democrat would, for example, heap scorn on business owners, putting scare quotes around the term “owners.” Democrats elect to be in symbiosis with journalism, and journalism does not elect to separate itself from Democrats in any way other than reserving only one positive label to themselves, and all other positive labels to cooperating Democrats. Journalists intend “progressive” and “moderate” and “centrist” - yes, and “liberal” - as positive labels for people who go along with journalism’s “lottery,” and they reserve to themselves the positive label “objective.” A George Stephanopolis can switch from being “liberal” to being “objective” merely by donning a hat with a “PRESS” tag on it - and a Walter Cronkite can become a flaming “liberal" commentator simply by taking that same hat off. The “PRESS” hat is the only distinction between a “progressive” and an “objective journalist.”
Right now, the Constitution in general and the Second Amendment in particular are undergoing the same sort of ordeal by slander. But of course it is flesh and blood people, relying on the Constitution, who are placed in the position of having their reputations wantonly besmirched. By my estimate there are more than 6000 guns, and approximately 2000 gun owners, for every gun murder which occurs in America in a given year. From those numbers it is obvious that. in general, guns are neither made nor sold nor bought for the purpose of murder. If you ask gun owners, they think that their weapon ownership is a right and in some sense a duty. Whether, by anyone else’s lights, they are correct or not is beside the point that that is a prudential rather than a moral question. But journalism/socialism majors in applying indignant moral answers to merely prudential questions.
BYW, more than a few of those gun owners are present or retired police officers, and even a journalist on the highest of high horses would have difficulty arguing against that. Millions of others are former military, and their behavior should scarcely be difficult to comprehend. Essentially all of the rest are also honest people who correctly - as the 2000 gun owners for every one gun murder statistic makes clear - perceive themselves and their weapons as being no threat of murder, either.
But that is to be bogged down in the present instance. The larger point which I have made is that at any given time, AP journalism is doing the same sort of smear on someone, or some group, as an essential element in its business model.
A good comedian who can explain the progressive agenda in humorous, five second sound bites. :)
Hitlery’s “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” campaign was a total lie, of course.
HST, there was, and is an active and very effective Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, as this article points out. Witness the last few elections.
I wish there were a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. I’d not only join it, I’d support it with my time, my talents and my treasure!
Every day, members of the VLWC wake up and go to work to advance their agenda: destroy America! By hook, by crook or by any other method that works.
The bad news is they are succeeding!
And, there is not much good news.
There is no effective counter group, save the infant Tea Party movement, which really is a number of stand-alone groups and is not yet a well-funded, focused or cohesive movement.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Tea Party! Somehow, someway, we have got to figure out how to overcome all the adversity placed in our way and defeat the LIEberal/Socialist/Marxist/Fascist Scumbags who are actively working to destroy America.
If we lose the 2014 election, you can kiss America good by.
We have our work cut out for us!
The 'main stream media' IS the progressive movement, for a large part. To expect them to uncover/reveal negative and potentially damaging information about liberals, would be expecting them to effectively go against themselves. Any member of the press that does so will instantly be locked out from the DC Beltway/Manhattan cocktail circuit, ruining their careers and all important social lives. That's a bit much to ask of liberals, since their lives are basically void of most anything else.
If knowone knows about it...It didn't happen..!!
Maybe it’s a minor gripe but it’s been mine for a long time. All the Conservative folks, Norquist, LaPiere, et al have been happy to have been assigned to the political “right”. In my view those who stand for the long term stability, financial security, and strict constitutionality of the country are in the political DEAD CENTER. And those of us who live, work and other wise conduct ourselves with those goals in mind should claim the DEAD CENTER. WE should begin every conversation by forcing the progressives and all their friends to the radical revolutionary left and keep them in that box. We can do this-——just shove it back at them in every way and speak to the DEAD CENTER.
So what can be done to return some integrity to journalism?
We do it ourselves.
Not to brag, but I spend several nights every month attending local school board, county commission, and city council meetings in the area and then reporting upon them on my newsblog.
http://lincolnparishnewsonline.wordpress.com/
Much of what I put into practical use, I learned here at FRee Republic. Just about any poster here is capable of reporting in their local areas.
Bookmarked.
I have two suggestions: first, to attempt to embarrass journalism by pointing out the illogic of accepting anyone’s word as to their own objectivity, and second, to sue the AP into oblivion. It’s my understanding from the Internet that SCOTUS has, in 1945 or thereabouts, found the AP to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But back then the AP’s mission of disseminating news using minimum transmission bandwidth was so important that it made the AP “too big to fail.” Almost Seventy years later, the requisite long-distance information transmission bandwidth is veritably “too cheap to meter.” So a lawsuit alleging the collusion and the systematic slander which is the mainstay of AP journalism could potentially obliterate the AP. Whether it is possible to break journalism’s headlock on the body politic is a different question, and would be uncharted territory.
“Journalism’s” headlock on the body politic can be broken, and we can do it. I do it every day here in North Central Louisiana.
But it’s not a part-time thing, and it requires commitment.
One of the most disappointing things about launching my own newsblog has been the reluctance and laziness of folks in my area to join in and also do newsblogs. I get all sorts of advice on what to write about and what to investigate, but very little help when I ask someone to attend a school board meeting and do a writeup while I’m at the city council meeting.
But most are very content to show up at the coffee shop in the morning and run their mouths about the no account politicians on the school board, but that’s all they’ll do about it. Ask them to go to a meeting, and suddenly there’s this important episode of Duck Commander on TV that night.
And if you decide to become a reporter, you can’t start and then taper off on coverage. Once you start, you can’t quit. People expect news coverage every day.
It requires giving up the Lazy Boy once or twice a week to go to meetings and report on what happened. You have to sit and listen and take notes. Who made the motion. Who voted how. How much did the yearly budget increase or decrease. What’s the tax millage rate for the year. Which councilman wants more taxes.
Then you have to collect your thoughts and put it into clear, concise writing that a reader can understand.
It’s called news reporting.
Opinion stuff won’t do, until you have built up some reporting credibility. Once you’ve established your skill as a reporter, THEN you can pontificate on who should do what.
Whatever else the MSM is, they have more than their share of writers, and they have the commitment, for whatever reason.
We have writers, too, but what we don’t have is the commitment.
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