Sharyl Attkisson Exposes Big Media in The Smear

Journalists today are elitists with their own agenda, never actually practicing journalism. Only a handful can be respected, trusted, and believed. Sharyl Attkisson falls into this category. She is an author and investigative reporter who hosts the syndicated TV news series Full Measure. Attkisson is a whistleblower of sorts in educating the public about the biased media. Her latest book, The Smear, reveals the tactics used to influence opinions in order to obscure the truth.

In the beginning of this book, Attkisson discusses the propaganda campaign used by the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA. They had asked the legendary Marlene Dietrich to sing "Lili Marlene" in German and English in order to make the Axis forces feel homesick and realize they were fighting for the wrong side. She contrasts this with Hitler's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels's playbook, which calls for creating a big lie – the bigger, the better to get more people to believe it. Repeat it often enough so it becomes the truth, and persistence is the most important requirement for success.

Today's media and leftists seem to take a page not out of the OSS, but out of Goebbels's strategy. Attkisson wants to inform Americans on the tactics used by political operatives on both sides as well as corporate operatives. These tactics fall into categories of "Astroturf and transactional journalism," all tools of the smear campaign. She told American Thinker her definition of a smear: "taking a sprinkle of truth and perverting it into a weapon of mass destruction to advance an undisclosed larger goal, often political or financial. Smear campaigns take something that many times has a grain of truth and amplifies it to accomplish the annihilation of their target."

Attkisson told of the example where polls showed Hillary Clinton widely ahead, even though she saw something quite different while traveling the country and digging into the polls. “On August 10, 2016, Bloomberg reported Clinton up by six. But looking at the actual poll, I found that her lead over Trump had shrunk by eighteen points in the past five months. Yet no news outlets reported that.” Maybe this is why the press has such a dismal approval rating. A recent PBS poll showed that the media are trusted by only 30%.

Attkisson went on: “I believe Donald Trump should be covered, as any president should, aggressively, and questioned on what he does. Yet there has been a shocking degree of false reporting on him in this short period of time by formerly well respected news organizations that have publicly suspended their normal standards and practices to cover Trump, saying they view him as uniquely ‘dangerous.’ This has also led to such practices as over-reliance on anonymous sources, who prove to be wrong time and again. I think this has resulted in experienced journalists at formerly well respected news organizations like CNN, Time, The New York Times, and The Washington Post making rookie mistakes that would not even be accepted in journalism colleges.”

Glad you like the book KC. Thanks for the heads up.

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