Posted on 09/13/2020 6:10:51 AM PDT by EyesOfTX
I’m old enough to remember a time when, if a U.S. president had brokered multiple historic peace agreements in the Middle East and one between Kosovo and Serbia, it would have been headline news for a week. There was a time when the president who accomplished this would have been able to hold a press conference with the White House press corps and have semi-curious reporters actually ask questions about those deals. Those things would have happened even in a Republican administration, and that time was not so long ago.
But those times are gone, and will never return without fundamental change in the media establishment itself, and the manner in which our society holds media operations accountable for the serial mendacity we see committed each and every day by cable news outlets, major newspapers and fake news-oriented magazines like The Atlantic. The simple fact of the matter is that the current status quo in the U.S. news media no only not consistent with the maintenance of a free and open society, it is actively and openly hostile to it.
Up until a few years ago, observers could be relatively sanguine about the state of the news media. The American press has always been biased. Indeed, throughout most of our country’s existence, newspapers and magazines – effectively the only means of obtaining news until the 1920s – had no issue with being openly-affiliated with and supportive of specific political parties. So, the fact that media outlets were biased was simply the maintenance of 200+ years of status quo.
Best Natural Hair Masks That Work Like Magic! VDO.AI Indeed, it was only during the post-World War II era, with the advent of television news operations and the growing prominence of radio, that national media outlets even bothered to put up a pretense of somehow being unbiased. Even that thin veil of pretense was mainly driven by the evolving federal “fairness doctrine” that was implemented by the Federal Communications Commission in 1949. That doctrine required TV and radio broadcasters to provide balanced coverage of elections and political issues. For many years, beginning in the Radio Act of 1927, the federal government also enforced “equal time” rules that required broadcasters to provide equal time to opposing views whenever they presented editorial content. All of that was eliminated in the 1980s to accommodate the growing development of 24-hour cable news operations, led by CNN.
For many years – this is really true, all you young people out there – CNN actually advertised itself as being “fair and balanced.” Also true is the fact that MSNBC assumed the same posture for the first decade of its existence before becoming aggressively and intentionally leftist as it transformed itself into a megaphone for Barack Obama’s 2009 presidential campaign. Fox News also claimed to be fair and balanced at its incarnation in the mid-1990s, but now only the increasingly CNN-ish Bret Baier continues to make that claim as he signs off from his nightly “Fox Report.”
Even during the days of the “fairness doctrine” and equal time laws, the major media outlets were liberally-biased. Let’s face it: This is always going to be the case, given the leftwards-tilt of most college professors, especially those who teach journalism.
But there is a crucial, qualitative difference between being biased and just being outright liars. Walter Cronkite was biased, but he wasn’t generally an outright liar. The same was true of TV news figures like David Brinkley, Roger Mudd, and even into the pre-George W. Bush years of Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. The shift from being figures who just put their own slants on otherwise factually-accurate news reports to being outright liars began in earnest following 9/11, led of course by Dan Rather and his use of transparently faked military documents in an effort to smear Bush while he was running for re-election. Things have only gone downhill from there.
Today, America is right back where it was during the advent of “yellow journalism” that came about in the early days of the 20th century. We’re back to having media outlets who openly pledge their allegiance to political parties or figures. If you can find a truly “fair and balanced” news operation at the national level today you will have discovered the media version of the ancient Incan and Mayan “cities of gold.” Legend has it that some such operations may exist out there, but people die before actually discovering them.
Attorney General William Barr called it out correctly on Friday when, in unusually blunt remarks, he referred to the mainstream press corps as “a collection of liars.”
From a report at NewsMax:
In an interview with Townhall, Barr’s no-holds-barred tirade zeroed in on coverage of months of racial justice demonstrations, some of which he said turned violent because of “street fighting radicals.”
“They’re basically a collection of liars. Most of the mainstream media,” he told Townhall. “They’re a collection of liars and they know exactly what they’re doing. A perfect example of that were the riots.”
He added, “Right on the street it was clear as day what was going on, anyone observing it, reporters observing it, it could not have escaped their attention that this was orchestrated violence by a hardened group of street fighting radicals.
“And they kept on excluding from their coverage all the video of this and reporting otherwise and they were doing that for partisan reasons, and they were lying to the American people. It wasn’t until they were caught red-handed after essentially weeks of this lie that they even started feeling less timid.”
…
According to Barr, “the national mainstream media has dropped any pretense of professional objectivity and are political actors, highly partisan who try to shape what they’re reporting to achieve a political purpose and support a political narrative that has nothing to do with the truth.”
“They’re very mendacious about it,” he continued. “It’s very destructive to our republic; it’s very destructive to the Democratic system to have that, especially being so monolithic. It’s contributing to a lot of the intensity and partisanship.”
[End]
What the AG said is absolutely correct: Our mainstream media is indeed just a collection of professional liars, operatives in propaganda operations modeled after those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. As Barr points out, this model is “very destructive to our republic,” specifically because it promotes a level of abject ignorance among the vast majority of the population, which in turn leads directly to the scenes of violence and destruction and death we see taking place on the streets of Democrat-controlled cities every day.
If you read the history of the rise of Hitler and his Nazi hordes, you will see that America today is roughly where Germany stood in 1938. This summer’s riots, staged and funded by operatives of the Democrat Party, were basically our version of Kristallnacht, which took place in November of that year. As most Americans are today, the Nazi-controlled news media ensured that the public was kept safely ignorant and misinformed about the true nature of the death and destruction that happened on that fateful night.
There was no public outrage, no public backlash against the Nazi hordes for all of that, because the corrupt news media ensured the vast majority of the population knew nothing about it, and those who did know about it put the blame on the innocent victims.
That is the role the U.S. news media performs for the Democrat Party in America today, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It is one thing for the Attorney General to call that out and speak the truth about the real state of our corrupt national media, but it is no more than a good start. If our society cannot devise some means of holding these depraved, anti-American media operations and their operatives accountable for their serial mendacity, then our Republic is well and truly doomed, and it could all happen far faster than we can even imagine.
That is all.
Like I’ve said for a long time, and sometimes get flamed for it, we have a free press, but we don’t have anywhere near a fair press.
You can't even edit someone else's words when you pass them off as your own, why should I believe you?
The old Soviet Union’s Pravda was more honest than our Ministry of Propaganda.
Crushing the big media companies is one of the most important tasks.
That’s not the same as crushing free speech. The First Amendment is still important. But they’ve slapped a lot of red-tape on the Second Amendment, and it’s time to do the same with the First Amendment (or else remove ALL red-tape from the Second).
People should say and publish what they want. But media companies should be trust-busted to smithereens. Perhaps one owner/one outlet. Or something. The Media Leviathan (and government schools) is turning people into brain-dead, indoctrinated fools. I say we kill that monopoly with fire.
About half way thru Jack Cashill's 'Unmasking Obama'. It's a rehash of Obama's many follies … many of them outright scandals whitewashed or more often ignored by the liberal media. Obama often bragged about his scandal free administration … which any Freeper knows is total BS.
In the 18th Century, the first case for a free press was John Peter Zenger badmouthing a local magistrate.
During the Revolution, you had pro-Patriot and pro-Tory papers. In the war of 1812, you had pro-war and anti-war papers. before and during the Civil War, you had pro-Union and pro-Confederacy, pro-slavery and abolitionist papers. During World War I, you had pro and anti-war papers.
This "down the middle" journalism only began in the wake of World War II, when national Socialist Hitler invaded soviet Socialist Russia, in what turned out to be an internecine civil war between two warring socialist philosophies. The Left, who were anti-war before June 22, 1941, suddenly became strongly pro-war. After the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the US was united like never before (LITERALLY! all other US wars had a significant anti-War opposition).
In the decades following the defeat of national Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan, most of the conservatives and liberals had the common experience of defeating a savage and ruthless enemy, and felt common-cause with many things.
However, it's been 80 years since then, most of those veterans who shared the common experience have died, and now we're at the cusp of another major national upheaval. The reason we call the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN "the mainstream media" was because in the previous 65 years after World War II, they were the only media reporting the news. However, now that there's One America News, Newsmax, The Blaze (not going to mention Fox News...since Roger Ailes died, they're desperate to attend the cool Georgetown brie,vin,coke, and adrenochrome parties).
My point is this- let's accept the fact that the media is biased, always been biased, and will always be. Don't expect down-the-middle news on much of anything. When you look at it like that, your blood pressure will go down.
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I had to laugh when I saw this at the beginning of the 4th paragraph. At first, I thought it was something you could buy from the Basementman campaign.
The media’s passion to see the destruction of Israel now includes the destruction of America. The bs and pretense are gone. The declaration of war is against democracy wherever it exists. The question is are there enough people who believe in freedom to preserve it?
DECAPITATE THE mediaSNAKES... it’s the only way to be sure!!!
Listened to about 10 seconds of Chris Walkance interview with Biden spokesman.
Biden hack: These riots and demonstrations never happened under Obama and Biden.
Of course, I’m screaming at the radio:Ferguson! Ask him what about Ferguson, or any of the other riots during Obama.
Oddly I did not hear Wallace come back with that, not before I turned it off on disgust anyway.
It’s like these are scripted in advance to say certaon things, without getting at the truth.
When the war goes hot, the media, who helped cause it, will be the first targets.
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