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The media has crossed the line. It is no longer merely manipulative, it has been completely compromised by politics. Most of the main stream media has become the house organ of the Communist Party.
It also has a lot to do with people having a stake in the future of thier country..worker bees against user bees. we have too many user bees voting for the lazy mans free stuff ticket..when nothing is ever free.
Candy Crowley's employer, CNN, is owned by Time Warner, the second largest media conglomerate on the planet. Not the country, the planet. The only media conglomerate bigger than it is the one that owns ABC News.
Interesting.
The media, after all, is largely represented by those who either because of a personal bias, lack of confidence or lack of intelligence, never really challenged the Marxist/Fabian/Jacobin type of influences in Academia. Many of those talking heads, or sloganists with key boards, in the Media, are simply the graduated "sheep" from Academia.
To understand the poison being promoted, Myths & Myth Makers In American "Higher" Education.
William Flax
We see this in the current election where conservatives were marginalized and dismissed through the technique of character assassination of any who dared to express other than "moderate", i.e. liberal, viewpoints on a number of topics, including globalization of trade, internationalization of foreign policy decision-making, abortion, gay rights, women's "issues" that somehow did not include conservative woman candidacy, the concerted vilification of the Tea Party movement; the list is long and depressing. Media control of the primary process has enabled a sort of framing through which the institutional ideology of corporate media cannot lose. That conservatives are relegated to voting for Mr. Romney as the only means of unseating the most destructive administration since Buchanan's is not only an illustration of this process, it's the culmination.
They'll take Romney - they won't like it, because 0bama is so completely a media creature that one wonders if he isn't going to start flopping around looking for oxygen when the spotlight is withdrawn - but they'll take Romney as a consolation prize because he owes them. There is no more perfect definition of political power than this ability to frame all the issues within a single candidate, and that of the media is very close to perfection in this regard.
It isn't new. All that is new is the pervasiveness brought about by modern mass communication, in particular television, a medium that must make Josef Goebbels' shade green with envy. But there was Leni Riefenstahl for him in the days when cinema could make this claim - how far that medium has fallen is illustrated by her counterpart Michael Moore these degraded days. There was the press in the days of William Randolph Hearst, a true corporate robber baron who felt and acted above the law. Carnegie and Rockefeller never maneuvered their nation into a war; Hearst did.
And so none of this is really new. The danger for the nation is twofold: that this sort of usurpation carries with it no accountability on the part of the usurpers and that it leads to the sort of denial of reality that led the German people to believe they were winning the war as the Red Army tanks were encircling Berlin. Would today's media deny an existential threat to the country in pursuit of power and ideology? They already do, in the form of immigration policy, Iran's "right" to nuclear weapons, and a bizarre conviction that countries that have spent three decades in a low-grade shooting war against us may be talked around or bribed into alliance. And the President they've given us appears shocked that rock-star political spectaculars and a phony Nobel Prize haven't resulted in the utopia he desires. Recasting the mess we're in as that utopia is, fortunately, beyond the capacities of even today's media but they're doing their best.
The real problem is that success in this arena tends to breed success, and gaming the Presidency has to be regarded as very high success indeed. Failure in the form of the election of Mr. Romney is not complete failure for the reasons detailed above. The ratchet continues to tighten.
Greenfield is right on the money again. I still remember the press conference where the media decided to take down the first President Bush. A reporter asked a stupid question and President Bush basically called him an idiot. You could just see the jaws tighten in the press corps. President Bush went from a 92% public approval to losing the election. The press was going to teach the politicians a lesson. There’s the old saying that, “You should never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Well, it’s fewer and fewer barrels.