Posted on 11/20/2004 9:40:16 AM PST by Congressman Billybob
Like Confederate General Jubal T. Early, I make occasional raids into Washington, D.C. The raid this week included a visit with some of my children and grandchildren, meeting Judge Robert Bork, and assorted other pleasures. But the most telling moment of the trip came in a deserted corridor of Reagan National Airport on Sunday morning. Then and there I understood the mechanical voices of the MSM (Mainstream Media).
It was a politico-religious experience, a secular epiphany, if you will.
I took a wrong turn and wound up in an empty hallway. There were moving walkways on both sides, but they were out of service and marked off with orange cones. Still, every five seconds a female mechanical voice said urgently, “Caution! Moving walkways are ending!”
In that moment I suddenly understood a talk show I’d seen an hour before, starring Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan and Sam Donaldson, among others. (I’m not picking on these gentlemen. Most other talking heads – with or without bad hairpieces – would have filled the bill.)
I realized there is no significant difference between these “live” talkers on the MSM, and that disembodied voice in that empty airport hallway. Before the election the MSM thought the Democrats might win. After the election, when the Republicans had won, the underlying message did not change. In thousands of words the talking heads of the MSM are repeating, ad nauseam, the same seven word message. It is:
“Caution! Republicans are bad! Democrats are good!”
Try this experiment for yourselves. Pick any talking head show. Choose any MSM print outlet; the New York Times will do nicely, thank you. Take whatever apparent story they’re talking about, and boil it down like Vermont maple syrup in the fall. When you reduce the story to its essence, beneath the level of the apparent facts of the day, see whether any political story in the MSM has any core message other than the “Caution!...”?
Bias is usually subtle. Pay attention to the verbs. I read a story right after the election on the thousands of state legislative races. The article consistently referred to seats “won” by Democrats, but seats “claimed” by Republicans. Is it any surprise that the reporters writing that were primarily Democrats? Or, pay attention to the adjectives. Others have researched to a fare-thee-well the respective use of “left-wing” and “right-wing.” Republicans often get the second label; Democrats seldom get the first one.
Are there more right-wingers than left-wingers in American politics? Check out the websites of the Congressional Black Caucus, or of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, or of almost any union (but especially the National Education Association). See if you conclude that the left wing is alive and well. Its label disappears because the MSM reporters don’t perceive the left as being “left-wing.”
When the MSM had a monopoly, facts they chose not to report simply did not exist. The monopoly has ended. Facts get reported in the alternative media. The MSM no longer controls the agenda; it can only embarrass itself by pretending that it still does.
TV requires, of course, more than just words. There has to be something to point a camera at, the apparently live and sentient pundits sitting in their chairs. But is that any more than window dressing? Does that make the content of the political shows any more substantial than that mechanical voice in the airport?
The MSM are dying by degrees in the quarterly Arbitron reports on audience shares. The MSM are dying because they insist on producing vacuous bias in their political coverage. This task will be unsettling, but I recommend it. Read the MSM, listen to them, watch them with more care than they think “dumb” Americans can bring to the task. See if you reach the same conclusion, that you’re hearing repetitive, mechanical voices from the MSM.
When the voices are clearly mechanical, they may be annoying but they seem less threatening. The true menace comes from voices which present the illusion of being real. Think of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and the Hal 9000. Don’t the first three need the same cure as Hal got in the movie, 2001? Don’t they need to be deprogrammed, back to a time before they learned to lie, or worse, learned to believe their own lies?
Don’t they all need to go back to Urbana, Illinois, in 1992? Shouldn’t they all be asked to sing us a song before they fall silent? “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true ....”
Your point was small and unimportant..yet you wanted to become the center of attention..Your brillance may be wasted here..Perhaps a Civil War site that refights the war and argues about the rightness of secession would be more to your liking.
You are on extemely thin ice, boy; insulting FR's Honorable Congessman BillyBob.
That is not acceptable.
It's been tried in hotels/motels with some limited success, but this is an 800 pound gorilla we're workin' with here.
Surely there must be a way to put a stop to this.
Now there's something constructive you could apply yourself to. See gorilla ref above ;^)
It's nothing less than sound trucks and speakers on the street trumpeting their propaganda in the worst sort of dictatorships--like North Korea.
Got the point after all I see.
Why do we have to put up with it?
$64,000 question.
FGS
I didn't get anything new from it. And to claim, as others have done, that the MSM no longer control the agenda--is wishful thinking at best.
The Lib/Dem cabal still control the news media at all levels, the bureaucries at all levels, academia at all levels, the unions, the publishing houses, the museums, art gallaries, theaters, movie screens...
Yes, the internet and talk radio are a new outlet. But even there the DEM/LIBS are making strides. In fact, the internet is much more liberal than it ever has been before, and getting worse.
And truth be told this site--what does it post? It posts material 99% of the time from the MSM or the other instituttions I have enumerated which are still in the control of the liberals. We still are forced to see the world through that prism.
I hope that the internet will prove to be a corrective--a fact checker--for the MSM and the rest of our culture. But it is only as good as its fact-checkers. And already the MSM is doing its level best to discredit its accuracy (which isn't too hard to do actually) by trotting out the Wonkette (who is of course a lib) to blame for the false exit polls.
So the death of the MSM is greatly exaggerated. And like the rest of the points in the article, it has been claimed to be dead or dying for years.
But speaking of Orwellian, I've found the responses to my posts to be disturbingly Orwellian. But I'm as tired of talking about that as everyone else is.
You are being deliberately obtuse. What multiple folks have pointed out to you is that it wasn't what you said, it's how you said it. And said it. And said it.
So that gives you carte-blanche to think your opinions are more valid than others?
The real Free Republic vets don't use their years here as a reason to think their opinions are more worthy than ones who are newer to this website. You might try taking a page from their book....
That's right. It was all about me.
Hey, did I mention I was going to meet Robert Bork?
LOL.
"The real Free Republic vets don't use their years here as a reason to think their opinions are more worthy than ones who are newer to this website. You might try taking a page from their book...."
So all those people who were pulling rank on me for their earlier registration dates were not real FR vets.
BTW, I offered no opinion--at least that anyone has contended. I offered verifiable facts.
But thank you for piling on. Why did you do it again?
Ghengis Khan and his brother, Don,
Could not keep from keeping on...
You ain't going nowhere.
Bob Dylan said that.
A casual observer would note that I am not the one who keeps trying to flame the embers.
I've dropped the subject. Can you?
Who said "lurking"?
For the record I've been following FR since 1997.
Unless you're a retread, that's lurking.
One toke over the line, Sweet Jesus, one toke over the line.
JK sitting there at the keyboard, one toke over the line.
I don't recall ever posting to you, at least by the name that you are using now.
So you are an expert on FR in 2 weeks? You feel that you can lecture us all?
Or perhaps you have been banned repeatedly?
C'mon now. Which is it?
That you JF'nK? I wondered what you've been do'n lately. ;-)
I have no dog in this hunt. I just read through post by post, and thought to myself (when I came to yours), "Wow, who peed in his chicken soup?" You seem to respond angrily and defensively to everyone who posts to you. Perhaps an apology to BillyBob?
What a display of "group think" at its worst.
It's like a pack of savage dogs. What was my crime again? Posting information? Backing it up?
Yeah, the internet is going to replace the MSM for fact gathering.
Not like this it isn't.
That is the part he doesn't get (or doesn't want to get). Many of us have made corrections or been corrected on minor errors and have not had a problem. I guess the closest I can come to his demeanor is his attempt to compliment someone by saying "for a fat guy, you don't sweat much". That doesn't nake friends for anyone.
Look, you can click on my name and then read my posts "in forum" on other threads if you want to see what an angry poster I am.
This is what is happens when a news-discussion site becomes a chat room. You find entertainment in gang banging posters--especially ones you think you can abuse because they are new.
It is a disgusting display. And, again, something that would have never happened in FR's better days. (Of course the thread would have probably been pulled as a vanity anyway, truth to tell.)
I'll bet you walked 10 miles to school everyday,too...
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