An anecdote I recall fondly. I saw once, as a patient, an older gentleman who had an accent. I asked him about it and he said he had grown up in Italy and come to America after WWII. So this meant he grew up in Mussolini’s Italy. I asked him about this and he said Italy was horrible during the war. When I commented that “at least the trains ran on time” he laughed. When I looked bewildered he explained that the trains didn’t run any better it was just that once Mussolini declared “The Trains will run on time” it was “unhealthy” to point out they didn’t.
So what had happened was that the papers were running stories about how the trains were not on time on a daily basis just suddenly stopped these stories. There was no change in anything in reality at all. Just all of a sudden, once the Leader had said it would stop, the reporting of it did stop. Once ink that sells papers becomes ink that gets you killed or tortured that ink is pretty scarce.
That’s a good story and it is very reminiscent of the Obama administration. There wasn’t much really bad news concerning the nation. The media didn’t print/report it.
If they did, it wasn’t an issue. For instance they could cover the homeless, there just wasn’t any accusations concerning the Obama White House connected to it.
It will be a problem for Trump though. Rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Look at the events surrounding Ambassador Steven’s death in Benghazi. None of that was reported as a problem for Obama, Clinton, or Rice. It was just a normal thing we have to expect once in a while.
“He who owns the media...”
That’s a good story, but in a way, our media situation is even more dire than any Mussilini style media suppression.
Our media is not being suppressed, our media is a willing partner in crime. Our leftist media is like a cancer - undetectable in the early stages, malicious but stealthy, difficult to root out without harming the patient because it imitates and attaches itself to healthy tissue.
At least under Mussilini (per your story) the lies the media was forced to print were easy enough to distinguish from reality. A citizen could observe that the trains are not running on time, that media reports were untrue, and conclude that they were obviously being forced to print lies.
Here, our media are not being forced to lie. They want to do it, so their lies are far, far more effective, and a huge percentage of the US population is badly misinformed as a result.
It’s kind of like when you see a captured us fighter pilot saying things he would never say, you can tell there’s a gun to his head off camera. They can make him read a script, but they can’t make him sound sincere. So the propaganda is not effective - everyone can see right through it.
But when someone like John Kerry comes back from Vietnam and lies, there is no gun to his head, he wants to do it, so the deceit is a million times more convincing - he nearly gets himself elected POTUS.