Posted on 12/04/2020 4:54:16 AM PST by Kaslin
Slanted is the third book by Sharyl Attkisson. As with her other two, it is a refreshing read. It is nice to know that there are still independent journalists who put fact over opinion, and she is one of those. To no one's surprise, she talks about the shift in the news, from a focus on reporting the facts to pushing a narrative on the American people. American Thinker had the privilege of interviewing her.
The emphasis of the book is on "the Narrative," a phrase describing how powerful interests shape the news and information online. This strategy includes discouraging certain questions, presenting information in a slanted fashion, sometimes reporting false information, and giving facts out of context. When Donald Trump was elected, Attkisson says it exposed this strategy and a shift in journalism like never before. "The media at large announced it was committed to undermining and ultimately removing Trump from office, which only served to prove his point about their bias."
In her chapter entitled "Narrative by Proxy," she discusses how today's perverted form of journalism rationalizes inserting personal opinions into straight news reporting. Further, reporters find themselves accused of bias if they simply "aren't overtly anti-Trump or are fair in their reporting."
It becomes obvious that reporters' questions for Biden versus President Trump were like day and night. The standards they had for the president were so completely different from those for Biden. Take for example the Yahoo reporter who asked this of Biden: "What do you see as the biggest threat to your transition, given President Trump's unprecedented attempt to obstruct and delay a smooth transfer of power?"
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Years ago, there was what should have been a real scandal on the White House giving daily talking points to the news media. I think Stephanopoulos was involved.
Anyone else remember?
The role of the press has always been to manipulate public perception.
This power can be used for good or for bad. Globalists think their narrative is for good. Do-gooders think their narrative is for good. Many think that freedom is too dangerous to be allowed. The public must be maniplated and controlled. It is the natural order of humanity. A certain amount of dissent must exist in order to sustain the illusion of choice.
The powerful people work against the formation of a public made up of informed and independent, free people.
I recall the deep depravity of Slick Willie’s influence on many aspects of our national psyche.
The decline and fall of the MSM cannot happen fast enough. If this election pans out in favor of DJT, then I can see the MSM going down the drain. All the corruption, including MSM & big tech manipulation, regarding the voter fraud will be exposed and hopefully some will go to jail. That would be a best case scenario.
A worst case would be a blood bath if the lefties go on a rampage. This would be good for no one personally, but would be an effective way to permanently cleanup this whole mess.
“The role of the press has always been to manipulate public perception.”
Yes, yes and yes. I love old movies, and many are about reporters and/or their newspapers. I now pay attention to how the print media of yesteryear tried to purposely manipulate public opinion. This shows up in one form or another in every newspaper movie plot.
Fast forward to today’s rapid electronic media, and the manipulation of public opinion has evolved into outright lying.
For the first hundred years of the Republic, the press was partisan.
Everyone knew the press was partisan. There were numerous papers, and they took sides.
Only when AP started becoming big did a national press have any serious meaning.
As long as there were numerous outlets with different viewpoints, there was no singular "press".
But the press became a ideologically monolithic entity from about 1932 to 1965.
President Roosevelt signed the Federal Communication Commission into existence in 1932, as I recall.
He appointed his guy to the commission, and made sure the radio networks were reliably progressive.
The radio networks became the television networks.
bookmark
Yep. Advent of radio and Walter Lipmann’s creation of the myth of objective press came at about the same time.
“Press as an essential watchdog over the government” is another myth created by powerful interests (CIA, cough cough) whose aim is to manipulate and control the public. These are truly bad people.
There is a synergy at work here as well, that facilitates advancing the evil goals. Radio and teevee are passive to the consumer. Easy. Does not require literacy or much time - and too, the amount of info in a 30 minute news is about half a page of newsprint, so people actually get less and poorer quality info - but they don’t have to work for it.
And when the stories and narrative tend to match across what appear to be separate platforms, humans tend to accept that what is being posed, is truth. Tell a lie often enough, it becomes truth.
The press is despicable.
MSM = Apparatchiks
MSM = Propagandists & Deceivers
You are confusing 'free press' with 'advertising.' I grew up with Walter Cronkite. I know your assertion is wrong.
I was on the front end of seeing these trends because of the type of reporting that I do. I started to pay really close attention to it in the early 2000s, and the first time I noticed it [fact-based journalism giving over to agenda-driven journalism] it was with [the] PHARMAceutical industry -- weighing in and able to successfully manipulate and shape reporting that we had done and others were doing on PHARMAceutical dangers.Again, medicine has many wonderful things that it's done for the public. There's a lot of terrific medicine [glitch] and we were all reporting on that in the early 2000s. And then, in came the PHARMAceutical industry, with its brand new partnership with the media through direct-to-consumer ads.
People may have forgotten that advertising prescription drugs on TV used to be illegal. But once the media partnered with the PHARMAceutical industry to lobby to legalize these ads that you see on TV and the media all the time, WE WERE BEHOLDEN TO THE TUNE OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to this industry, and they were able to successfully stop reporting, and pull strings in a way I had never seen before, and controversialize those who were off the narrative or reporting the truth on certain things.
I kind of saw it go from there, that the same PR firms and global law firms that were intervening to try to stop stories for them, were then taking on other corporate clients, and bragging and advertising that they could stop or shape news stories by bullying news reporters, controversializing them, and the tactics that we see this smear industry use on a daily basis now.
...We're in a really troubled information landscape today.
It looks like a great book from an author who is well acquainted with journalism.
You left off the sarcasm tag. I grew with Walter Cronkite, 20th Century, etc. He was a propoagandist.
One of the biggest disappointments to me is the failure of the mainstream media to be objective and not left-leaning. This is really sad! There was a time when they simpley reported what was going on without spin. It is no more like that. Just look at CNN and others like them. I wish we could go back to the time of J.F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Back then the news was real. Not today, not by any strech of the imagination. They are so tainted that you can not take anything they say as truthful. It’s time for them to go back!!!!
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