Posted on 04/27/2014 11:54:36 AM PDT by Nachum
This morning on CNN’s Reliable Sources Brian Stelter asked David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America, how his group operates both independently and collaboratively with other journalists and media watchers.
Last Sunday former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson told CNN’s Reliable Sources that far left Media Matters helped produce news reports for CBS News.
They used to work with me on stories and tried to help me produce my stories, and at some point –“
Attkisson also said CBS blocked several of her reports.
David Brock, chairman of the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt group Media Matters for America and self-described “Democratic political activist”, did not deny the allegations today. Instead, Brock admitted on Reliable Sources that Media Matters works with liberal media outlets to develop news stories.
“We do work with reporters. We’re a media watchdog group. I have no reason to doubt that.”
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And this is news? Who doesn’t already know this?
Sadly the most conservative politician currently active could get elected president and Media Matters would still hold onto it’s 501c tax exempt status.
Oh, my. Media Matters is a 501c? Where’s the IRS?
Hiding behind a wall of GOP protectors doing their job protecting liberals.
Same as always.
Thank you, IRS.
Thanks Nachum.
On the left.
Even now, it is hard to do a search of information without one of these biased sites being a secondary news source for information and given credibility that is not questioned.
Where’s the IRS? Likely at parties with Boehner and McConnell, in between handing out tax exempt status for muzzie terrorist groups (with ties to the Clintoons).
FoxNews just questioned MM’s tax exempt status - due to Brock’s political activist claim - just days ago.
99% of democrats don’t know this...
So David Brock, the admitted liar who is funded by the anti-American Nazi collaborator and convicted felon George Soros, is working with the so-called “mainstream” media on their stories. What does that say about the media?
bump
There is no reason for any controversy over “bias in the media.”The fundamental fact about freedom of speech and press is that it is political freedom. If you have freedom of speech, you can express your political opinion, and you can express your religious opinion - and religious opinions lie beneath political opinions.
FULL STOP.
Therefore claims of “bias in the media” boil down to attacks on freedom of the press.
HOWEVER,
there are OTHER constraints on freedom of speech and press:
Some of the largest constraints on freedom of the press are the constraints imposed by the FCC and the FEC.
The sine qua non of freedom of “the press” is the right to spend your own money to buy things such as printing presses, paper, ink, and means of distribution (horse and buggy in the Founding Era, trucks today).
It is important to recognize that the framers of the Constitution intended the promotion, and I quote, of "the progress of science and useful arts.” That means that although there is no case that they contemplated the specific technologies of the telegraph, the radio, the phonograph, the movie, and so on up through the Internet and the www, in principle they contemplated them all. And they provided for the possibility that such progress might indeed require an adjustment to the regime which they were establishing - Article V, Amendments.
I do not mean to imply that we need a constitutional amendment, I mean that the FCC and the FEC are unconstitutional impositions on “the freedom . . . of the press.". If in fact we need an FCC, we should compose a constitutional amendment which specifies the right of Congress to make the decisions we think the FCC should make - and reiterating the limitations on those powers. Absent such an amendment, the courts should strike down the FCC, and the FEC, as unconstitutional.
But the FEC and the FCC aren’t the whole story. They were preceded, and are still legitimized, by a private organization which in its own way regulates “the media.” Namely, the Associated Press. The AP newswire is a continual virtual meeting of all major journalism outlets in the country. And as such it has the effect which Adam Smith described for monopolies:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of NationsJournalists don’t do things, they only report on what they think went wrong when others undertook to do things. And that introduces an inherent bias in what they do. Because of that, the journalist’s perspective is precisely the opposite to that of Theodore Roosevelt:"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .The opposite of that claim obviously is that it is the critic (i.e. the journalist and anyone who goes along and gets along with the journalist) who is important. And, the person who works to a bottom line deserves to be second-guessed. That is a skeptical, in its extreme expression a cynical, POV which Theodore Roosevelt anticipated and peremptorily rejected:There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.It is not far to look to see “sneering disbelief” at work in American politics today:
"If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." - Barak Obama, president of the United States.President of the United States, yes - but also prophet of cynicism. Prophet, that is, of “liberalism.” Not the liberalism of Washington, Jefferson and the rest - but the “liberalism” of Clinton operative George Stephanopolis - who did not have to change his attitude one iota in order to be recognized by “objective” journalists as one of their own.But again, it is the right of the people to be biased, and to spend money promoting their opinions, whether provable, falsifiable, or anything in between. Whether or not Dinesh D’Souza violated the letter of McCain-Feingold or any other “Campaign Finance Reform law,” he innocent of wrongdoing for the simple reason that under to the First Amendment there is no law against spending his own money, in whatever amount, to promote his own beliefs. And likewise there can be no law against claiming to be objective while promoting cynical “liberal” claptrap.
But there is the Sherman Antitrust Law, and the Associated Press does homogenize journalism by its monopolistic influence. There is also RICO - and the AP and its member news organizations have systematically libeled Bundy, Zimmerman, the Duke Lacrosse team, the SBVT, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, George W. Bush, George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan, Ray Donovan, Edwin Meese, and so forth and so on, back to Senator Joseph McCarthy and beyond. The Associated Press has always had the mission of conserving expensive bandwidth in the nationwide transmission of news - but with the technologies which enable the Internet, “expensive” bandwidth is now dirt cheap. That means that the AP is no longer “too big to fail,” and is simply too big, period. The Associated Press should be sued into oblivion.
The FCC should be enjoined against any attempt to enforce “fairness” or “objectivity,” and be limited to controlling frequency contention. Except that the networks should be required to broadcast true debates (rather than “debates” which are actually joint press conferences) between presidential contenders, and should be forbidden to broadcast projections of the outcomes of the races on election day. The outcomes of elections are determined by official counts of ballots, and not in news rooms. The FEC should be disbanded with prejudice.
Bump
Is David Brock trying to look more and more like Liberace? If not so deliberately, he increasingly comes across as a flaming flamboyant queen. He’s only interested in the truth and the truth supports the progressive point of view? Yeah, right. That’s credible. Only if you can imagine David Crock is a devout and pious Christian.
BUMP! BUMP! BUMP!
(Thanks for the ping to the thread, c_I_c.)
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