I believe in the First Amendment. Overwhelmingly Americans believe in the right to and the necessity of a free press.
But implied in that is that the press are objective or impartial tellers of truth.
A free press is vital to a free society and the press should serve as a bulwark against tyranny by holding the powerful to account and shining the light of transparency on the government.
We have known for a while that the press had a bias, but what has happened in the last year or so is so extreme it’s hard to fathom.
We found out that NBC torpedoed a Pulitzer Prize winning story about the sexual misconduct of Hollywood producer and Democrat kingmaker Harvey Weinstein.
NBC is also the broadcaster that covered up the acts of its own in-house sexual predator, Matt Lauer.
We just found out that ABC shelved a similar story about Democrat donor, political powerbroker, sex trafficker, and pervasive pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.
Then CBS and ABC worked together to identify and punish the employee that leaked the story of the report cover up.
CNN has refused to even acknowledge the ABC Epstein story.
These are all the same media organizations that breathlessly covered every last unfounded accusation against Brett Kavanaugh, no matter how far fetched and ridiculous.
CNN has Kavanaugh proxy-accuser and scumbag, Michael Avenatti on daily and even endorsed his premature presidential ambitions.
These are the same media organizations that pushed a provably false lie against some students from a Catholic School for wearing MAGA hats.
CNN threatened to doxx a rando on Twitter for making a meme that made fun of them and accosted a retired woman for posting about Trump on Facebook with the accusation that she was a Russian agent.
The latest was a despicable smear job on a Mormon community that endured the murder of nine people, six if them children, at the hands of a Mexican cartel, because they were Mormons.
One would think that in traditional capitalism, as these news organizations lost money and viewership, they’d figure out that this hyper partisan mendacity was not a good business model and change.
This is malevolence.
But like every anti war movie that spit on the US military made during the GW Bush administration, the purpose was not to make money but to prosthelytize Lefist values.
There are always interns that can work for free. Jeff Bezos can find the Washington Post out of his own pocket. They will push this regardless of how much money they lose because this is ideological zealotry for them.
This tactic of destroying nobodies with the weight of multi billion dollar media empires is untenable.
Our Founding Fathers were worried that the press would be forced by government to toe the party line.
I don’t think they expected that the press would toe the line out of ideological conformity.
What happens when CNN and NBC become Pravda and Izvestia because they wanted to?
This situation cannot go on forever.
In today’s WSJ, the lead editorial is about the left’s attack on Facebook for being unwilling to censor political ads. In that editorial they coined a nice phrase: “the Resistance press”.
Capitalism dictates that a poor/botched product is met with decline in sales, thus encouraging fixing of said product. This isn’t happening w the press. They’re bought and paid for by wealthy oligarchs with delusions of grandeur. So the press isn’t really the press, they’re propagandists.
Any actual free press (boots on the ground type reporters, respect) is dwarfed so much by propagandists that they’re practically non-existent.
The only answer isn’t to rage against the propagandists, but the oligarchs that fund them. Removing propagandists doesn’t fix the real issue. There’s the solution.
The founding fathers were well aware of the concept of biased journalism. In fact it was the standard. If you read one paper you would expect their viewpoint and if you read another you would get a different view. Nobody hid there affiliations. The concept of neutral journalism is a lie from the left. They have always been biased they just didn’t want you to know it.
What Steve said is true. The biggest problem today is the lack of alternative “news” viewpoints to compare all the leftist propaganda with. All of the big outlets have been bought and paid for by the rich leftists and the right doesn’t have any sugar daddies to champion their cause, at least none that I’ve heard about. It takes deep pockets just to open one radio station and defend it from all the lawfare used by the competition to shut you down.
Blogs are about the only alternative source of views plus a few conservative web sites that have been mentioned recently. But the average American rarely knows any sources beyond what he sees and hears on the boob-tube. Fox looked like it was going to be the alternative when it first appeared but it is fast becoming CNN lite.
Steve and Craig are correct. The press always has been corrupt. It was Thomas Jefferson who was quoted:
“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.”
He also said:
“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
Why did newspapers tell lies? He had an answer for that as well:
“A coalition of sentiments is not for the interest of printers… [T]he printers can never leave us in a state of perfect rest and union of opinion. They would be no longer useful and would have to go to the plough.”
In other words, the press needs strife and disagreement, or else no one will buy their product and they will have to find honest work.
Ladies and Gents, I give you Rush Limbaugh, his radio show and the Limbaugh Letter,
Listen and subscribe. Write, call your “leaders” never give in, never, never,never.