I Suspected But Could Not Prove

I've said for a long time that the media spoke with a suspiciously unified voice.

I had attributed it to there being so very few owners of the large outlets and that they just happened to agree with one another.

The recent kerfluffle about JournaList shows that the members of the media are willing to conspire to push their agenda. Conspire and lie about it.

This explains a great deal.

It was impossible to talk about how Bill Clinton committed perjury when all we could talk about was that getting fellatio was OK or even admirable.

When the topic was how admirable fellatio was, it was impossible to talk about how that act was sexual harassment.

It was impossible to talk about how I disagreed with Bush Jr's spending when I had to prove he wasn't Hitler.

It was impossible to express my concerns about how Obama assassinated the character of Joe the Plumber while attempting to explain that Sarah Palin wasn't really a moron.

I couldn't talk about my concerns about how the Obama campaign squelched the local media in Missouri or how ACORN might have been committing voter registration fraud when the media flat refused to report on it and was unified about how the one channel, Fox, that talked about it was wholly owned by the Republican party. I notice that nobody is talking much about how the margin of error in the Minnesota senate campaign was determined by illegally registered felons.

Never mind that if the Republicans owning Fox is wrong, then the Democrats owning the rest is just as wrong.

A republic hinges on a well informed electorate. Intentional misinformation runs counter to the needs of a free nation. I would call it treasonous; I am not alone.

Comments

2nd-Aug-2010 01:46 pm (local) ravenclaw_eric

The news media used to be openly partisan---the people that published Thomas Nast's cartoons (look them up sometime; I think you'll like them) weren't likely to give a fair shake to the Democrats, and everybody knew it! Unfortunately, sometime in the early 20th century, the practice of newspapers and the like openly taking sides for or against a political party fell into disuse---and the people manning the media, in the face of the Depression, became, eventually, "New Deal" Democrats-or-farther-left almost to a man. After that, peer pressure and the newsroom culture ensured that this POV endured---in the 1960s, Robert Novak says that one of his pals was OK with covering the Nixon campaign "because I can do Jack more good from here." Not very objective, eh? And some people wondered why Nixon hated the media. I'm old enough to remember Watergate (hey, you kids, get off my lawn! Whippersnappers!) and even as a kid myself, I thought that the hysteria was 'way overblown and knew full well that if Nixon had been Kennedy, the press would have said something like "Boys will be boys!"

As for what to do about it, I'm at a loss. You can't fire people en masse for being liberal...even if I didn't think that they're right on some things. (Being a libertarian, I acknowledge that sometimes, the "left wing" has the right slant on problems.)
As far as the media flat refusing to report on things---how about them deliberately sitting on Juanita Broadderick's story until after their precious Bill Clinton was out of danger of a well-deserved expulsion from office? Christopher Hitchens, who is a leftist but an honest person, wrote an enraged little book called No One Left To Lie To about how Clinton lied and betrayed his core followers again and again, and the media lapped his lies right up.

I know everything that they accused Dubya, and Nixon, and other Republicans of...and none of them have ever had plausible accusations of rape thrown at them! Chelsea has to have heard about this...it would be creepy as hell, looking at my dad and wondering if he really was a serial rapist. I felt sorry for Chelsea.