The radical leftists, as is their standard way of combating opposition to their ideology, are using the media as their propaganda tool to divert the public's attention away from the real issue. Last Friday Vice Pres. Pence spoke at an anniversary event for the Focus on the Family and the left's outraged response to this was to claim that restrictions on abortion are forcing women to have babies! Excuse me?
So, let me see if I understand this... a couple meets, and they get interested in each other and decide to have sexual relations. (More often, than not, these events occur spontaneously on a "first date" these days.) Did anyone force them to have sex? Did no one ever tell them about having "safe sex"? You know... using a condom would be "safe sex" which statistically results in preventing conception and the formation of a zygote (a multi-celled entity which grows into a fetus and eventually a human being with potential; if it's given a chance to grow to full term). So, if no one forced them to have sex - especially unprotected sex which increases the possibility for STDs - and the female conceived, who's responsible for bringing that child into this world by their actions?
But no... liberals do NOT want to take responsibility for their actions. Instead, in their minds it's the government's responsibility to remove their "gamble" that they wouldn't conceive by allowing them to remove it via the procedure of abortion; killing approximately 900 babies a day. And if anyone tries to tell them otherwise, they're being "forced" to have the baby! No, the liberals are just ignoring what they already know is the facts about the circumstance their "gamble" created for them and they are so spoiled and in denial about it that they do their best to place the "unpleasantness" of it all on those pointing out the consequences to them.
They want all the pleasure, and none of the responsibility or consequences which come with it. In short, they don't want to be the young adults they've become. I call it a version of the "Peter Pan" effect.
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
My Favorite Word Makes Great Points
Conundrum...............
"A gun is like a parachute. If you need one, and don't have one. You'll probably never need one again."
"A gun is like a parachute. If you need one, and don't have one. You'll probably never need one again."
The
definition of the word Conundrum is: something that is puzzling or confusing.
Here are six Conundrums of Socialism in the United States of America :
1. America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.
2. Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.
3. They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.
4. Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.
5. The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other Countries only dream about.
6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about, yet they want America to be more like those other countries.
Think about it! And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the USA in the 21st Century.
Makes
you wonder who is doing the math. By
the way....................
1. We are advised to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, But we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics.
Funny
how that works. And here's another one worth considering...
2.
Seems we constantly hear about how Social Security is going to run out
of money. But we never hear about welfare or food stamps running out of
money? What's interesting is the first group "worked for" their money,
but the second didn't.
Think
about it..... Am
I the only one missing something?
Finally, The Truth Is Coming To Light
I'll provide the links here for your edification, in case you've not had the opportunity to view them yet. I've put Sean's show on first because of his excellent introduction and the inclusion of Mark Levin who makes excellent remarks about the "big picture" of all of this.
Update: Project Veritas has now revealed the real motivation behind this "Russia Hacking Conspiracy" hype that CNN and other mainstream media outlets have been obsessed with for the past 10 months. Wanna bet some judge is sought by liberals to put a "kybosh" on this video?
History Teaches Us Why the Peaceful Majority is Irrelevant
Although this "letter" is purported to be authored by this doctor is incorrect, the points the actual author makes here are worthy of posting here, IMHO. See this link to read truthorfiction.org's background research on it. (Note the modified spelling of the doctor's name.)
This is one of the best explanations of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = =
This is one of the best explanations of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear.
Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read.
The author of this, is Dr. Emanuel Tanya,
a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist. A man, whose family was
German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large
industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true
Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.
"Very
few people were true Nazis," he said, "but many enjoyed the return of
German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those
who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just
sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us,
and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come."
My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.
We
are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is
a religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to
live in peace.
Although
this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It
is meaningless fluff meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow
diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name
of Islam.
The
fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is
the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50
shooting wars worldwide.
It
is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups
throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in
an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or
honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is
the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape
victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to
kill and to become suicide bombers.
The hard quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous. [Why? Consider these facts of history.]
Communist
Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet
the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20
million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.
China 's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The
average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a
warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across
South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic
murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel,
and bayonet.
And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving?
History
lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt. Yet for all our powers
of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:
peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our Enemy if they don't speak up. Like
my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the
fanatics own them and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving
Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis,
Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died
because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
Now
Islamic prayers have been introduced in Toronto and other public
schools in Ontario, and, yes, in Ottawa, too, while the Lord's Prayer
was removed (due to being so offensive?). The Islamic way may be
peaceful for the time being in our country, until the fanatics move in.
In
Australia, and indeed in many countries around the world, many of the
most commonly consumed food items have the halal emblem on them. Just
look at the back of some of the most popular chocolate bars, and at
other food items in your local supermarket. Food on aircraft have the
halal emblem just to appease the privileged minority who are now rapidly
expanding within the nation's shores.
In
the U.K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now
dozens of "no-go" zones within major cities across the country that the
police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because
the Muslim community in those areas refuse to acknowledge British law.
As
for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group
that counts - the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
Lastly, anyone who doubts that this issue is serious
and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to
the passiveness that allows the problems to expand.
'In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends'.
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Monday, June 26, 2017
The 2016 Election and the Demise of Journalistic Standards
Finally, here is an article, written by someone who's been in the business of news reporting and politics for long enough to have a perspective which sees what's really gone down in media and its campaign coverage this past presidential election.
This article, printed in IMPRIMUS - a publication of Hillsdale College for May/June, Volume 46, Number 5/6 - succinctly explains what I've been attempting to collect together in this blog for the last several months. I highly, highly recommend taking the time to read this! You'll be glad you did.
I read that paragraph and I thought to myself, well, that's actually an easy question. If you feel that way about Trump, normal journalistic ethics would dictate that you shouldn't cover him. You cannot be fair. And you shouldn't be covering Hillary Clinton either, because you've already decided who should be president. Go cover sports or entertainment. Yet the Times media reporter rationalized the obvious bias he had just acknowledged, citing the view that Clintion was "normal" and Trump was not.
I found the whole concept appalling. What happened to fairness? What happened to standards? I'll tell you what happened to them. The Times top editor, Dean Baquet, eliminated them. In an interview last October with the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Baquet admitted that the piece by his media reporter nailed his own thinking. Trump "challenged our language," he said, and Trump "will have changed journalism." Of the daily struggle for fairness, Baquet has this to say: "I think that Trump has ended that struggle... We now say stuff. We fact check him. We write it more powerfully that [what he says is] false."
Baquest was being too modest. Trump was challenging, sure, but it was Baquet who changed journalsim. He's the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be abandoned without consequence.
With that decision, Baquet also changed the basic news story formula. To the age-old elements of who, what, when, where, and why, he added the reporter's opinion. Now the flood-gates were open, and virtually every so-called news article reflected a clear bias against Trump. Stories, photos, headlines, placement in the paper - all tools that writers and editors have - were summoned to the battle. The goal was to pick the next president.
Thus began the spate of stories, which continues today, in which the Times routinely calls Trump a liar in its news pages and headlines. Again, the contrast with the past is striking. The Times never called Barack Obama a liar, despite such obvious opportunities as "you can keep your doctor" and "the Benghazi attack was caused by an Internet video." Indeed, the Times and The Washington Post, along with most of the White House press corps, spent eight years cheerleading the Obama administration, seeing not a smidgen of corruption or dishonesty. They have been tougher on Hillary Clinton during her long career. But they still never called her a liar, despite such doozies as "I set up my own computer server so I would only need one device," "I turned over all the government emails," and "I never sent or received classified emails." All those were lies, but not to the national media. Only statements by Trump were fair game.
As we know now, most of the media totally missed Trump's appeal to millions upon millions of Americans. The prejudice against him blinded those news organization to what was happening in the country. Even more incredibly, I believe the bias and hostility directed at Trump backfired. The feeling that the election was, in part, a referendum on the media, gave some voters an extra incentive to vote for Trump. A vote for him was a vote against the media and against Washington. Not incredibly, Trump used that sentiment to his advantage, often reviving up his crowds with attacks on reporters. He still does.
If I haven't made it clear, let me do so now. The behavior of much of the media, but especially The New York Times, was a disgrace. I don't believe it will ever recover the public trust it squandered. The Times' previous reputation for having the highest standards was legitimate. Those standards were developed over decades to force reporters and editors to be fair and to gain public trust. The commitment to fairness made The New York Times the flagship of American journalism. But standards are like laws in the sense that they are designed to guide your behavior in good times and in bad. Consistent adherence to them was the source of the Time's credibility. And eliminating the has made the paper less that ordinary. Its only standards now are double standards.
I say this with great sadness. I was blessed to grow up at the Times, getting a clerical job right out of college and working my way onto the reporting staff, where I worked for a decade. It was the formative experience of my career where I learned most of what I know about reporting and writing. Alas, it was a different newspaper then. Abe Rosenthal was the editor in those days, and long before we'd ever heard the phrase "zero tolerance," that's what Abe practiced toward conflicts of interest and reporter's opinions. He set the rules and everybody knew it.
Here is a true story about how Abe Rosenthal resolved a conflict of interest. A young woman was hired by the Times from one of the Philadelphia newspapers. But soon after she arrived in New York, a story broke in Philly that she had an affair with a political figure she had covered, and that she had accepted a fur coat and other expensive gifts from him. When he saw the story, Abe called the woman into his office and asked her if it were true. When she said yes, he told her to clean out her desk - that she was finished at the Times and would never work there again. As word spread through the newsroom, some reporters took the woman's side and rushed in to tell Abe that the firing was too harsh. He listened for about 30 seconds, raised his hand for silence, and said (this is slightly bowdlerized): "I don't care if you have a romantic affair with an elephant on your personal time, but then you can't cover the circus for the paper." Case closed. The conflict of interest policy was clear, absolute, and unforgettable.
As for reporter's opinions, Abe had a similar approach. He didn't want them in the news pages. And if you put them in, he took them out. They belonged in the opinion pages, which were managed separately. Abe said he knew reporters tended to lean left and would find ways to sneak their views into the stories. So he saw his job as steering the paper slightly to the right. "That way," he said, "the paper would end up in the middle." He was well known for this attitude, which he summed up as "keeping the paper straight." Like most people, I thought this was a joke. But after I related all this in a column last year, his widow contacted me and said it wasn't a joke - that, in fact, Abe's tombstone reads, "He kept the paper straight." She sent me a picture to prove it. I published that picture of his tombstone alongside a column where I excoriated the Times for its election coverage. Sadly, the Times' high standards were buried with Abe Rosenthal.
Looking to the Future
Which brings us to the critical questions. Can the American media be fixed? And is there anything that we as individuals can do to make a difference? The short answer to the first question is, "No, it can't be fixed." The 2016 election was the media's Humpty Dumpty moment. It fell off the wall, shattered into a million pieces, and can't be put back together again. In case there is any doubt, 2017 is confirming that the standards are still dead. The orgy of visceral Trump-bashing continues unabated.
But the future of journalism isn't all gloom and doom. In fact, if we accept the new reality of widespread bias and seize the potential is offers, the is room for optimism. Consider this - the election showed the country is roughly divided 50-50 between people who will vote for a Democrat and people who will vote for a Republican. But our national media is more like 80-20 in favor of Democrats. While the media should, in theory, broadly reflect the public, it doesn't. Too much of the media act like a special interest group. Detached from the greater good, it exists to promote its own interest and the political party with which it is alligned.
Ronald Reagan's optimism is often expressed in a story that is surely apocryphal, but irresistible. He is said to have come across a barn full of horse manure and remarked cheerfully that there must be a pony in it somewhere. I suggest we look at the media landscape in a similar fashion. The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public's sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for news and views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them; first, free speech; second, capitalism and free markets; and the third ingredient is you, the consumers of news.
Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and get a politically segregated audience in return. Look at the letter section in The New York Times - virtually every reader who writes in agrees with the opinions of the paper. This isn't a miracle; it's a bubble. Liberals used to love to say, "I don't agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it." You don't hear that anymore from the Left. Now they want to shut you up if your don't agree. And they are having some success.
But there is a countervailing force. Look at what happened this winter when the Left organized boycotts of department stores that carried Ivanka Trump's clothing and jewelry. Nordstrom folded like a cheap suit, but Trump's supporters rallied on social media and Ivanka's company had its best month ever. This is the model I have in mind for the media. It is similar to how FOX News got started. Rupert Murdoch thought there was an untapped market for a more fair and balanced news channel, and he recruited Roger Ailes to start it more than 20 years ago. Ailes found a niche market alright - half the country!
Incredible advances in technology are also on the side of free speech. The explosion of choices makes it almost impossible to silence all dissent and gain a monopoly, though certainly Facebook and Google are trying.
As for the necessity of preserving capitalism, look around the world. Nations without economic liberty usually have little or no dissent. That's not a coincidence. In this, I'm reminded of an enduring image from the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a pestilence, egged on by President Obama and others who view other people's wealth as a crime against the common good. This attitude was on vivid display as the protesters held up their iPhones to demand the end of capitalism. As I wrote at the same time, did they believe Steve Jobs made each and every Apple product one at a time in his garage? Did they not have a clue about how capital markets make life better for more people than any other system known to man? They had no clue [because our public education system has abandon teaching students anything about the benefits of capitalism]. And neither do many government officials, who think they can kill the golden goose and still get golden eggs.
Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It's you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, "You have to join the side you're on." It's no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good magazines. There are publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don't let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. And expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preference would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you're on.
This article, printed in IMPRIMUS - a publication of Hillsdale College for May/June, Volume 46, Number 5/6 - succinctly explains what I've been attempting to collect together in this blog for the last several months. I highly, highly recommend taking the time to read this! You'll be glad you did.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = =
MICHAEL GOODWIN is the chief political columnist for The New York Post. He has a B.A. in English literature from Columbia College and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining the Post in 2009, he was the political columnist for The New York Daily News, where he served as executive editor and editorial page editor and led its editorial board to a Pulitzer Prize. Prior to that, he worked for 16 years at The New York Times, beginning as a clerk and rising to City Hall Bureau Chief. He is the co-author of I, Koch and editor of New York Comes Back.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 20, 2017, in Atlanta, Georgia, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar.
I've been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn't always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts last year's election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale - that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.
It's not exactly breaking news that nost journalists lean left. I used to do that myself. I grew up at The New York Times, so I'm familiar with the species. For most of the media, bias grew out of the social revolution of the 1960s and '70s. Fueled by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the media jumped on the anti-authority bandwagon writ large. The deal was sealed with Watergate, when journalism was viewed as more trusted than government - and far more exciting and glamorous. Think Robert Redford in All the President' Men. Ever since, young people became journalists because they wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, find Deep Throat, and bring down a president. Of course, most of them only wanted to bring down a Republican president. That's because liberalism is baked into the journalism cake.
During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." I'm not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say, "Government is what we do together." From there, it's a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.
The rest of that journalistic ethos - "afflict the comfortable" - leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He will also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
A New Dimension
I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened. This was not naive liberalism run amok. This was a whole new approach to politics. No one in modern times had seen anything like it. As with grief, there were several stages. In the beginning, Donald Trump's candidacy was treated as an outlandish publicity stunt, as though he wasn't a serious candidate and should be treated as a circus act. But television executives quickly made a surprising discovery: the more they put Trump on the air, the higher their rating climbed. Ratings are money. So news shows started devoting hours and hours simply to pointing the cameras at Trump and letting them run.
As his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. The candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people to his events and getting the most news coverage. Newspapers got in on the game too. Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial that made a headline. He made news by being a spectacle.
Despite the mockery of journalists and late-night comics, something extraordinary was happening. Trump was dominating a campaign none of the smart money thought he could win. And then, suddenly, he was winning. Only when the crowded Republican field began to thin and Trump kept racking up primary and caucus victories did the media's tone grow more serious.
One study estimated that Trump had received so much free airtime that if he had to buy it, the price would have been $2 billion. The realization that they had helped Trump's rise seemed to make many executives, producers, and journalists furious. By the time he secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, they were gunning for him. Only two people now had a chance to be president, and the overwhelming media consensus was that it not be Donald Trump. They would make sure of that. The coverage of him grew so vicious and one-sided that last August I wrote a column on the unprecedented bias. Under the headline "American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes," I wrote that the so-called cream of the media crop was "engaged in a naked display of partisanship" designed to bury Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.
The evidence was on the front page, that back page, the culture pages, even the sport pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and the bottom of the broadcast. Day in, and day out, in every media market in America, Trump was savaged like no other candidate in memory. We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion ran in the same direction - toward Clinton and away from Trump.
For the most part, I blame The New York Times and The Washington Post for causing this breakdown. The two leading liberal newspapers were trying to top each other in their demonization of Trump and his supporters. They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings.
On one level, tougher scrutiny of Trump was clearly defensible. He had a controversial career and lifestyle, and he was seeking the presidency as his first job in government. He also provided lots of fuel with some of his outrageous words and deeds during the campaign. But from the beginning there was also a second element of the lopsided coverage. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a "D" after its name. Think of it - George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970's, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.
But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension. This time, the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. The Times media reporter began a story this way:
If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalist tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with controls of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
I read that paragraph and I thought to myself, well, that's actually an easy question. If you feel that way about Trump, normal journalistic ethics would dictate that you shouldn't cover him. You cannot be fair. And you shouldn't be covering Hillary Clinton either, because you've already decided who should be president. Go cover sports or entertainment. Yet the Times media reporter rationalized the obvious bias he had just acknowledged, citing the view that Clintion was "normal" and Trump was not.
I found the whole concept appalling. What happened to fairness? What happened to standards? I'll tell you what happened to them. The Times top editor, Dean Baquet, eliminated them. In an interview last October with the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Baquet admitted that the piece by his media reporter nailed his own thinking. Trump "challenged our language," he said, and Trump "will have changed journalism." Of the daily struggle for fairness, Baquet has this to say: "I think that Trump has ended that struggle... We now say stuff. We fact check him. We write it more powerfully that [what he says is] false."
Baquest was being too modest. Trump was challenging, sure, but it was Baquet who changed journalsim. He's the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be abandoned without consequence.
With that decision, Baquet also changed the basic news story formula. To the age-old elements of who, what, when, where, and why, he added the reporter's opinion. Now the flood-gates were open, and virtually every so-called news article reflected a clear bias against Trump. Stories, photos, headlines, placement in the paper - all tools that writers and editors have - were summoned to the battle. The goal was to pick the next president.
Thus began the spate of stories, which continues today, in which the Times routinely calls Trump a liar in its news pages and headlines. Again, the contrast with the past is striking. The Times never called Barack Obama a liar, despite such obvious opportunities as "you can keep your doctor" and "the Benghazi attack was caused by an Internet video." Indeed, the Times and The Washington Post, along with most of the White House press corps, spent eight years cheerleading the Obama administration, seeing not a smidgen of corruption or dishonesty. They have been tougher on Hillary Clinton during her long career. But they still never called her a liar, despite such doozies as "I set up my own computer server so I would only need one device," "I turned over all the government emails," and "I never sent or received classified emails." All those were lies, but not to the national media. Only statements by Trump were fair game.
As we know now, most of the media totally missed Trump's appeal to millions upon millions of Americans. The prejudice against him blinded those news organization to what was happening in the country. Even more incredibly, I believe the bias and hostility directed at Trump backfired. The feeling that the election was, in part, a referendum on the media, gave some voters an extra incentive to vote for Trump. A vote for him was a vote against the media and against Washington. Not incredibly, Trump used that sentiment to his advantage, often reviving up his crowds with attacks on reporters. He still does.
If I haven't made it clear, let me do so now. The behavior of much of the media, but especially The New York Times, was a disgrace. I don't believe it will ever recover the public trust it squandered. The Times' previous reputation for having the highest standards was legitimate. Those standards were developed over decades to force reporters and editors to be fair and to gain public trust. The commitment to fairness made The New York Times the flagship of American journalism. But standards are like laws in the sense that they are designed to guide your behavior in good times and in bad. Consistent adherence to them was the source of the Time's credibility. And eliminating the has made the paper less that ordinary. Its only standards now are double standards.
I say this with great sadness. I was blessed to grow up at the Times, getting a clerical job right out of college and working my way onto the reporting staff, where I worked for a decade. It was the formative experience of my career where I learned most of what I know about reporting and writing. Alas, it was a different newspaper then. Abe Rosenthal was the editor in those days, and long before we'd ever heard the phrase "zero tolerance," that's what Abe practiced toward conflicts of interest and reporter's opinions. He set the rules and everybody knew it.
Here is a true story about how Abe Rosenthal resolved a conflict of interest. A young woman was hired by the Times from one of the Philadelphia newspapers. But soon after she arrived in New York, a story broke in Philly that she had an affair with a political figure she had covered, and that she had accepted a fur coat and other expensive gifts from him. When he saw the story, Abe called the woman into his office and asked her if it were true. When she said yes, he told her to clean out her desk - that she was finished at the Times and would never work there again. As word spread through the newsroom, some reporters took the woman's side and rushed in to tell Abe that the firing was too harsh. He listened for about 30 seconds, raised his hand for silence, and said (this is slightly bowdlerized): "I don't care if you have a romantic affair with an elephant on your personal time, but then you can't cover the circus for the paper." Case closed. The conflict of interest policy was clear, absolute, and unforgettable.
As for reporter's opinions, Abe had a similar approach. He didn't want them in the news pages. And if you put them in, he took them out. They belonged in the opinion pages, which were managed separately. Abe said he knew reporters tended to lean left and would find ways to sneak their views into the stories. So he saw his job as steering the paper slightly to the right. "That way," he said, "the paper would end up in the middle." He was well known for this attitude, which he summed up as "keeping the paper straight." Like most people, I thought this was a joke. But after I related all this in a column last year, his widow contacted me and said it wasn't a joke - that, in fact, Abe's tombstone reads, "He kept the paper straight." She sent me a picture to prove it. I published that picture of his tombstone alongside a column where I excoriated the Times for its election coverage. Sadly, the Times' high standards were buried with Abe Rosenthal.
Looking to the Future
Which brings us to the critical questions. Can the American media be fixed? And is there anything that we as individuals can do to make a difference? The short answer to the first question is, "No, it can't be fixed." The 2016 election was the media's Humpty Dumpty moment. It fell off the wall, shattered into a million pieces, and can't be put back together again. In case there is any doubt, 2017 is confirming that the standards are still dead. The orgy of visceral Trump-bashing continues unabated.
But the future of journalism isn't all gloom and doom. In fact, if we accept the new reality of widespread bias and seize the potential is offers, the is room for optimism. Consider this - the election showed the country is roughly divided 50-50 between people who will vote for a Democrat and people who will vote for a Republican. But our national media is more like 80-20 in favor of Democrats. While the media should, in theory, broadly reflect the public, it doesn't. Too much of the media act like a special interest group. Detached from the greater good, it exists to promote its own interest and the political party with which it is alligned.
Ronald Reagan's optimism is often expressed in a story that is surely apocryphal, but irresistible. He is said to have come across a barn full of horse manure and remarked cheerfully that there must be a pony in it somewhere. I suggest we look at the media landscape in a similar fashion. The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public's sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for news and views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them; first, free speech; second, capitalism and free markets; and the third ingredient is you, the consumers of news.
Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and get a politically segregated audience in return. Look at the letter section in The New York Times - virtually every reader who writes in agrees with the opinions of the paper. This isn't a miracle; it's a bubble. Liberals used to love to say, "I don't agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it." You don't hear that anymore from the Left. Now they want to shut you up if your don't agree. And they are having some success.
But there is a countervailing force. Look at what happened this winter when the Left organized boycotts of department stores that carried Ivanka Trump's clothing and jewelry. Nordstrom folded like a cheap suit, but Trump's supporters rallied on social media and Ivanka's company had its best month ever. This is the model I have in mind for the media. It is similar to how FOX News got started. Rupert Murdoch thought there was an untapped market for a more fair and balanced news channel, and he recruited Roger Ailes to start it more than 20 years ago. Ailes found a niche market alright - half the country!
Incredible advances in technology are also on the side of free speech. The explosion of choices makes it almost impossible to silence all dissent and gain a monopoly, though certainly Facebook and Google are trying.
As for the necessity of preserving capitalism, look around the world. Nations without economic liberty usually have little or no dissent. That's not a coincidence. In this, I'm reminded of an enduring image from the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a pestilence, egged on by President Obama and others who view other people's wealth as a crime against the common good. This attitude was on vivid display as the protesters held up their iPhones to demand the end of capitalism. As I wrote at the same time, did they believe Steve Jobs made each and every Apple product one at a time in his garage? Did they not have a clue about how capital markets make life better for more people than any other system known to man? They had no clue [because our public education system has abandon teaching students anything about the benefits of capitalism]. And neither do many government officials, who think they can kill the golden goose and still get golden eggs.
Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It's you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, "You have to join the side you're on." It's no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good magazines. There are publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don't let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. And expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preference would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you're on.
Organizing For Action (OFA) - Obama's Ongoing Obstruction
Note: Truth or
Fiction says the
information in this
article is basically accurate, but
calls it "commentary" (one
person's opinions and conclusions). However,
it does not dispute the
information presented by the author of
the article.
= = = = = = = = = =
An article
from the New York Post:
I do not
understand how living in a
country with its democracy established over
200 years ago, and now,
for the first time in history, suddenly we have
one of our former
presidents set up a group
called "Organizing for
Action" (OFA).
OFA is
30,000+ strong and working
to disrupt everything that
our current president’s
administration is trying
to do. This organization goes against our
Democracy, and it is an
operation that will
destroy our way of governing. It goes
against our Constitution,
our laws, and the processes established over
200 years ago. If it is
allowed to proceed then we will be living in chaos
very much like third world
countries are run. What good is it to have an
established government if
it is not going to be respected and allowed to
follow our laws?
If you had an
army some 30,000 strong
and a court system stacked over the decades
with judges who would
allow you to break the laws, how much damage
could you do to a country?
We are about to find out in America!
Our
ex-president said he was
going to stay involved
through community organizing and
speak out on the issues
and that appears to be one post-administration
promise he intends to
keep. He has moved many of
his administration's top
dogs over to Organizing
for Action.
OFA is behind
the strategic and tactical
implementation of the resistance to the
Trump Administration that
we are seeing across America, and politically
active courts are
providing the leverage for
this revolution.
OFA is
dedicated to organizing
communities for
"progressive" change. Its issues are gun
control, socialist
healthcare, abortion,
sexual equality, climate change,
and of course, immigration
reform.
OFA members
were propped up by the
ex-president's message from the shadows:
"Organizing is the
building block of
everything great we have accomplished.
Organizers around the
country are fighting for
change in their communities and
OFA is one of the groups
on the front lines. Commit to this work in
2017 and beyond."
OFA's website
says it obtained its
"digital" assets from the
ex-president's re-election
effort and that he
inspired the movement. In
short, it is the shadow
government organization
aimed at resisting and tearing down the
Constitutional Republic we
know as AMERICA.
Paul Sperry,
writing for the New York
Post, says, “The OFA will fight President
Donald Trump at every turn
of his presidency and the
ex-president will command
them from a bunker less
than two miles from the White House."
Sperry writes
that, “The ex-president is
setting up a shadow government to sabotage the
Trump administration
through a network of non-profits led by OFA,
which is growing its war
chest (more than $40 million) and has some 250
offices nationwide. The
OFA IRS filings, according to Sperry,
indicate that the OFA has
32,525 (and growing) volunteers nationwide. The
ex-president and his wife
will oversee the operation from their home/
office in Washington DC.
Think about
how this works. For
example: Trump issues an immigration executive
order; the OFA signals for
protests and statements from pro-immigrant groups;
the ACLU lawyers file
lawsuits in jurisdictions
where activist judges
obstruct the laws;
volunteers are called to
protest at airports and
Congressional town hall
meetings; the leftist
media springs to action in
support of these
activities; the twitter
sphere lights up with social
media; and violence
follows. All of this
happens from the ex-president's
signal that he is
heartened by the
protests.
protests.
If Barack
Obama did not do enough to
destroy this country in the 8 years he was in
office, it appears his
future plans are to
destroy the foundation on which
this country has operated
on for the last 241 years.
If this does
not scare you, then we are
in worse trouble than you know.
So, do your
part. You have read it, so
at least pass this on so others will know what
we are up against. We are
losing our country and we are so compliant. We
are becoming a "PERFECT
TARGET" for our enemy!
Related
Links:
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/06/organizing-for-action-whos-giving-to-obama-linked-nonprofit/
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/06/organizing-for-action-whos-giving-to-obama-linked-nonprofit/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizing_for_Action
Organizing
for Action
(OFA) is a
nonprofit
501(c)4
organization
and community
organizing
project that
advocates for
the agenda of
former U.S. President
Barack Obama.
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