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American |
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Reading
the morning newspaper is a difficult slog. Rather than welcoming it like
an old and trusted friend, as it surely was in days long gone, the paper
now is received more often as a door-to-door salesman, who may, or may
not, be giving complete information about a product. There are three (3)
levels of suspicion that must be cleared before the morning ink has
resonance and can be relied upon. The
first is fabrication. The
second is selectivity. The
third is mendacity. Fabrication
is generally not a concern. The online and broadcast media crowd is much
more vulnerable to accepting and running with fabrications. Newspaper
folks have an internal due diligence process of
fact-checking to sort out details and do not have to rush to
‘be first at 6 p.m. with the latest news.’ However, there are no
checks and balances to what is taken from the Associated Press (or
Reuters or the New York Times News Service).
It comes into the newsroom and onto the newspaper as gospel. The
Washington Post was burned by a Pulitzer recipient who fabricated a
series of ‘street’ stories. The New York Times, once, long ago, the
international standard of solidity and veracity (but certainly not
anymore), went through a major upheaval when forced to confront a
similar situation. Heads rolled and, supposedly, the newspaper swore-off
any practice that would compromise its integrity, or what there remained
of it. The problem at the NYT, like other overly in-bred, print domains,
was not in the newsroom, but in the offices of the editor and publisher. The NYT
was caught red-handed in a very serious fabrication in the final days of
the Presidential campaign, when they conspired with CBS to do a
‘hit’ piece on the eve of the election, alleging that the U.S.
military failed to secure hundreds of tons of explosives that were
reported to have been ‘missing’. The
scheme was outed, foiling the NYT-CBS plans to ambush the President, and
the story unraveled and was discredited before it got legs. The intent
was obvious, however. Had their scheme hatched as planned, there would
not have been sufficient time to learn the facts and the damage would
have been done. It was
learned that the United Nations was involved in the affair, apparently
through Kofi Annan’s office, who may have coordinated with NYT and CBS
political assassins posing as news reporters for these major
institutions. It was astonishing treachery, but who would report it? Selectivity
is increasingly the major crime of the print media. Newspapers offer 5
columns (though 1, mentioned below, carries 6) that can be shaked &
baked (and filtered) in a variety of ways. The average reader (is there
one?) makes an assumption, almost unknowingly, that the information
presented reflects a fair and balanced presentation of the most
important news of the day. The very pronounced slant in reporting by the
dangerously dominant Associated Press allows manipulative editors to
emphasize certain stories and ignore others that may be of more
importance to the topic, for the purpose of advancing a political
agenda. A recent
example: the resignation of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Were this
the Clinton, Gore, or Kerry Administrations, ABC’s hourly radio
newscaster, Ann Compton, and Meeshel (Seashells?) of NPR would be using
their whispered, gah-gah tones to ooze and emote about the, ‘first
African-American woman to be named to the 4th highest
position in America.’ CNN would be wall-to-wall for 48 hours with
Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, even Koffi Annan, about how
this was such a great advancement for people of color all over the
world, yahda-yahda-yahda. Instead, what are the stories? ‘Powell
departure forced by Hawks,’ and ‘Bush gets control of State Through
Rice’. It’s all a matter of perspective. I wish news reporters would
sit in the middle and not always on the left side of the field. Consider
the almost treasonous reporting coming out of Iraq. Instead of analysis
of the one of the most remarkable urban conquests in military history by
the U.S. Marines, in which over 2,000 terrorists were killed or captured
within a week, and the terrorists’ stronghold was retaken with minimal
collateral damage, what is being reported? A pin-prick car bomb here,
and a pin-prick suicide bomber there, and, hold it --- breaking news!
clear the front page! ---- scrap the Fallujah story (too much good news
for America)--- “Man Jumps Over Fence at White House and Tries to Burn
Himself”. Front page photo and story. NPR runs with it as if it were
the selection of a Pope. Does
anybody in America not know the agenda of the press? Besides Democrats? Mendacity
is a fancy word that fits very well the current condition of news
reporting in America. Mendacity is an artful form of lying, practiced by
revealing a piece of the truth, but not the whole truth, as when the
criminal defendant’s attorney asserts that his client could not have
committed the crime because she never saw the gunshot that wounded the
victim, while not mentioning that his client had closed her eyes when
she pulled the trigger. That is being mendacious. The press is
mendacious, especially today, in the manner that it advances an angle,
such as opposition to the agenda of the President, which is unrelenting,
while they wonder why subscriptions are falling.
It is
more than disappointing that the press has been taken over by many from
the hippie-wannabe generation. Nothing wrong with that. We’ve got a
whole generation of fat, balding, Baby Boomers wearing leather, and
riding $35,000 bicycles in an amusing attempt to play Peter Fonda in Easy
Rider (hope the boys ‘n babes on Harleys remember how it ended). But we’re not depending on the bikers to give us the truth
each day. Freedom
cannot be sustained solely on the blood of patriots, though even this
sacrifice, continuing now, is disdained by the enemies of truth that
infest ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the vast majority of daily
newspapers. Truth is the oxygen of freedom, without which it withers,
coarsens, and then dies. Perhaps I am naďve, when I express
frustration, asking, ‘why can’t they just give us the truth, the
whole truth, and let us analyze and decide?’
There is
no greater crime than the deliberate distortion of the truth. There is
no greater enemy to America and a free society than a person who abuses
the truth, whether it is a college professor misleading impressionable
minds, or, worse, a reporter or editor that fabricates, misleads, or
otherwise wounds, hides, or ignores the truth. No purpose or agenda can
justify it. Fortunately,
there are alternatives, though precious few. In print, there remains but
one solid pillar of consistent truthful reporting. It is the Wall
Street Journal. This publication is far more than a financial
report. It contains remarkable analysis and keeps the editorials where
they should be placed, on the editorial pages. The ‘agenda’ is not
revealed on the front page and doesn’t seep into news reports, as is
so often the case with local and wire stories. The WSJ is fascinating,
as well, offering a wide range of topics both timely and designed to
meet the interests of the readership. I look forward to it each weekday.
The rise
of so-called ‘conservative’ Talk Radio is due almost entirely to the
marketplace’s demand for alternative viewpoints because of the absence
of fair and balanced presentations in the broadcast media and the
left-stream press. Truth-hating editors and reporters in America’s
news rooms have created and sustain the market for Rush Limbaugh, Sean
Hannity, Michael Savage, and Bill O’Reilly. Their success is due
substantially to the abuse of truth by Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter
Jennings, CNN, and NPR. Rather and Brokaw are bowing-out, but we should
expect more of the same from those network newsrooms. The thin
reed of alternative analysis represented by the WSJ and Talk Radio is no
counterbalance to the almost crushing and suffocating left-stream media
and press. The lone cable TV broadcast, FOX, though immensely
successful, cannot offset the danger to the truth and the condition of
information that the majority of Americans receive each day. Perhaps,
however, the marketplace will eventually work its wonder, even in the
resistant news room. Perhaps executives and publishers will realize
---get ready for a stunning disclosure--- that truth actually sells.
Maybe they will become envious of the higher ad dollars FOX is grabbing
and force changes. It will take wholesale changes, not just in news
rooms. Unfortunately,
the rot in America extends through the entire system and down to the
root cause that is found in the colleges that produce ‘journalists,’
like the one recently interviewed during the election campaign, who
declared that she wanted to be a journalist, ‘so that I can change the
world’. Nice goal, but where are the journalists that want to tell us,
simply, what are the facts, and not what they want us to believe? And so
it is now, in this, the American Age.
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