The Press...Still At It After All These Years

Here are some excerpts from a study of media attitudes in the last Presidential election, produced by Harvard*, which is a perfect example of the refusal of liberals to state the obvious truth.  Sorry to beat away again at this subject, but it is killing the country.

"the majority of mainstream media coverage...largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign."

Do I need to say that both the Republican stories of Clinton "scandals" and the allegedly "substantive issues" of the Trump campaign were all a pack of right wing lies?  Here is how that comment should have read, in a fair world:

"the majority of mainstream media coverage was devoted to broacasting Republican lies and smears, rather than attempting in any way to discuss the real issues."

Better?  I think so. Unless you define the word "better" as meaning anything, true or false, that will keep Republicans in power.

"We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism."

Once again, the simple truth is deliberately obscured in a blizzard of pseudointellectual babble.  That truth being that, in almost all cases, the "left wing media" tries to tell the truth, while the "right wing media" is a pack of liars paid by rich sociopaths to vomit out propaganda.  Apparently, the American people don't deserve to be told the truth, however, because even supposedly left wing organizations like the New York Times have done everything possible to see to it that right wing monsters like Trump are treated favorably, while the lies about people like Hillary Clinton are shoved down our throats every single day.

"Donald Trump succeeded in shaping the election agenda. Coverage of Trump overwhelmingly outperformed coverage of Clinton. Clinton’s coverage was focused on scandals, while Trump’s coverage focused on his core issues."

This is presented, idiotically, as some extremely clever strategy of Trump's, rather than what it really was: the press, which thanks to Reagan deregulation, is overwhelmingly owned by rich Republicans, deliberately did everything it could to see to it that the Republican won, as it does in every single election this country ever has, no matter how grotesquely unsuitable for public responsibility they may be (recent case in point, one Roy Moore.)  The media were not Trump's dupes, they were his collaborators; and until that truth is openly acknowledged, no progress toward fixing the problem can be made.

And if I haven't been clear enough, this means taking media outlets away from the hateful rich people who are misusing them to lie the American people into cutting their own throats, and severely punishing people who use the media to spread lies intended to reduce this country to an oligarchic dictatorship.  And don't come back at me with any arguments about freedom of speech; I know all of that, but none of it changes the fact that if we don't find a way to accomplish this, we are all doomed.  Let's not forget the famous words of Justice Robert H. Jackson in a now-legendary Supreme Court decision:

"This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints from these crowds and that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."

And that is what the First Amendment has become in the hands of the Republican party: a suicide pact.

Leading me to about the ten millionth repetition of Green Eagle's First Law:  Democrats could crush the Republican party out of existence without hardly trying; what they cannot do is beat the Republicans and the press working together.

A lot of Democrats are extremely excited over a couple of Democratic electoral victories, and polls showing generic Democrats running far ahead of Republicans in the 2018 election.  God, it takes a supreme act of will to forget the past forty years and realize that the billions of dollars spent by rich sociopaths in the three months before the election to lie about both Republicans and Democrats is going to totally erase that advantage, and we will in all probability be stuck right were we are today: on the road to hell.

And a little update:  Today, Daily Kos had this to say:

"In a colossal media failure perhaps exceeded only by the Iraq war and the election of Donald Trump itself, the GOP swept to power in 2010 despite misleading the nation on almost every major campaign issue of consequence."

None of these was a "media failure," no matter how much you miserable people try to hide from the truth. They were among their greatest successes, since electing Republicans regardless of the facts is what they exist for.  How can decent people ever expect to take power back from these evil monsters when even the supposedly most liberal sources won't admit a truth as obvious as that?




*Shows what they know at Harvard, or at least what they will admit in public.  For the record, I was led to this study by an article at Daily Kos, which was barely more forthright than the wording of this study.