Legitimacy
It’s getting to them. David Carr at the New York Times tries to laugh off the charge of media bias. But clearly it is creeping under his skin. “In the last few days, conservatives have become agitated about Mitt Romney’s drop-off in the polls … in their view, the mysterious drop can only be explained by the fact that the mainstream media have their collective liberal thumb on the scale, in terms of coverage and, more oddly, polling.”
To imagine bias is only paranaoia he says. “Let’s be fair. It’s not as if everyone who believes there is a liberal bias needs to be fitted for a tinfoil helmet. But the trope is losing traction, partly because there are many robust champions of the right, which gives conservatives the means to project their message far beyond the choir.”
But Carr is is confused. Who is the ‘they’ he speaks of who have the temerity to project their message beyond the choir besides his circle? And why, pray, tell is there even a circle?
More importantly, he’s got the charge wrong. The conservative media isn’t claiming that Romney is actually losing to Obama. They are only claiming that the mainstream media is wrongly proclaiming Obama the winner in order to dampen Romney’s turnout. Romney, at least, is willing to grant legitimacy to the MSM.
“I think we have a system of free press,” he told CBS before an appearance in Toledo, Ohio. “People are able to provide their own perspective based upon their own beliefs. I think there are some people who are more in my camp, there’s a lot of people who are more in his camp, and I don’t worry about that.”
Why can’t Carr make the same allowance for his industry rivals? Maybe because it would imply there was no privileged point of view; that he should accord the same respect for the “tinfoil” crowd that he feels is due to him. Carr’s real objection is that badged journalists are no longer licensed to preach from on high.
Now even the polls themselves are being impugned, with suggestions that they are skewed by left-leaning math. Various conservative bloggers and pundits have complained that a slew of polls showing gains by President Obama were guilty of “oversampling Democrats” and “confirmation bias.”…
Maybe though — and I’m just putting this out there — the polls and the coverage suggest that Mr. Romney has had a bad couple of weeks and he needs to turn it around if he wants to win the election. On Sunday, a well-informed observer pointed out as much on ABC’s “This Week.”
Why not impugn the polls if there’s a reason to ? Are they sacred? And is why citing ABC’s “This Week” proof of anything? Because it once meant something? Suppose Carr is right. What if Romney is lagging in the true distribution; then if so that will be proved in the November polls. We’ll all know the truth on the day.
But in the meantime, people are obliged to believe nothing. And if they do credit something, they are also entitled to question it. The real significance of news stories that show a significant portion of the American public unwilling to accept the media’s interpretations of events in advance of the actual outcome is that they’ve lost their mojo.
That is the news.
No matter how Carr spins it this represents a huge decline in his industry. They once enjoyed a implicit belief in their reports. Their reports were the facts. The New York Times was the Gold Standard of journalistic credibility; it was the newspaper of record. To now complain that people doubt it is the headline. To say that it is now reduced to haggling over its credibility is the bombshell. It’s like saying Queen Elizabeth II now shops at the five and dime.
To use a cliche, ‘people doubt the media’ is not a ‘dog bites man story, but man bites dog story’. And it is no use to say that this fall in credibility is due to the impertinence of the peanut gallery. Had the New York Times and its sisters maintained their record of accuracy, who would reject them? No one but an imbecile casts away accurate weighing scales or dumps watches that keep precision time or discards equipment that functions unerringly. The real story here is that an industry with a near monopoly lost its market because it consistently produced a shoddy product.
In this respect The New York Times is no different from General Motors. It’s customers didn’t leave them because they were perverse or wore tin-foil hats. Their customers left them because they kept selling their loyal base nothing but s**t.
The challenge for the MSM is to win back their customer base by doing better than their rivals. So far they have pretended that nothing unusual happened in Libya and that Fast and Furious is a Vin Diesel Movie. How cool is that? Keep it up and who will read them? The days of merely taking the high hand are over. No more Chevy Volts. No more treating the audience like Dolts.
You Mean The Mohammed Video Story
Fast and Furious: Ay Chihuahua!
How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
Naw, they’re going to ride that MFer right down to ground zero, hootin’ and wavin’ their cowboy hat the whole way. They’re all in. They’ve already signaled; it’s a deathmatch and only one of us will be left standing…or maybe none of us. We’re going down and/or they will die trying. And they have the temerity to call us the fanatics. They’re the memetic suicide bombers.
Once they have been thoroughly driven before us and we can hear the lamentations of their women, we might have a chance of turning this country around. If there’s anything left in the rubble.
“No, no, no, we can’t be biased! We aren’t! We aren’t! We aren’t. Anyway Rush Limbaugh had a drug problem so everything he says is lies. And the great guy we got now is SO smart. Really, just listen to us again. Would we steer you wrong?”
Folks, this video has to be seen. (there’s also a transcript version)
A DEMOCRATIC pollster, Pat Caddell, who’s been in politics for many years, gave a speech about the media becoming the “enemy of the American people”: you really need to watch it all. Caddell starts slowly, but soon he gathers steam, and is thundering down the tracks.
He names names, and he names newspapers, and he names networks. He reveals hair-raising inside information that he’s gotten from Beltway politicians that even those of us with our ears to the rails haven’t heard —
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brDZJA8j-8c
He is so furious and so scared for the country that he starts to shake. And he says, “We’ve crossed a line in the last few weeks that is terrifying”. . . .
I listened to it on one tab as I continued my surfing, but I found myself riveted to his account, and shaken by HIS obvious alarm. Caddell has [at last] waked up: and has found the time is 1 minute to midnight.
Please, please pass this on. This is stuff that all the citizens need to know, urgently. The fact that Caddell is a lifelong Democrat will mean that SOME more people who are impervious to Republicans or Libertarians will listen to him.
(Forgive all the boldfacing; I hope to catch the eye of the skimmers. Those who are in thrall to the Left will only listen to one of their own. This was a thread topic at Ace of Spades; he reposted it today in hopes that more people will see it. God bless our nation; I do fear that we’re going to have to “bottom out” on Leftism before people will be willing to sober up. . . if so, we’re going to be a long time in the wilderness.)
Past is prologue. How is it possible that Robert Mugabe is still in power in Zimbabwe? One suspects there’s more to his vote tallies than Jimmah Carter’s endorsement of his vote tallies.
And does it have any connection at all to dee bold man who observed that it is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes?
It is interesting that the MSM can’t seem to cope with the “memory” function of the internet. Words spoken in the past have been digitized and made available over the net. They struggle to erase mistakes but are often way to late. Things said in the 1930′s come back to hunt them on the digital screens. Video records show up for contrast and compare of their lies of yesterday to their lies of today. So now I read online that the best the pollsters can do at the present time is a total of 9% of the people they try to poll. Pollster has become a dirty word.
“19th century solutions for the 21st century,” should be the left’s battle cry.
“— and I’m just putting this out there —”
They have sunk to resorting to the weasel tense circumlocution. This is the same as when an Internet concern troll commentator inserts “just saying.” When you see the passive voice, “a well-informed observer pointed out,” you know that you are being not only lied to but insulted.
Romney should announce that the NYT is not a news organization but a DNC house journal and will not receive any government support. Say not a taxpayer dime will be spent to purchase their rag or subscribe online, except for by law enforcement functions. No access to government facilities or issuance of access passes to agents of a political conspiracy. Turn off CNN in every government office like VA waiting rooms and their only captive audience will be in airports. Kick the hyenas out of the White House basement and restore the swimming pool that was built using dimes sent by the school children of America to the sick President FDR. Announce that for two hours a week the pool will be open for the children of the District.
“Follow the money” is the phrase one needs to keep in mind when dealing with the left, always.
Lacking the intellect, skills, temperament, and work ethic to make it in any truly productive venture, they gravitate towards certain fields.
Law. “Education”. “Journalism”. Welfare rolls. Public employment.
Fields where having a fluid moral sense and the ability to change morals based upon what will keep the government checks and/or perceived status going are a feature, not a bug. Fields where no real-world metrics are needed to be satisfied to keep yourself employed and making money.
This, more than anything else, is what this election is about. Do you believe in a Euro style society where the bulk of the populace stay in school until 25, work some fussy make-work public sector functionary job (or stay on welfare, not much difference) for 25 years, and then live extremely well and stress-free until 80 without having to work, and somehow the math all works out? If you believe in that, you’ll vote for Obama. Otherwise, you won’t.
The Romney video is not a gaffe, it is a telling of truth that should be hammered daily. This election is about people who believe they have a “right” to use the government to pry money away from me and give it to themselves in amounts which do not reflect the true value of their labor. Is there a majority of these? Then the real America is finished.
BFTP has the truth of it – for the center/right the press is irretrievably lost so we should treat them appropriately.
Our “free” press has figured that one out, while we all sit around and discuss platitudes. For the next month, the platitudes can wait. Let’s deal with this issue of consumers of wealth declaring war on those of us who actually produce, or we lose it all.
Compare the Times of today with the liberal paper run by Punch Sulzberger and Abe Rosenthal.
“How the mighty have fallen.”
- 2 Samuel 1:25
The Wiki includes this gem, “There is no evidence that the New York Times has a slant left or right.”
The steady money for news is soap opera women. That’s the bias towards a shoddy product.
Nothing that doesn’t interest them can run, lest they tune away. Their tastes edit every story.
So it starts as a business model bias. Then it attracts reporters with a political bias that fits the needs of the business.
It’s doubtful that any other business model can work, if this doesn’t. People won’t come every day, day in and day out, for hard news, and so can’t pay the bills. It’s soap opera or nothing.
The present day mainstream media reminds of the title of a Japanese Anime that translates as, “Twilight of the Cockroaches.”
My theory is that up until about 20 years ago the networks and the newspapers had a nice little monopoly on advertising dollars. This enabled them to be able to hire a lot of staff that could spend the time to dig up the stories and the facts behind them. So when an anchor like Chet Huntly, Cronkite and the like spoke, they spoke from a position of a well or fairly well researched story.
As the market place for new advertising dollars became splintered because of the internet, their share of the advertising dollars dropped. Well, more like the bottom dropped out, especially the past 10 years. They can’t afford to pay people like a Woodard and Bernstein to spend a lot of time researching stories. This is why talk radio and the talking heads shows became more popular. There is no shortage of people who can read the AP wire and then give their opinion on TV. Unfortunately the confirmation bias is on the other end. The market supports these networks simply by tuning in and feeding the Neilson ratings. Well, that’s my theory anyways…
The NYT is infested with DNC shills and liberals. The NYT’s troubles stretch from Pulitzer Prize winning liar Walter Duranty to liar and plagiarist extraordinaire Jayson Blair. I will note Howell Raines, Jonathan Landman and others asserted that Jayson Blair had gotten the breaks he had enjoyed because he was black.
Fast forward and you can imagine the huge “breaks” 0bama has gotten from Arthur Sulzberger his biased cronies at the NYT because 0bama was black – no matter how many blunders 0bama made. It makes me want to vomit. The NYT’s only use could be to line bird cages to soak up the crap.
I have not read any major MSM newspaper or watched any TV in almost eight years. I get my information from the internet. The internet is much broader, deeper, and timely. I doubt I have missed anything.
I can’t understand why the average Joe would spend the time and money to buy, read, and dispose of, in a proper receptacle, that grossly biased rag called the NYT. The NYT is just an extension of the DNC and nothing more.
Jayson Blair and his contribution to the NYT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair
I no longer refer to “them” as the MSM. I call them the LRMC – the Leni Riefenstahl Media Complex.
I don’t think they’re putting their thumbs on the scales to depress turnout on the right or to fire up the left enough to drag Obama over the line. The thumbs are pushing to keep Obama in the game to mitigate the blowout he’s facing.
It will work. Instead of the two-to-one, decisive drubbing Obama ought to be getting, they will probably manage to keep the popular vote within ten points. It will work because herding animals of the two-legged variety tend to herd toward the left.
I had a funny thought early this morning: The members of the lefty cadre that make a very comfortable living off the forever struggle of pushing the country leftward have as much if not more reason as I do to fear an Obama win next month. If Obama wins reelection, he will declare that the people have spoken and will drop what little pretense remains of our being a republic of laws. The dog will have caught the car. What then?
I heard in a civics class long ago about the class system in the US that one the average for the wealthy it was often “Shirt Sleeves to Shirt Sleeves in Three Generations.” The first generation earned the fortune, the second generation preserved it, and the third generation spent it till it was all gone. I thought of that when I read an article in the Diplomat about how long one party authoritarian regimes last. It seem to be about 72 years on average.
http://thediplomat.com/2012/10/01/is-chinas-communist-party-doomed/?all=true
The “left” has built an one party empire of education, information, and culture in the US but now it is starting to come apart. It’s leadership isn’t showing much in the way of intelligence or character. In a way it is surprising that they have lasted as long as they have.
I think few things illustrate the mental and moral decline of the MSM than its reaction to Media Matters objective of destroying Fox News.
I believe that there was once a time in which a group which had the clear objective of destroying any element of any industry would have produced outrage from the rest of that industry. Probably even today, if a Soros funded group announced they were going to destroy Chevrolet then Toyota would say they were horrified. Maybe it would be a sense of fair play or maybe it would be simply, “Today they came for Chevrolet; if not stopped, tomorrow they’ll come for me.”
And I think that at one time that was true of the MSM. Even as Fox News kicks butt, you would think that the concept of a free media would be sacred enough that a hit squad approach to dealing with them would be unacceptable to everyone. But I see no evidence of that.
David Carr uses as his evidence of lack of NYT liberal bias the fact that conservative voices like the WSJ and talk radio have large audiences. That’s like the mugger arguing that he couldn’t possibly have robbed the old lady because Wendy’s sells more hamburgers than Burger King in Sheboygan.
I finally stopped reading the NYT forever during the Bush years when the paper regularly used the results of an internal poll for a headline and as the only source of its major news story. “America Hates Bush” or some-such. The stories were always well written and if you were not paying attention it was easy to miss that this important “news” story had been manufactured out of whole cloth.
The politicization of journalism extends itself beyond influencing elections into every aspect of the culture. “Families” without fathers are the best possible condition. It’s cool to kill your unborn children. What movie actors have to say about everything is important. Putting a crucifix in a jar of urine is high art. Climate change is killing millions. And on it goes.
The absence of MSM integrity is a real tragedy because it leads directly to fractionalization of the population. Everybody wants to know what’s going on in the world and once you know that you cannot reliably believe anything you read or see in the MSM you will go to narrow sources which have more trust. PJM is a prime example. What gets lost is the national dialogue. You can’t have a civil conversation when you know the other guy is lying.
Never confuse the Constitution’s First Amendment ‘free press’ which was about the medium of free flow of information at the time of its writing with the institution of today’s ‘Press’ which obscures, obstructs and fabricates information.
There is an interesting little book by Abe Rosenthal in which he reviews the variety of ways the Times screwed up the Kitty Genovese story over the years due to this or that current piety. Rosenthal seems to think he’s coming clean about media bias, but the book is embroiled in its own biased spin, making it a virtually mathematical object lesson in the power of power to blind the powerful.
It isn’t actually that hard to tell the truth.
And they keep avoiding it. Recent stories valorizing Sixties terrorists (there’s a sort of Tiger Beat fan page for such) are, if anything, more belligerently resistant to hard facts than the apotheosis of such stories — the Bill Ayers I’m Not Sorry I Bombed Buildings article published 9/11/01 and thus the last thing some people may have seen as they hurtled to death that morning.
If that does’t wake you up, you’re David Carr.
A working link for Pat Caddell’s transcript:
Pat Caddell – The Audacity of Corruption
He may be the last honest one…
tom
The NY Times used to be a Sunday pleasure, That stopped a few yrs back, the Book Review kept me interested on the net for a while, now even the Book Review is so slanted, forget about it..
#3 Beverly: “Folks” has become an Obama word, used in addressing inferiors, try “People”..
We have one news paper delivered, a very local info,…World news comes from a variety of sources on the net..The day internet info is controlled, we will be truly blind..
How did George W Bush win? Same media. I think we give the media more relevance than it actually has.
” … the fact that the mainstream media have their collective liberal thumb on the scale … ”
”have”, ”their”, ”collective”—way to go!!
RE. # 7. no mo uro
1. “Follow the money” is the phrase one needs to keep in mind when dealing with the left, always.”
With right as well.
2. “… or we lose it all.”
We will. And than they will run out of OPM. And after that our grandkids will be able to start the cycle over. I just hope that going through the bottom will not eliminate accumulated knowledge so the cycle will be just a cycle and will not become a flatline.
I am voting Romney/Ryan but like I’ve been saying since March of this year 0bama is getting his second term, voting wise there ain’t enough Original American’s in this election to change anything. I use to think it would be a massive Nuclear War to bring America down or a very nasty Civil War but I think the Progressives have the upper hand, they know it and their going for the jugular, America is going to flip with barely a whimper, there are to few and to far spread to make a difference anymore, there might be small pockets of resistance but they will be forced to change and if there is any violence it won’t get reported so very few will know what’s happening or willing to give up (sacrifice) what they have to go stand with their fellow patriots, when it means that the Federal (and State) Government will confiscate their possessions and even their lives most likely would be lost… I know to many that say “Ya I am with ya” but are the first ones to stay away or have reasons to not get involved… Talk has always been cheap (and Free), Action has always required a higher price than most care to pay.
The greatest challenge in life is extracting the essential truth from the immense sea of cacophonous concepts, true, false, incomplete, inconsequential, substantive, and superfluous. Josh might opine that we’re half wrong, half of the time.
It’s much worse. We’re more often in the dark than basking in rays of light. Throughout the long march of time, the intellectual elite have continually marked the descent into well-intentioned calamity. Self-deception is always a perfidious companion of personal arrogance.
Recall the British intelligentsia, fawning in self-satisfaction over the great appeasement by Chamberlain. Pig farmers in Alabama are more likely to achieve understanding of the unfolding of history. With no pretense of great intelligence, they are better equipped to avoid stepping into unseasoned fertilizer.
Witness also the unflinching support of the national socialists by the unavoidably befuddled media during the decades leading to disaster. Those of greater perspicacity were already seeking means to escape. Einstein and the Von Trapp’s succeeded.
In the turn of the great wheel of human folly, we find, again, the self-assessed intellectuals of the media captured by the rapturous visions and sonorous vocals of a self-absorbed fool.
True, the pretender has a lofty vision, but is a dissembler, none-the-less. And the destination is disaster. An insufficiently prepared leader, with the best of intentions, informed by the inadequacy of arrogance, poses great danger for the following flock.
These pretentious fools have no understanding of the depravity of mankind and the hopelessness of mankind’s self-sanctified return to the Garden. This attempt will avail the same disaster as the previous effort – the war to end all wars, redux.
It is far later than you think. Can the nation be saved? By the grace of God, it remains possible.
One big problem that many of you may be too young to appreciate is the significance, for management level custodians of the legacy media, of having cut their teeth on the heady stuff of the late ’60s. There is just no way to overemphasize how intoxicating those days were for those who were just coming of age.
The romantic pull of that era will just not let go of many of us, so we carry the torch of what was ultimately a culture of death forward, continuing to delude ourselves that we’re eventually going to save the world.
Getting out of this trough will take the demise, through retirement, death, or disgrace, of all of the intellectuals of that era AND of the children that they raised and put through leftist universities while blowing dope in the sauna in their basements.
Grrr #23:
You cannot compare profit motive on the center/right with the desire for perfect government guaranteed income stream that exists on the left. Not comparable at all. Leftists seek out and then try to expand enclaves where they can manipulate the force of government to extort money away from productive people, whether it be directly, by subsidy, or by rent-seeking regulations. This is true of teachers, public workers, regulatory compliance industries,lawyers, and the financial/insurance//government axis.
Also, leftists tend to seek out and populate areas where they are shielded from market forces and the possibility of anxiety regarding their income. As such, they are almost never found in truly productive, entrepreneurial ventures, which are concerned not at all with this sort of thing.
Desiring a profit by working hard and taking a risk in private enterprise really isn’t the same thing as desiring to get money by force and extortio by being involved in the public sector in some way. The will to produce and innovate and thereby create value for yourself and others is not the same as scheming to use the police power of the state to skim off of other people’s work and transactions to get more money than your skill set could justify in a free enterprise, market scenario.
In the end, while the desire for money may be common, how an individual acts on that desire is extremely variable. Also, the sector in which you exist can vary greatly in terms of forces – like the invisible hand existing in the private sector and not the public – which punish and modify people’s economic behavior. That is what I was trying to address in the above post.
Another possibility is battle space preparation after an Obama loss.
A Romney win has to be made illegitimate, and it’s the Bush derangement all over again.
And is why citing ABC’s “This Week” proof of anything?
This is a double-shuffle.
Citing ABC’s “This Week” is supposed to carry weight (sic) because the first guest was Chris Christie, who is a Republican and said some neutral-ish things.
HOWEVER I do *not* believe he said that Romney had a bad week (I can hardly watch the stupid thing anymore or *any* of the Sunday morning shows, which is perhaps the MSM goal, well congratulation guys you’re almost there). I think maybe Stephanopoulos suggested during a panel, or someone like Donna Brazille breezily asserted, that Romney had had a bad week. But Carr cites the show because of Christie.
You’ve been double-shuffled.
–
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-gov-chris-christie-david-plouffe/story?id=17341440&page=4
STEPHANOPOULOS: You alluded to, do you buy this argument that some conservatives are making that the polls are skewed against Mitt Romney?
CHRISTIE: I don’t buy that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Not sure, right?
CHRISTIE: I don’t know if it’s — listen, I don’t think it’s intentional. I think, you know, you look at every different poll and look and its methodology and you can say whether it’s good or bad poll, but do I think there’s a concerted effort to skew the polls against Governor Romney? No, I don’t buy that.
–
Network news still pulls in more than 20 million viewers nightly
Rush in a good week pulls 25 million.
Geez, maybe Rush should start hiring his own stringers and primary reporters, and start running a 6PM nightly broadcast on his Dittocam network.
WHAT? Carr says:
What about radio? Three of the top five radio broadcasters — Mr. Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the recently departed Michael Savage — have outdrawn NPR’s morning and evening programs by a wide margin.
NPR? Wait while I Google, …
http://www.npr.org/blogs/gofigure/2010/04/27/126303646/how-the-audience-for-npr-programs-compare-against-the-top-shows-on-commercial-radio
Just the single show All Things Considered pulls maybe 13m. OK, that’s a LOT higher than I would have guessed. Carr gets a pass on this, though it’s still an understatement.
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e @ 26: Josh might opine that we’re half wrong, half of the time.
We probably are but I would normally be too polite to mention it, and it doesn’t follow from my mantra that “half of X is below average”, if that’s what you mean. Anyhow .500 is a pretty good batting average!
–
m @ 27: One big problem that many of you may be too young to appreciate is the significance, for management level custodians of the legacy media, of having cut their teeth on the heady stuff of the late ’60s. There is just no way to overemphasize how intoxicating those days were for those who were just coming of age.
Right. I agree, that is exactly the subtext. And I keep wondering, was it really better back then, or why did we think so? And I think it’s both. We were in a little bubble of time there where the *ideal* was to report objectively. There was very little on-air challenging of interviewees, the “attack interview” as *standard* MSM practice came later, in response to Nixon defenders lying, and then with Tim Russert and his ilk merely as style, a lack of manners taken for depth and insight. And hey, it was respectable to be liberal, as “liberal” meant breaking the hold of segregation, and what’s more included BOTH PARTIES. Well, the parties realigned in the 1980s, the Clinton liars were elected and not challenged in the 1990s, and the democratic party has been foaming at the mouth continuously since Bush was elected to make up for the fact that the Republicans boxed in Bubba instead of impeaching him. Should have impeached (removed) him, guys. Anyway, have to date the death of the MSM to somewhere between 2000 and the 2008 campaign, throttled between Hillary’s thighs, basically. To be a “liberal” today is to live within scare quotes, and in short, to be a credulous, dogmatic, vicious lying fool. The MSM still insists on living there, and that’s how they are.
There’s a one-word counterargument to Carr’s entire piece: Journolist.
The MSM is not dead, and for all practical purposes it is not “dying” in any sense that makes a difference right now. They are having an effect on the polls, because, while people may “mistrust” the media more than ever, most of them only get their news from a few minutes of an evening broadcast, or from the scandalously biased Yahoo! and other on-line sources. Even “conservative” papers like the Washington Times and the Examiner are infested with AP dispatches, making reading even those papers a disorienting experience.
It isn’t so much that the polls are being “weighted” in collusion with the MSM and Democrats, as the fact that what little of the narrative that most people get is from the “mistrusted” MSM. And the single most devastating aspect of the conventional narrative is that many people are irrationally frightened of or turned off by “Republicans.” Such people vote reflexively, no matter how awful they themselves may think Obama and the Democrats are.
For my part I am voting Romney/Ryan and straight GOP, and would even vote for Akin if I were a Missouran. Romney may pull a “Truman” on Nov. 6. We shall see.
Re @ 26: Josh might opine that we’re half wrong, half of the time.
I dispute that. I think it is more accurate to say: “we’re half right, half of the time”. This means that we are at the most 1/4 times right (sort of).
Multi-national corporations and “globalization” are not solely the province of manufacturing. The State-controlled news media in this country are, in fact, global concerns by their very nature. Profits earned elsewhere are fungible and support monetary losses elsewhere in the conglomerate.
Just as one cannot be “a part-time prostitute” or “a little bit pregnant”; the inherent political and financial corruption of the news media is not restricted to this country.
We know that the Hollywood-based media is financed by foreign governments who have their own goals and propaganda “red lines”; q.v. Matt Damon’s new vehicle Promised Land is an anti-American energy independence screed, with the villains being …. wait for it …. evil American oil companies. Funny thing, the movie production was paid for by Image Media Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media; which is wholly owned by the Government of the United Arab Emirates. Production of energy inside our country is heresy to the UAE. Hollywood was salivating at the prospect of the payoff; both financial and political.
We know that they take payoffs from various dictators, because being a kept news outlet regurgitating press releases is a lot easier and more profitable than actually looking for the real news and reporting it. The latest example of the news media covering up for enemies of America, and being paid handsomely for it is in a post at ZEROHEDGE:
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-09-30/3-time-emmy-award-winning-cnn-journalist-mainstream-media-takes-money-foreign
The money they get from Bahrain, subsidizes the losses they take on their slanted American news coverage; allowing them to keep pushing their ideology despite low ratings and financial losses.
Subotai Bahadur
A very applicable old saying from an old country: “There is no truth in “Pravda” and no news in “Izvestia”. Unfortunately the names like “New York Times”, “LA Times”, or “Washington Post” are intentionally misleading. No doubt due to capitalistic plots to confuse the revolutionary masses.
Anyone paying attention at all knows the MSM is biased, badly. Whats scary is most Americans arent that interested in the news the TVsuch that they watch enough to form a balanced or even “aware of bias” context. When the major wires for local papers are NYT and AP, the built in bias becomes the truth for these readers, and when NBC and MSNBC manufacture truth in doctored clips, and get away with it- we can say the myth of “objective” news reporting is complete. Carr is either a simpleton or a cynical liar, period.
35. grrr:
Note, however, that the WaPo has sometimes been the canary in the liberal coal mine. They have recently slammed the whole electric car crash program, and in 2009 they begged the Democrats and Obama to focus on economic recovery first and health care later.
Oh, and both “Izvestia” and “Pravda” often did provide a truthful info as well… if you were skilled in reading between lines.
As Beverly says at 3, Mr. Caddell is seen trembling. That doesn’t necessary prove he’s sincere (See Burt Lancaster’s performance in Elmer Gantry.) However, he stammers quite a bit in his delivery. I think that’s a sign of his real anger and fear. Thus I think he’s more earnest than many other talkers. Because of the stammering, I think any transcript of Mr. Caddell’s speech needs some help from us via a slightly edited transcription than what appears at the link mentioned by Beverly, that may be found here. (This is the same as what tomw left at 20, and, imo, needs a bit more help).
From 17:30 – 18:32 on the clip.
It has been talked about all over the Dextrosphere. I’m not so sure it’s being seen by anywhere near enough non-internet users. There is still time to send transcripts via snail mail before the election. Consider it.
There’s one more bit of old news for which there ought to be transcripts that I feel must be mentioned in this context.
It should be no revelation that the press corps is a willing participant in the degradation of all that is America. I fail to believe how I can be the only person who remembers hearing the National Press Club luncheon, or meeting, or whatever it was that was broadcast over NPR sometime either late in Reagan’s term or during the term of Bush41. Its theme was “the need for Draconian rule to come to America.” I say that was its theme because every speaker, not one of whose names I recall, spoke to the need for Draconian conditions to be experienced by Americans.
I tried passing this along to the Media Research Center through the leave a tip function at Newsbusters. I got quite a runaround trying to get the tip to go through without repeated error responses. After about 3 months I finally got back a terse email from —- ——-: “No Idea.”
I also sent a note through the tip function at Big Journalism. It accepted it, but it gave me no feedback as to whether or not they received it. And I’ve heard nothing at all. Maybe Roger Simon et alii has the heft to drag that recording out of its memory hole.
I know I did not imagine that broadcast. If there is any other club member who recalls this, please pipe up. It really would be timely to hear again now that we have Democrat Pat Caddell telling us what a traitorous bunch the press corps has become. Find that recording and bring it out for the world to bear witness.
Perhaps a coincidence that shows promise. Three hours after my request for his aid in my last comment yesterday, Roger Simon posted his own broadside on the illegitimacy of the press corps. “We Live Under a Media Coup d’État”. Unlike Wretchard, if he ever adds to his comment threads it’s hardly noticeable. (Does he even read the comments he instigates?)
Too bad I did not see it sooner. I think it too late to repeat the last suggestion there. That thread has too many comments and sub-threads now. Comment number 40 above is more noticeable here.