“The little truth that is urged, is usually urged coarsely, weakened and rendered vicious, by personalities; while those who live by falsehoods, fallacies, enmities, partialities and the schemes of the designing find the press the very instrument that the devils would invent to effect their designs.”---James Fenimore Cooper
"Newspapers ... serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke." --Thomas Jefferson
"The liberal mainstream media is held in such low regard by the public -- in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles"--Mark Steyn
"If you watch the delusional left-wing media, they make it seem like everyone in America is a Trump-hating liberal who despises the Founding Fathers and hates guns. In reality, nearly all TV programming — news, sitcoms, movies, etc. — comes from just two radical Left-wing cities: Los Angeles and New York City. The people in these cities live in extremist Left-wing “thought bubbles” that are entirely disconnected from the real world. Their goal is to try to convince you that you’re totally alone if you believe in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment or in honoring the legitimate outcomes of elections. In truth, most of America agrees with you, but they’re all too busy working real jobs to produce crappy sitcoms and Netflix programming. LA and NYC don’t represent America; they represent fringe extremism of the delusional Left." - Natural News
Many of us recognize (although many more, its sad to say, do not) that the electronic media with their high definition sensationalism and sound-bite are hardly an amenable venue for sound reflection on the hard realities of the human condition. For example, in our age of images and symbols(1), elections are easy to capture on film. But how do you televise the Rule of law? Still, that is no excuse for the way they are transforming what should be the news.
Listen to the current apologists for the mainstream media excusing the false reporting they do. The usual refrain of justification is a swarmy-spin that in substance concedes that sure, its fake but its believed to be true. As their great nemesis Rush Limbaugh sums it up, it isn’t the weight of the facts that matter for this media, but the extent of the seriousness of the charge they can dream up that they deem being truthful. Animal Farm anyone?
The Pew Research Center found the gap between journalists and other Americans is particularly wide on social issues. In 1995, 22% of journalists told Pew they were liberal, and 5% conservative, the rest didn’t have the guts to be honest. Now it's around 34% vs. and 7% respectively. Yet 20% of Americans now call themselves liberal, versus 33% who say they're conservative. Since human beings, especially journalists, are susceptible to the fact that we humans tend to form our views heavily influenced by emotions and our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, all news, regardless of its pedigree, is influenced by its background, therefore it seems there’s a disconnect between the audience and the 5th estate.
Reporters exert plenty of influence over their coverage and can't help missing parts of the big picture if they look at things the same way. Yet the trend toward a liberal-biased viewpoint continues to rise. Journalists are often blind to their bias, deciding to cover one story and not another, deciding some people are kooks and not worth consideration. Such practice, known in the behavioral sciences, is called anchoring, whose definition means different starting points yield different results, which are biased toward the initially presented values. As Daniel Kahneman tells us: People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the extent of the coverage in the media.” Intellectually honest people know that leaving out data is just as harmful to the pursuit of truth as getting the wrong data or making logical errors.
In a Gallup poll 41% of Americans said the news media are too liberal, while 14% said too conservative. It also found TV news and daily papers near the bottom - on par with Congress and labor unions - in its ranking of public confidence in US institutions. Approximately 69% of the adult English speaking population of the U.S. finds the national news media too liberal-biased and unbelievable. The result of years of inbreeding of management-ownership? Like minds attracting and employing like minds? Supported by an extreme left leaning education system that teaches that journalism's function is not to inform but to participate in enacting specific agenda? CONTINUED...
Supplemental Info:
https://spectator.org/five-qui....ck-things-eviscerati
