Media Bias and Corruption
The Failure of the Fourth Estate and the Death of Journalism in America
Hunter S. Thompson suicide '05Media is supposed to attempt, at least, to be somewhat neutral - serving all of us equally. Their job should be to report the news, not make the news or weight it down with spin and bias. Their job is to provide only the facts and whatever background is necessary to make the information understood in proper context. Their job is not to reprint or rebroadcast propaganda, theirs is a higher responsibility. It's obvious the media has failed us completey. It was especially evident by the way they treated presidents Bush and Obama [Ed. note: and later, especially, Trump]. The failure to really dig deep into Bush's "weapons of mass distruction" cost countless innocent lives. And, of course, the free ride the press gave Obama, Hillary, and the rest of his administration cost our society dearly. It's obvious the media has failed us completely. We don't need anymore political activists posing as journalists - they've nearly killed journalism and now the media can't be trusted.
- Roger J. Wendell (2013)
America's news media can't be trusted. Period.
Addendum: After the press' treatment of Kavanaugh, for his Supreme Court nomination in September/October 2018, is there any doubt that most media has become the enemy of the American people? As Jonah Goldberg wrote, on Oct 2, 2018; "Now, I get that most journalists are liberal, even if they deny it. I understand that most think they're just seeking the truth. But, dear champions of the Fourth Estate, you might take just a moment to understand that you need to be fair to the other side of the argument even if you disagree with it."
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Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record:
"Americans' trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four
percentage points since last year to 36%, making this year's reading the second lowest in Gallup's trend."
- Megan Brenan (Gallup.com), October 7, 2021
"Honest journalism died and was buried in this country long ago." - Roger J. Wendell, COVID 2020 |
"The media is a nakedly partisan political organ." - Eliana Johnson on the Hugh Hewitt show, January 22, 2021 |
The most pervasive form of bias is omission... - Roger J. Wendell, 2013 |
Senior NPR editor says the organization has lost its way:
NPR Senior business editor Uri Berliner stated that his organization lacked "viewpoint diversity" and criticized it for telling listeners and readers how to think through a progressive worldview. In 2021 Berliner looked up voter registrations for the NPR newsroom and found that in the city's headquarters of Washington, D.C., there were 87 registered Democrats in NPR editorial positions and "zero Republicans." "None."
source: Uri Berliner and The Free Press, www.thefp.com April, 2024
Lawsuits against media and "journalists":
Relentless Attacks by Media
President Trump certainly has his faults, as we all do, but on balance he did a fantastic job for our people and our country. Neverthless, media was always relentless in its bias, attacks, and slander against the former president. At the time of this entry I was 68-years-old and had never, in over five-decades of close media scrutiny, ever saw anyone treated so badly by our media - never, not even Nixon received as much hatred!
Anyway, why take my word for it - there are plenty of others out there who feel the same. Here's one example that was posted a few days after President Trump was shot while giving a campaign speech in Pennsylvania,
"This county's anti-conservative media never knows when enough is enough. You would think that when their enemies are shot and wounded, it might be the time to set aside petty partisan antics. But apparently even when former President Trump was seemingly shot on Friday, CNN just couldn't help but insult the man's dignity by making it appear to be an accident.
It all happened during a Friday rally in Pennsylvania that Trump was speaking at. The incident was all captured in a video that has since gone viral on social media. Trump is seen in the video giving his speech when, suddenly, loud popping sounds are heard. The former president then grabbed the side of his face, which was bleeding profusely shortly thereafter, as Secret Service agents rushed to cover him.
As the agents began to lead Trump off stage, he can be heard telling them to wait. Then, just before he exits, Trump raised up a fist to the audience to let them know he was alright. But, according to CNN's headline of the incident, what we all saw happen in that now-infamous video wasn't the story. No, instead, according to CNN, Trump simply fell off the stage. Here was the outlet's headline -- 'Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally.'" [My emphasis]
- Michael Austin, The Western Journal
Journalism has become the enemy of the American people:
September 2, 2020:
From the RTDNA (Radio Television Digital News Association) website:
"Americans have not only lost confidence in the ideal of an objective media, they believe news organizations actively support the partisan divide."
RTDNA reported that a Gallup/Knight Foundation study found that 73%, "...perceive news media bias as a major problem. More perceive a great deal of political bias in media than did in 2017..."
"Americans also mistrust news media because of their perceptions of errors in news. Gallup/Knight find that 8 in 10 Americans feel errors are intentional misrepresentations..."
A fond memory:
Mark R. Levin
(from his book, Unfreedom of the Press)
March 2020:
It's no secret that CNN, MSNBC, and other media made a lot of money off the China Coronavirus (COVID-19) panic. However, in their quest for higher ratings they scared a lot of our population - creating shortages and endangering people's health. Here's what internist Dr. Drew Pinsky had to say about the situation that month; "What I have a problem with is the panic and the fact that businesses are getting destroyed that people's lives are being upended, not by the virus, but by the panic. The panic must stop. And the press, they really somehow need to be held accountable because they are hurting people."
Elon Musk
In April 2020, during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, CNN disputed Elon Musk's claim that he was providing 1,000 venitlators to California - despite Governor Newsom confirming that the ventilators had arrived in Los Angeles and that Musk's effort was "...heroic."
On April 13, 2020, Musk shot back on Twitter;
"What I find most surprising is that CNN still exists."
Malcom X
Claas Relotius
Claas Relotius typifies modern journalism - he received several awards for his "detailed" reporting in a number of German publications, and was also German CNN's "Journalist of the Year" in 2014. On December 19, 2018, Der Spiegel made public that Relotius had admitted that he had "falsified his articles on a grand scale", inventing facts, persons and quotations in at least 14 of his stories in Der Spiegel, an event now being referred to as "Spiegelgate". The magazine uncovered the fraud after a co-author of one of Relotius's articles about a pro-Trump vigilante group in Arizona conducting patrols along the Mexico-United States border, the Spanish-born Der Spiegel journalist Juan Moreno, became suspicious of the veracity of Relotius's contributions and gathered evidence against him. Relotius was accused of numerous other "journalistic inaccuracies" and fraud. On 23 December 2018, Der Spiegel magazine announced that it was filing a criminal complaint against Relotius - he had been accused of embezzling donations intended for Syrian orphans he claimed to have met in Turkey. Relotius appealed to readers for donations to be paid into his personal bank account.
Joseph Goebbles
"Let me control the media and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs."
Fake News
On A Related Note: From the early 1970s, until now (the second decade of the second millennium), I regularly monitored all kinds of news in addition to listening to a lot of talk radio and monitoring internet blogs. Whether at my office, driving to work, or even repairing my car, I've always enjoyed listening (and reading) about alternative viewpoints and philosophies. And, I haven't restricted myself to just any one political persuasion or genre either - I've enjoyed hearing from both ends of the political spectrum and everything in-between. However, as time has moved on it's become increasingly evident that there's less and less objectivity on the channels and blogs than ever before. The dishonesty and misrepresentations have become so extreme that I can no longer rely on conservatives, liberals, or anyone else in the media for an objective, balanced, fair or accurate representation of the facts. Their reporting, interviewing, and talk show monologues have become nothing more than propaganda pieces for one political ideal or another. So, after having listened to them all (Beck, Boortz, Colmes, Flanders, Goodman, Hannity, Hartman, Hightower, Lavin, Limbaugh, Maddow, Savage, Schultz, Rosen, and a bunch of locals you've probably never even heard of), and even corresponding, meeting personally with, or holding private telephone conversations with a bunch of them (to conduct business, etc.) I've concluded that they're generally no more capable of assessing a political, economic, environmental, or military situation better than you or me. And, as I've mentioned above, many continue distorting the facts in support of their own political agenda or that of their employer. Because of the media's profound influence on our society the aforementioned propagandists get special attention on this page since I don't have a national newspaper or radio show to challenge them with. They, along with their cousins holding political office, need to be challenged by the owners of this country - we the people.
- Roger J. Wendell
July 2014Addendum (January 2018): About 15 years after I created this page the phrase Fake News had made its way into the vernacular. Although it's a problem I've pretty much outlined on my website, all these years, the "official" defination as of 2018 went something like this; "Fake news is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often using sensationalist, dishonest, or outright fabricated headlines to increase readership, online sharing, and Internet click revenue." Unfortunately most of our major news outlets, social media, and broadcast media were engaged in fake news at the time of this entry in 2018...
- Congressman Trey Gowdy, May 11, 2014
(challenging the media as to why they failed to followup on Benghazi)
- Arundhati Roy
(As heard on David Barsamian's Alternative Radio broadcast 08-18-2005)
Paul Ehrlich
"I've been a member of the media, I used to be a correspondent for NBC News. We can all tell stories about the media. It's wrecked, it's broken. Almost nobody in the mdeia is well informed of what's going on. Just like the politicians." - Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Ph.D, when asked why the media doesn't address the huge overpopulation problem. (During a radio interview on KGNU's "Connections" program, hosted by Roger J. Wendell (me!). (Click Here to hear the entire interview)
- Bill Blunden and Violet Cheung in their book,
Behold a Pale Farce (Cyberwar, Threat Inflation, & the
Malware Industrial Complex), p. 1
"We are living in a time in history when the mass media can no longer be counted on to provide a free and independent voice in political debate, or to be a countervailing force against large corporate commercial interests."
Departure
Me and journalist Joe Goldman"Too much is made of anchors and their personalities, their ups and downs. The larger issues -- the role of a free press and of honest, real news in a democracy, the role of technology in supporting a free press, the 'corporatization' of news and its effects on news content -- all deserve more attention, more discussion and more passionate debate." - News Anchor Dan Rather, in his final
departure from CBS in June, 2006
- George Orwell
"Too much of the U.S. news media have become bottom feeders, regurgitating stories on the weird, the stupid and the coarse to satisfy an 'idiot culture' hungry to see humiliation."
"Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.' There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.
An Invertebrate Media
An invertebrate media
by Paul Campos, professor of law at the University of Colorado
Rocky Mountain News, June 04, 2008, p. 31
"It's been a very bad week for American journalism. The fun began when former Bush administration press secretary Scott McClellan published a book in which he pointed out that the Iraq disaster was enabled, in part, by the failure of the media to do their job."Their job was to do something other than simply reprint and rebroadcast propaganda fed to them by, among other people, McClellan himself. But this turned out to be too much to ask.
"That they were reprinting propaganda, rather than engaging in actual reporting, was obvious at the time. As my friend Jon Chait pointed out four years ago in The New Republic, McClellan wasn't a very good press secretary, because he was a terribly transparent liar. This made him particularly unqualified to defend the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
"But in the end it didn't make any difference, because most of the media were more than happy to be lied to. Indeed the most shocking aspect of McClellan's book is how little new information is in it; we've known for years now that the White House was peddling pure claptrap when it claimed Iraq posed a threat to the United States.
"We've also known - because institutions such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have admitted as much - that the elite American media largely failed to ask critical questions of the government in the run-up to the war, and that they took, in McClellan's words, a markedly 'deferential' attitude toward the administration.
"What's new are some of the extraordinary arguments being put forth by the media themselves to explain and defend the commission of journalistic malpractice on such a catastrophic scale."
Focus the Nation
by Michael Welch
Home Power Magazine
Power Politics, April & May 2008, p. 118
"According to the League of Conservation Voters, since January 2007, the hosts of popular news shows on five major TV networks - ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN - have asked the presidential candidates almost 3,000 questions. Of these thousands, only six mentioned global warming. Six. That calculates to about two-tenths of 1% - and is about the same number of questions posed to the candidates about UFOs." "Is anyone besides me wondering why reporters are ignoring one of the most urgent threats to humanity?
"I guess it's not much of a mystery, considering that for-profit corporations, which are legally required to put shareholder profits ahead of all other considerations, own almost all media in the United States. Many are also heavily invested in or even owned by energy companies (for example, General Electric, which owns NBC) and have board members who sit on the boards of other corporations, including oil companies and defense contractors.
"Major media relies largely on advertising sales, so little impetus exists for them to focus on anything other than programming that maximizes ad revenues. Nor is there any incentive for their advertisers to support programming that deals with topical issues that could possibly countermand the need or desire for the products and services being hocked.
"But six measly questions? Jeez."
The term Fourth Estate is frequently attributed to the nineteenth century historian Carlyle, though
he himself seems to have attributed it to Edmund Burke:
"Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, .... Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. ..... Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite."
- Carlyle (1905) pp.349-350
"Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question you wish had been
asked of you. And, quite frankly, I follow that rule, it's a very good rule."
- Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamera
from the 2004 Errol Morris film documentary, The Fog of War
(transcribed by me and Tami!)
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
- Edward R. Murrow from his See it Now CBS Television broadcast of March 9, 1954 in regards to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...
American Media Failes Democracy: |
It's no secret that the "Fourth Estate," for the most part, has been a miserable failure for us in America. Huge media conglomerates hold and control large numbers of newspapers, television and radio stations. It became clear to me, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that much of America's media simply rolled over and allowed government and corporations to have their way with our freedoms, information, and our very way of life.The media's failure to question or provide accurate information about the invasion, prisoner treatment, 911, or terrorism in general was a clear sign that big government and big business are in control of our information sources. For me, this era of media subservience is the darkest period in our political history. It's still hard for me to imagine that in a country like America that it's considered sedition, or a statement against our troops, to question what the government is up to around the world.
So, I started this page to not only continue questioning the illegal activities of my own government, but to question our media as well. I'll be updating this page as material becomes available.
- Roger J. Wendell
Golden, Colorado, fall '03
Disclosure seems to be really lacking in other parts of journalism as well. During the January 21st (2006) rebroadcast of NPR's Living on Earth (LOE) program it was revealed that a number of opinion writers had been receiving money from outside sources without disclosing it or the possible influence on their work.
LOE (a science program no less!) is hosted by Steve Curwood and has a website that stated, "Several prominent opinion writers have recently lost their syndicated contracts because it was revealed by Business Week Online that the writers had previously undisclosed financial arrangements with companies who paid them to write about a particular story or viewpoint." Eamon Javers, Curwood's guest, stated, "Michael Fumento is a columnist, author, think tank scholar here in Washington, DC, at the Hudson Institute. And what we've reported on Business Week Online was that Mr. Fumento, who had written a book in 2003 called "BioEvolution," which talked very favorably about the biotech and agribusiness industries, had actually been paid $60,000 by the agribusiness giant company Monsanto to write that book." Curwood and Javers talked about how Fumento, and a number of other opinion columists, wear different "Think Tank" hats and may not always be considered journalists or reports. When asked if they should still have to disclose payments from outside sources Mr. Javers stated, "Well I think that's the standard that the syndicates have. And when you're talking about opinion columnists, you're talking about sort of a hybrid breed of person. These people are not journalists, they're not reporters. This is not a journalism problem, it's maybe more a media problem, in that these people are paid to offer their opinions; I'm not, I'm paid to offer facts. I think there's a big distinction there." |
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VNRs (Video News Release)
In early 2005 it couldn't get much more bizzare than the "discovery" that VNRs were being used by the Bush Administration to mislead the American people on a variety of issues. These little propaganda videos were prepared and edited by the U.S. government and then broadcast by media outlets as though they were some kind of original news report! Some real confusion took place when it was discovered that a government VRN was being used to "sell" a controversial new Medicare law to the public.The bigger question, to me, is how many of these propaganda type videos did the government, corporations, and political organizations use to pass their programs off to the rest of us as "news?" The most important thing to do, in regards to VNRs, is to ensure that they're properly identified. In case you're a broadcaster wondering how to handle a VNR, or you're a government propagandist involved in creating 'em, here are some simple, easy-to-follow rules when dealing with VNRs:
Again, it's our responsibility as citizens to demand that our media provide us the information necessary to challenge government, big business, and political organizations any time they run afoul of our well-being or best interests. The media must be independent of government - it's all we have!
- Without question, VNRs should be clearly identified along with disclosing who produced and paid for it.
- The word "reporting" should never be used in a VNR where the narrator is not a reporter!
- VNRs should be identified by the media outlet whenever they're aired - anything less is journalistic fraud!
- Roger J. Wendell
The Elements of Journalism
In 2001, Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach co-authored the book The Elements of Journalism, which identifies,Kovach and Rosenstiel also provided the five "intellectual principles of a science of report":
explains and traces intellectual origins of the core principles of American journalism and their role in civil society
- Journalism's first obligation is to the truth.
- Journalism's first loyalty is to citizens.
- The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.
- Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover.
- Journalists must serve as independent monitors of power.
- Journalism must provide a forum for public criticism and comment.
- Journalists must make the significant interesting and relevant.
- And journalists should keep the news in proportion and make it comprehensive.
- Its practitioners have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience.
- Citizens, too, have righs and responsibilities when it comes to news.
Tom Rosenstiel is an American author, journalist, press critic and executive director of the American Press Institute. He is also a non-resident
- Never add anything that was not there.
- Never deceive the audience.Never add anything that was not there.
- Be as transparent as possible about your methods and motives.
- Rely on your own original reporting.
- Exeercise humility.
Bill Kovach is an American journalist, former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times and former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Links:
I don't necessarily endorse any or all of these links. However, I list 'em here for a variety of reasons; as alternative sources, exposure
to differing opinions, entertainment, new information, or (most importantly) Sun Tzu's reminder that you should know your enemy...
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