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Reform the Mainstream News Media
PJ Media ^ | October 30, 2016 | Andrew Klavan

Posted on 10/30/2016 2:39:38 PM PDT by Kaslin

Remember when Marco Rubio drank some water while giving the Republican response to the president's 2013 State of the Union address? Remember how CNN ran a picture of the Florida Senator taking his sip with a chyron reading: "Career Ender"? “So can a drink of water make or break a political career?” Wolf Blitzer asked. Politico ran more than one column discussing Rubio's "water thing." Most other major (read Democrat) news venues covered it too.

So my question is this, if a drink of water threatens the career of a Republican, what happens when a former Democrat congressman makes sexual Twitter advances to a minor causing the FBI to seize the computer of his wife, the Democrat presidential candidate's aide and a woman with ties to radical Islam, and the said computer is found to contain emails that potentially exposed classified information to our enemies so that said candidate could hide her likely influence peddling? Worse than a sip of water? Better? I'm asking for a friend.

Klavan's Second Rule of Mainstream Journalism has been on full display this weekend: "When a scandal breaks on the right, what's important is the content of the scandal. When a scandal breaks on the left, what's important is where the information came from and how it was obtained."

So many in the press are struggling to make this story about FBI Director James Comey and whether he should have informed Congress of the bureau's find. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has accused Comey of being a hack trying to influence an election instead of doing his job (insert takes-one-to-know-one joke here). A CNN legal analyst called for the director's resignation. As HotAir points out, this is after the media rushed to Comey's defense when he simultaneously announced grounds for Hillary Clinton's indictment and refused to indict.

In this year's Manhattan Institute Wriston Lecture, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, historian Andrew Roberts made a suggestion I've been touting privately for years. The Republican Party needs to reform its presidential nominating system to limit the number of candidates who qualify to debate:

The percentages of support that guarantee a candidate a place in the debate should be drastically higher so that you don’t have a dozen or more people taking part and thus sometimes given no more than 30 seconds in which to try to sum up complex issues, leading to a moronically low standard of debate.

But as Mr. Roberts also notes, even debates with fewer candidates don't do much good if they are run by media that are entirely in the tank for the Democrats:

It is ludicrous to have debates controlled by TV channels that want the GOP to split and the Democrats to win, and which frame their questions accordingly.

I'm forever being told that even though nearly all journalists at the major TV networks are Democrats, they can still be objective. This is untrue. A Democrat journalist can be objective if he works with Republican journalists. When people are sequestered among others of shared biases — as they are at ABC, CBS, and NBC — confirmation bias and groupthink take over. Their biases radicalize and they begin to mistake their opinions for the facts. This has happened at the networks, not to mention the New York Times and other major information outlets including YouTube and Facebook.

It's time for the public to loudly and continuously demand the reform of at least the networks. They may be parts of private corporations but the airwaves on which they broadcast belong to the public and are licensed by the government. Bringing public pressure to bear on them is no violation of the First Amendment and would in fact do much to protect it from its left-wing enemies, including Hillary Clinton.

Term Limits for the Media?

That such reform is necessary is beyond question. ABC's chief journalist is Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos. CBS's pro-Obama bias forced their best investigative reporter to quit. Until recently, NBC's top anchor was a perennial liar who once bowed to Obama as if he were a king. Brian Williams' replacements are no less biased toward the left.

These outlets not only support Democrat candidates, they support a left-wing agenda, elevating and legitimizing minority and sexual grievance politics often based on misinformation. Their mistreatment and misrepresentation of right-wing movements like the Tea Party, meanwhile, have been unforgivably unfair.

The point is not to tell these outlets what to report, but to pressure them to hire a balanced staff run by balanced managers to do the reporting. Part — much — of the public's anger in these times is, I believe, related to the fact that they are continually being lied to by the people who are paid to inform them. The media are damaging our democracy with their one-sidedness. A serious movement to reform them is well overdue.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: media; mediabias; msm
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1 posted on 10/30/2016 2:39:38 PM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

We are living in the
“End Times” The end times of the Clintons and their scummy friends.


2 posted on 10/30/2016 2:43:57 PM PDT by Don Corleone (Oil the gun, eat the cannolis, take it to the mattress.)
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To: Kaslin

Trump should be credited with exposing the mainstream media for what they are. A bunch of democrats in reporters clothing. How they sleep at night I’ll never know.


3 posted on 10/30/2016 2:44:27 PM PDT by McGruff (#HillaryForPrison)
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To: Kaslin

I agree with this article, that w

e need balanced and fair reporting, but how is that done? Other than by a conservative billionaire buying a couple of competing outlets? The bias at the big 5 media obviously is approved by their ownership, so “pressuring them” to be more balanced is going to be a completely wasted effort.

We are going to lose our republic if we don’t figure out a way to correct this though. The big 5 have WAY too much unelected power in this country, they are kingmakers, and to presume that especially the people who aren’t naturally very informed anyway and dont care much about politics are going to search things out on the internet and “find out the truth” for themselves, is naive.


4 posted on 10/30/2016 2:47:37 PM PDT by boxlunch
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To: Kaslin

MSM will never be neutral or investigative until the liberal public education indoctrination is cleaned up.


5 posted on 10/30/2016 2:48:05 PM PDT by NautiNurse (ILLary uses BleachBit to scrub her medical history away...)
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To: Kaslin
It's past time to name and shame and call out the media whores. I saw Andrea Mitchell opining on a panel today, and nobody called her a presstitute! In the situation below, after the last debate, she is STONE COLD BUSTED reading her lines right from Hillary's PR flack. She should be spat upon in public as a media whore, no better than a flack for Pravda, Tass or Izvestia.

It's right on youtube for the world to see! Then the flack texts another question to another media whore, looks at him, and taps his phone. "Here's your question, hack stooge." This is how they play the game. They are WHORES and should not be allowed any respect at all.


6 posted on 10/30/2016 2:49:39 PM PDT by Travis McGee (EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com)
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Indeed, the MSM is the Country’s greatest threat. But the parent companies such as Disney & Comcast should not be patronized by any decent citizen.


7 posted on 10/30/2016 2:51:07 PM PDT by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: Kaslin

Not more government control. Big mistake.

Cut the cord! Let the market correct itself.

Cancel your cable tv and tell them you will be back when they get a la carte.

If you have cable tv you are funding the liberal media. Each channel in the basic package gets a subscriber fee even if you never plug in the tv.


8 posted on 10/30/2016 2:52:13 PM PDT by joshua c (Cut the cord! Don't pay for the rope they hang you with.)
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To: Kaslin

The US media is just as healthy as ever.

There’s just ONE catch:

It’s CHANGING HANDS..!


9 posted on 10/30/2016 2:54:54 PM PDT by gaijin
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To: gaijin

http://projectveritasaction.com/donate?reset=1&id=1&reset=1&id=1

10 posted on 10/30/2016 2:55:45 PM PDT by gaijin
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To: joshua c

How about one simple law to start:

—Ban all taking and publishing of “horse-race” polls for sixty days prior to elections.


11 posted on 10/30/2016 2:58:07 PM PDT by cgbg (Another World War I veteran for Hillary!)
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To: Kaslin

Mandate ala carte cable programming so that the audience has more influence upon the channels’ profits!

End anti-First Amendment regulations.

Voila!


12 posted on 10/30/2016 2:59:18 PM PDT by mrsmith (Dumb sluts: Lifeblood of the Media, Backbone of the Democrat/RINO Party!)
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To: Kaslin

The key, my friends, is to go after their sponsors. Boycott, harass, harangue their corporate supporters.


13 posted on 10/30/2016 3:05:47 PM PDT by The_Media_never_lie (Stay ignorant, my friends! (if you watch mainstream media, you will!))
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To: Kaslin
Reform the Mainstream News Media

There is NOTHING to reform.

Buy media back from leftists?

Yes!

But any other 'reform' would necessarily come from a power GREATER than media.

Do you REALLY want the gummint controlling media?

14 posted on 10/30/2016 3:25:49 PM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: The_Media_never_lie

I think cleaning up the media is a simple solution. First off, anyone in the media cannot have a relative working for a political candidate or be part of an administration. Second, when leaving government, a person cannot become part of the media for five years and vice versa. Third, all media outlets that host commentators must divulge whether the commentator is from the left of right. It must be divulged at the beginning of every article or broadcast and again at the end. Fourth, news is news and opinions by news readers or guests are prohibited. Finally, political commentators can extol the virtues of their candidate of choice, but in order to denigrate the opposition candidate, information must be openly sourced and corroborated. Anonymous sourcing is no longer allowed.

Doing only those 5 things will clean up the media. And like I said, it is a simple task to do it.


15 posted on 10/30/2016 3:32:46 PM PDT by EQAndyBuzz (Election 2016 - Freedom or Slavery)
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To: joshua c

Cancel cable TV! Boycott!


16 posted on 10/30/2016 3:40:32 PM PDT by uncitizen (Drain.The.Swamp!)
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To: boxlunch

Simply give their channel frequency to the tea party and let big media compete like others.

It is that simple folks. Do not over analyze.


17 posted on 10/30/2016 3:42:13 PM PDT by TheNext (Hillary Hurts Children & Women)
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To: The_Media_never_lie
The key, my friends, is to go after their sponsors. Boycott, harass, harangue their corporate supporters.

I'm afraid that in most cases they do not care. Their liberal agenda is more important then their revenue. Look at all major networks and cable news channels. They're losing viewership and have had the wrath of the conservative public aimed at them for decades. Their response? Become more liberal. Become more biased. They do NOT care about money. They are aiming for a bigger prize...the country.

18 posted on 10/30/2016 4:05:31 PM PDT by DouglasKC
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To: Kaslin

I can’t wait to hear the montage Rush plays tomorrow morning mimicking the Lame Stream Press mantra


19 posted on 10/30/2016 6:35:23 PM PDT by tubebender
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To: Kaslin
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate

20 posted on 10/30/2016 8:06:44 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ('Liberalism' is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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