Yup. I have a bumper sticker on my 27 year old truck, it's been there more than 20 years:
On the other side it says "Join The Resistance www.Freerepublic.com
Posted on 07/02/2021 4:12:47 AM PDT by Kaslin
If someone inside the American media elite were tapped to deliver a State of the Media address in front of a distinguished audience, they would not be able to claim that their position is strong, stronger than ever.
Sadly, a new survey by the Reuters Institute found the United States ranks last in media trust -- at 29% -- among 92,000 news consumers surveyed in 46 countries.
There are several easy answers for why this is true. But the most obvious one is the media's dramatic tilt to one side of the political argument. For many years, the Republicans attempted to reply with polite rebuttals, never failing to concede the old media's role as a referee of the democratic system. Then in 1996, the Fox News Channel challenged the dominance of the liberal establishment. It made the press look more liberal and less authoritative. They've never stopped hating Fox for that.
The media's overt celebration of the Clintons and then, even more fervently, the Obamas, made it apparent that any notion of fairness and balance had been shredded and burned. By the middle of the Obama era, Republican candidates were learning that bashing the press was an obvious way to boost their popularity. Their voters no longer wanted to show respect to media outlets that showed them no respect. The media divided into reinforced silos. Opinion was king.
By 2015, all the Republican candidates were trashing the press in debates, as the debate "moderators" trashed the Republicans in return. Strangely, the media briefly became the wind beneath Trump's wings -- but only until he had vanquished all the other GOP contenders. That became just another episode in the extreme cynicism of the press in trying to manipulate the election, and it failed spectacularly when Hillary Clinton lost.
Throughout the Trump era, the media relentlessly campaigned to remove him from office as quickly as he could be. When impeachment failed, they relentlessly politicized the coronavirus pandemic, shamelessly accusing the president of killing hundreds of thousands.
When George Floyd became a household name and a cause celebre, the liberal media sided with rioters and eviscerated police officers as guilty until proven innocent. They touted a "racial reckoning," where violence in the streets was blurred into "mostly peaceful protests" against alleged oppressors, soaked in "white privilege."
Today's radicalized youth also disdain the press as completely untrustworthy because they haven't been revolutionary enough. They aren't fierce enough in destroying capitalism, or defunding the police and the immigration enforcers, or emptying the prisons. They are still enablers of "systemic racism." Because journalists care more about the opinions on the left than they do about the American "middle," we can expect them to keep attempting to shuffle further toward this extreme.
Building trust cannot coincide with more crusading for "social justice." People don't trust referees who have always wanted to be players. People can't trust moderators who refuse to restrain their ideological urges and sound moderate. People shouldn't trust questioners who are more interested in generating the hostile "gotcha" or the friendly fist-bump than an honest answer.
To build trust, the media would have to act like trust is their goal, not just an entitlement.
They would have to act as moderators on behalf of all the people, just not their half. Nobody can be optimistic that they would accept this assignment.
The question is how do we dismantle the media’s stranglehold on the narrative?
PROPAGANDISTS deserve it.
The MSM went full activist left wing bias during Nixon’s downfall. It never looked back.
The question is how do we dismantle the media’s stranglehold on the narrative?
RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)
Democrats are clowns and/or hatemongers. It’s the news/media/tech that keep them in power by artificially creating a false reality for Americans too busy, ignorant, or selfish to seek the truth day to day.
Bingo.
The current Pravda we have was intentionally created in the 1960s communist movement into universities.
Schools of journalism were one of the first departments to turn hard left and focused on teaching activism over journalism.
It will only get worse as each generation of “journalists” will be less focused on fact and more on propaganda.
We already see that whatever the Politburo puts out as a dictate (LGBT, Voter ID racist, etc) is parroted and supported with articles by Pravda. Opinions that run contrary to the Politburo (election fraud, fake climate change) are denigrated, humiliated and portrayed as “fringe”.
Social media handles the suppression of those voices that run contrary to Politburo dictates.
The cancel culture goes after the individuals deemed most persuasive.
This will not get better my friends. We are already living under communism and most cannot see it.
The question isn’t trust, it’s influence.
Trust in the media here has always been super-low, but then what do you hear:
“Of course there was collusion between Trump and Russia, otherwise all 17 intelligence agencies wouldn’t have concluded such”
“Global Warming is real, it has to be, because nearly all Leftists say so”
“It was proven by the rejected lawsuits that there was no cheating in the 2020 election”
“It was an insurrection, even when no one is charged with that crime”
The media organizations have long since past their subjective tipping points, and it is now baked right into their organizational culture to be subjective about their product, and many of them no longer attempt to hide it. Long gone are the says of 60 minutes attempting to appear to produce relevant investigative journalism, even though anyone who kept score could see that they targeted the right and defended the left simply by what they chose to ‘report’ on.
I personally don’t have any problem with political punditry as long as it is not branded as “news”.
If you ran a clock on any of the “news” networks, you’d find that their content was focused on politics well over 50% of the time. Of course, the excuse will be that politics is newsworthy. But most of the time, it’s just punditry, and not really much reporting at all.
I am not one to easily support more regulation or increased bureaucracy, but I feel strongly that you should not be able to call/name/brand/declare your media content “news” if your product is majority politics.
...and by “politics” what we really mean is influence peddling. No one (except maybe CSPAN) is covering the procedural minutia of some congressional sub-committee. This is all a game of power over people.
The headline in The Detroit Free Press this morning is about this...
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/561062-michigan-to-announce-5-million-vaccine-lottery
Wretched wHitler is SUPEREVIL
The Free Press costs money
FRee Republic is not trying to kill us.
By getting OANN and NewsMax and other networks like this into more American homes, by breaking the stranglehold Big Tech has on social media via more alternative sites like Gab, Rumble, Locals, WeMe, etc etc.
Busting up Big Tech via antitrust actions would be very helpful.
“Collapsing”???? The trust is already gone. I haven’t watched MSM news in over 30 years
Good for you, RatRipper. It’s been about 15-20 for me. I saw he Free Press headline on the ground in the rolled up newspaper in a plastic bag under a neighbor’s mailbox this am while walking my dog.
Yup. I have a bumper sticker on my 27 year old truck, it's been there more than 20 years:
On the other side it says "Join The Resistance www.Freerepublic.com
Add another 20% who KNOW the media are liars, and are happy about it, and you have an entire political party.
6 companies own 90% of the media we see and hear. They need to be broken up.
I do not trust anything on the tv news. I see them lie or shade the truth all the time. Even the weather!
This is a good article. Thanks for posting.
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