Who does the news media serve?
Commentary by Frank Conner
"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce
or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves
with the power which knowledge gives." --James Madison - letter to W.T. Barry, Aug. 4, 1822
As this is written, we are just a couple weeks shy of the first state primaries in the 2008 presidential-election
cycle, which is almost a year away. In national politics, that is almost a lifetime away. Most of what is happening on the political front today
will have very little bearing on the outcome of that distant election.
Yet for the past few months, most of the network and cable TV-news programs have devoted as much as 20% of their
time to breathless coverage of the presidential candidates (the politically-correct mainstream Democratic and Republican ones, that is; no
other candidates exist in the eyes of the media). The media act as if the presidential election were only a few days away.
Given that much coverage of the candidates, the American public should by now have a crystal-clear picture of
each candidate’s position on each of the critically-important issues that are now determining whether or not the US can maintain its sovereignty,
and representative government, and some vestiges of its previous internal freedoms, and its high standard of living, and its decent way of life;
and the public should by now know just how each candidate intends to manage those issues if he is elected President.
How the TV-News Media Cover the Almost-Permanent Presidential Campaigning
Instead of that, the TV-news media have given us incredibly-superficial and virtually-worthless descriptions of
the candidates and of their competition with one another. The media have turned the whole thing into a kindergarteners’ horse-race, first, by
giving the highest points to those candidates who have managed to be bribed the most with campaign contributions from the special interests
(thus guaranteeing that they will run the country to satisfy the special interests, not the public at large).
Second, the TV-news media are constantly on the lookout for any politically-incorrect comment that a candidate
might make on or off the record; and if they can find or manufacture one, they will all jump on that candidate gleefully, and pillory him or
her unmercifully. That is an earthshaking milestone in the eyes of the media.
Third, the TV-news media search ceaselessly for any indiscretion that each candidate might have made since
birth--with which to attack him/her mercilessly. Fourth, they exhibit insatiable curiosity re each candidate’s religion and views on the
hot-button social-issues (homosexuality, abortion, etc.)--even though anyone with an IQ above 65 knows full well that the elected officials
in the administration and Congress never deal with such touchy issues themselves, but instead leave it to the unelected federal-courts to do
whatever the ruling establishment wants done about those issues.
And finally, the TV-news media report breathlessly the results of weekly polls regarding the relative popularity of
each presidential candidate right then, as if any of that will make the slightest bit of difference a year from now.
(For the most part, the print news-media operate much the same way as the TV-news media; they just don’t
devote quite as great a percentage of their content to national politics. But it is the TV news that most Americans pay attention to.)
How the TV-News Media DOESN’T Cover the Presidential Campaigning
The TV-news media do NOT ask each presidential candidate whether his/her primary allegiance is to the US
Constitution which he will swear to uphold if elected; or to a handful of US, Canadian, and Mexican supercapitalists for whom he will junk
the Constitution by creating the North American Union, thereby transferring much of the governance of the American people to unelected
international trade-officials who will always rule in favor of the supercapitalists. Right now the Republican Bush administration is busily
creating the North American Union, while the Democratic Congress looks the other way and pretends that it isn’t happening; and President Bush
lies through his teeth to the American people by saying there is no such thing.
Wouldn’t you say that’s an important consideration? Yet almost the entire major TV-news media (with the
exception of CNN’s Lou Dobbs) are pretending that it isn’t happening.
[Lou Dobbs has reported relatively extensively on this.]
The TV-news media do NOT ask each presidential candidate whether his primary allegiance is to the
US Constitution or to the United Nations, an openly-global-socialist organization whose stated aim is to equalize the standards-of-living
of the poor countries with that of the US by crippling America’s economy so as to enrich the poor nations, via endless treaties supposedly
dealing with global warming, sea traffic, etc., ad infinitum, but in fact transferring the governance (and then the income) of the American
public to UN officials whom the Americans will have no hand in electing.
The TV-news media do NOT ask each presidential candidate whether his primary allegiance is to the US
Constitution or to an endless series of international trade- associations, whose officials even now are dictating to an alarming extent
how the Americans will be governed. This is particularly important, because NAFTA, etc., have demonstrated beyond question that they
were established solely to benefit supercapitalists in the countries involved, while screwing the manufacturing workers of both the US
AND the other countries involved. Yet those trade-associations remain in force year after year, under Democrats and Republicans alike,
and President Bush is trying to cram as many more of them down our throats as he possibly can.
The TV-news media do NOT ask each presidential candidate whether his primary allegiance is to America or to
the handful of Jewish Zionists who control our country’s foreign policy re the Middle East, and who dictate that we will wage wars against
one after another of the Middle Eastern countries because those Zionists see them as future threats to Israel (not the US)—thus ensuring
heavy (unsustainable) drains upon our treasury, and upon the ability of our Armed Forces to defend our nation, and upon the lives of our
servicemen. In addition, this policy has resulted in an artificial shortage of the petroleum that is the very basis of our economy, and
is driving up the cost-of-living for our lower-middle class and our lower class painfully. Worst of all, it is rapidly engaging the US
in a totally-unnecessary global religious-war with Islam that we do not need or want and cannot possibly win.
The TV-news media do NOT ask each presidential candidate whether his primary allegiance is to the American worker
or to the supercapitalists who demand that they be permitted to ship all of our manufacturing jobs overseas (notably to China); and to import
vast numbers of knowledge-workers from Pakistan and India, so as to cut the costs of
white-collar workers; and to keep our Mexican border wide open (as at present), so that floods of unskilled labor can pour into our country
and create such a huge labor-pool here as to cut wages to the bone across our economy. That is the way it works now; and the supercapitalists
and the politicians (whom they own) could not care less that the American middle-middle class and lower-middle class are thereby being driven
downward into the lower class—inexorably changing the US into an oversize banana-republic.
The TV-news media do NOT ask each presidential candidate whether he intends to lift a finger to prevent the US
from being subjected to more terrorist attacks. If we pick fights with Middle Eastern countries, we are almost certainly going to be subjected
to terrorist attacks in retaliation, because that is the only practical way they can fight back against us. The first and most-basic step to
defend our country against such attacks is by sealing our borders, and by inspecting carefully every item that is imported into this country.
Yet the Republican president and his administration and the Democratic Congress are doing everything in their power to drag their feet and leave
our borders wide open, and most of the imported cargoes uninspected, purely for the convenience of the supercapitalists. So it is business as
usual, and to hell with the security of America.
Those are by no means all of the truly-critical issues facing our nation that the TV-news media are either
ignoring totally or propagandizing beyond recognition, but they are enough to make the point.
And although the newspapers do not devote as great a percentage of their editorial content to inconsequential
drivel about the presidential campaigning as do the TV-news media, they, too, carefully ignore most or all of these vitally-important
issues--—even though they are of burning interest to a major segment of our population, and are sensational in nature and therefore would
sell lots of newspapers and gain high ratings on TV.
What Does This Tell Us About the Nature of the News Media?
First of all, what do these issues tell us about our national political system? They tell us that in the
matters of real importance, the Democrats and the Republicans react in exactly the same manner, to do the bidding of the supercapitalists
by selling our country down the river. It means that our entire national political-system has been bought and paid for by the
supercapitalists/supersocialists who own and operate this country. There is no longer any real difference between the two national
political-parties. It really doesn’t matter who we elect to the key posts; we will be governed in basically the same manner in any case.
Consequently, the American public is now helpless and impotent politically, and the supercapitalists run the country to suit themselves. And
what suits them is to create a national socialist government in this country (a government which they will own), and to force the US to become
a member of a global socialist government (a government which they will also own). At last money is power, purely and simply.
You can see it for yourselves: the politicians have dropped the mask of servility: they have stopped
pretending to be public servants. Now—during the past five or ten years—they have begun acknowledging openly that they are in the driver’s
seat, and we are their subjects. Look at the towering arrogance with which the president and the Congress have treated the public’s
outraged demand that they stop the illegal immigration from Mexico now. That tells you what’s really happening.
Where do the news media fit into this picture? Are they too ignorant to have noticed all of this happening
right beneath their noses? Many of the pretty blow-dry TV-news anchors (male and female) might well be, given that almost every time they
open their pretty mouths, they utter gaffes of such magnitude that they make me squirm in embarrassment even though I despise those people.
But the reporters as a group do not strike me as ignorant or stupid, and some whom I have known were obviously brilliant and dedicated men and women.
Granted that almost all of the news-media people are heavily-indoctrinated liberals—--who therefore strongly
favor both national--- and global-socialist governments to run the US and the world, would they therefore obediently watch our politicians
systematically destroy our country to satisfy the insatiable short-term greed of our supercapitalists in the name of socialism? That is the
key question here. My past experience with reporters tells me they are more intelligent than that.
But this leaves only one other practical answer. The news media are an indispensable part of the ruling
establishment. The owners of the big media-conglomerates are among the select few who attend the jolly secret conferences mixing big money,
key politicians, and opinion-shapers (media people) at Bohemian Grove, Davos, etc. And they are not there just to scarf up the caviar
canapés. Obviously they are issued the same orders as the politicians. And without their complete cooperation, the supercapitalists could
never have subverted and destroyed America’s political system
Thus, almost every reporter in America’s news media is a paid whore. He or she may not have known that was the
case when first going to work there, but sooner or later (and probably sooner) they got the message—but stayed there.
(Lest such people dismiss me as an ivory-tower theorist who has no knowledge of the real world, and makes
accusations without any knowledge of the consequences involved, I held a number of jobs in a bewildering variety of professions, but the one
job I wanted more than any other was to be the editor of a motorcycle magazine. I worked twelve years to learn enough to become a good one.
Three months into that job, I roadtested a popular Japanese street-motorcycle that dumped me off and put me in the hospital. Research by
my staff revealed that the design was dangerous. I had two choices: reveal the danger to the public and lose my job, or pretend that it
hadn’t happened--as I later learned that a couple of other motorcycle magazines had done previously. I have always believed that the
world is so complicated that a writer of nonfiction has a sacred obligation to the public to tell the truth as best he knows it. I wrote
and signed the roadtest and said that the bike was dangerous and people shouldn’t buy it.)
(To continue—the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration began an investigation of that model, so
the manufacturer redesigned it in the middle of the model year; and the Big Four Japanese motorcycle-manufacturers similarly redesigned all
of their street bikes and made them much safer over the next five years. But three of the Big Four manufacturers (Honda didn’t participate)
ganged up and got me fired from my magazine and blacklisted me with the other motorcycle magazines. Given my principles, if I had it all
to do over again, I’d have to do it exactly the same way the second time around. Therefore, given the present situation regarding the American
news-media, I have no compunction about calling all of the employees of the American news-media paid whores for looking the other way
while the supercapitalists bought up almost all of our national-level politicians, and employed both the media and those politicians to
wreck our country so as to enrich those supercapitalists over the short term—with no concern for the future.)
"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce
or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves
with the power which knowledge gives." --James Madison - letter to W.T. Barry, Aug. 4, 1822
"To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and
humanity over error and oppression." --James Madison - Report on the Resolutions, 1799
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will
be." --Thomas Jefferson -- letter to Charles Yancey, 1816
"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;... whenever things get so far wrong as to
attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights." --Thomas Jefferson -- to Richard Price, 1789.
"The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the
masses." --Vladimir Lenin
What is the significance of this? It means that the American Century is over—--deliberately sabotaged by the
greedy supercapitalists, and the politicians and the media owners, whom they own. As the Founding Fathers said repeatedly, our chosen form
of government cannot possibly survive without an informed electorate; and for far too long, our electorate has had no possible way to become
informed.
The US education-establishment—in its secular-humanist’s religious anxiety to persuade the public to become good socialists by
whatever means available--—has deliberately refused to inform the American public that the supercapitalists are using socialism to gain
complete control over the society, thus the economy, in their own self-interest. And the American news-media have been bought off, so they
too are remaining quiet. Therefore, the American public doesn’t have a clue as to what is happening; and the US is going right down the
tubes before our very eyes.
Frank Conner is the author of "The South Under Siege 1830 - 2000/A History of the Relations
Between the North and the South." You may contact him at frankconner@mail.newnanutilities.org or
order the book from Amazon.com
Related Links
The Third American Revolution - Part 1
Religion and the Federal Government - loc.gov
Doomed to repeat? - Frank Gillispie
Liberty Lost Part 4 - J.A. Davis
Republicans and Democrats Differ on Proposed Border Signage - Parody
Know The Enemy of Liberty - J.A. Davis
Dirty Dubya Outspends Liberal Punks - Parody
Confusing 'Republican' and 'conservative' - J.A. Davis
Another Choiceless Bogus Referendum - Steve Scroggins