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Those involved in the U.S. response to the attacks tell me that the U.S. government was in sheer chaos that night.
Do your own research. Consult those you trust. Make up your own mind. Think for yourself.
In the quest to reveal information, the logician in me is troubled when I see the media treat stories differently depending upon who we think did the bad deed, what ideologies we personally hold, or how we secretly wish a story would turn out. Everyone has opinions and biases; our job is to keep them out of our journalism.
Substitution Game: If a corporate environmental disaster had occurred under a Republican administration, the lines would be clear. Democrats and most in the media would fault Republicans and their hostility toward the environment, aversion to regulation, and cozy relationship with industry. But under a new, popular, African-American, Democratic president, few are as eager to point fingers.
Combine complacency in the news media with the incredible publicity forces behind the political-industrial complex and you begin to understand how little of the
truth you sometimes get. They often have unlimited time and money to figure out new ways to spin us while cloaking their role in doing so.
“They’re often worried about the wrong things; not worried about the right things.”
The tendency to stick to mostly “safe” stories means you’ll see a lot of so-called day-of-air reports on topics that won’t generate pushback from the special interests we care about. Think: weather, polls, surveys, studies, positive medical news, the pope, celebrities, obituaries, press conferences, government announcements, animals, the British royals, and heartwarming features. They fill airtime much like innocuous white noise.
“In England they call us presenters. They don’t call us reporters. And in many ways, that’s what we’ve become.”
astroturf is when special interests disguise themselves and write blogs, publish letters to the editor, produce ads, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts, start nonprofits, or just post comments to online material with the intent of fooling you into believing an independent or grassroots movement is speaking.
Anonymous Wikipedia editors acting on behalf of corporate interests co-opt and control pages to forbid or reverse edits that threaten their agenda.
Wikipediocracy.com,
You may never fully trust what you read on Wikipedia again. Nor should you.
Thomasson’s memo reiterates, “ATF needs to proactively push positive stories this week, in an effort to preempt some negative reporting. . . . If you have any significant operations that should get national media coverage, please reach out to the Public Affairs Division for support, coordination and clearance.” Think about it. Your tax dollars are paying the salary of an ATF manager who’s using taxpayer time and resources to direct his teams of taxpayer-supported public affairs officials to “push” propaganda in order to drown out an important, truthful story of public interest.
controversialize critics to try to turn the focus on personalities instead of the evidence.
It’s news to them since they’re not paying attention to our own coverage—only the administration’s spin.
We’re using $90 billion of your money to promote clean energy. Some of it will be loaned to companies that are so risky, nobody in their right mind (besides the government) would support them. But don’t worry! When they default on the loans, and they will, we’ll call it “even” by subtracting the losses from a $2.4 billion fund we’re setting up in advance. With your tax dollars. How’s that sound?
It’s a paternalistic attitude that results in de facto censorship. Simply put: they decide that it’s best for you to not hear a story at all rather than run the risk that you might see it and form the “wrong” opinion. (By that, I mean an opinion that differs from theirs.)
Having worked at CBS for nearly twenty years, I tell Kim that there are groups of people who are so ideologically entrenched, they literally see you as the enemy if you do stories that contradict their personal beliefs.
But as things look worse for the Obama administration and the election draws near in late October, the light switch turns off. Most of my Benghazi stories from that point on would be reported not on television, but on the Web.
They controversialize the legitimate reporting of their self-generated controversies by using the language of propagandists.
KNOW YOUR ENEMY Get to know the reporters on the story and their supervisors. Lobby them. If they don’t adopt your viewpoint, try to discredit them. MINE AND PUMP When asked to provide interviews and information for a story, stall, claim ignorance of the facts, and mine the reporter for what information he has. CONTROVERSIALIZE Wait until the story is published to see how much the reporter really knows. Then launch a propaganda campaign with surrogates and sympathizers in the media to divert from
the damaging facts. Controversialize the reporter and any whistleblower or critics to try to turn the focus on personalities instead of the evidence.
The Obama administration’s downhill PR trajectory may have been a fait accompli from the moment Secretary Sebelius’s handlers scheduled her to appear on Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central program October 7, 2013. She cleared a spot in her tight schedule for the political comedy show after refusing Congress’s “invitation” to testify because she supposedly didn’t have time. It’s a classic Obama administration move: bypass the traditional news media. Circumvent Congress, if you...
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Among the news wire services, Reuters does cover the security expert hearing. Interestingly, the article calls it a “Republican sponsored Congressional hearing.” It’s the first time I remember noticing an official congressional hearing described as being “sponsored” by a political party. It’s as if readers are being cued to skeptically view the expert witnesses who criticize the Obama administration.
As a young journalist, I once had a supervisor who required us to label conservative analysts in our news stories as “conservatives,” while the liberals were simply referred to as “analysts.” And if a conservative analyst’s opinion really rubbed the supervisor the wrong way, she might rewrite the script to label him a “right-wing” analyst. The implication is that when a conservative says something, the opinion needs to be qualified and perhaps discounted. But the liberal? He’s just an independent, fair guy giving an everyman’s opinion.
Under President Obama, the press dutifully regurgitates the line “no evidence of White House involvement,” ignoring the fact that if any proof exists, it would be difficult to come by under an administration that fails to properly respond to Freedom of Information document requests, routinely withholds documents from Congress, and claims executive privilege to keep documents secret.
And that the true number is even lower because the government is counting 20 percent of enrollees who haven’t paid, and because two-thirds of the enrollees were already insured prior to Obamacare so shouldn’t be counted as previously uninsured.
Allowing Clapper and other government officials to be in charge of solving their own surveillance controversies is like inviting the fox to guard the henhouse.
They’re simply executing a well-thought-out strategy to harass reporters and editors at the slightest air of negativity so as to impact the next news decisions.
“I do find it hard to reconcile how the very same agencies who thought of, approved, and employed the strategies used in Fast and Furious only to later attempt to cover it up by lying to Congress and the American people, ignoring the rule of law, withholding documents, and smearing whistleblowers, now asserts themselves to be the sole authorities who preside over this or any other ‘ethical inquiry.’ The conflict is obvious.”
“The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change.” —Edward Snowden to the Guardian, June 2013
TV likes pretty people who say predictable things and speak in homilies. I like real people who tell the truth.
Do your own research. Consult those you trust. Make up your own mind. Think for yourself.
