Press Politics

I’ve been watching the news since the Trump election and marvel over all the leaks. It looks like anyone in Washington that says something, is taped. Every cell phone is monitored. Every foreign diplomat meeting is recorded. That doesn’t bother me much, but the leaking of what was said, violates all sorts of trusts we build up with other nations.

The only thing I can conclude, is that you say nothing, and use no electronic devices, while in Washington D.C. Under no circumstances, discuss anything in the White House, unless you want it in the paper the next day. That is a pretty sorry state of affairs.

Lately, a lot of the newspapers have been writing news citing anonymous sources. Their sources are rather suspect and or non-existent. Today I was reading the morning paper about the Muller Inquiry. The paper quoted said “Five people briefed on the requests, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly,”—bla bla bla. Five anonymous people makes the newspaper’s story line creditable? Let me guess 6 people in the room and Trump is one of them.

On this investigation of the Russians and Trump by a privately appointed prosecutor, where are the supporting leaked documents? We know when the conversations occurred and with whom. It’s got to be either the CIA, NSA or the FBI that has the document. It has already been released to the press, why can’t it be subpoenaed? Irritatingly, no documents have been produced. I would figure that even if there was nothing indicating a crime, the document should have a physical presence as the newspapers claim.

It’s kind of tragic when the news is reduced to fictional anonymous sources. It kind of remind me of the Orson Wells broadcast of years back. Here is a quote from WWW.smithsonianmag.com

On Halloween morning, 1938, Orson Welles awoke to find himself the most talked about man in America. The night before, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air had performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. By the next morning, the 23-year-old Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his CBS broadcast had allegedly inspired.

What bothers me, is that an awful lot of people believe whatever they see in print or on TV. I was a long-time subscriber of “The Economist.” During the election, the magazine was a political pulpit for Hillary Clinton. I didn’t agree with their political message, but it was only then, I realized this was not a magazine dealing with economics. They lost a subscriber.

It appears that the news organizations are trying to bend the news with a definite political slant. It makes no sense; the election is over. I can only guess that their subscriber base is mostly Democrats and/or the papers are owned by Democrats. In the past, newspapers were not dumb enough to enter into the political arena for one reason, it would alienate half of their subscriber base. Your subscriber base determines how much you can charge advertisers.

I am not sure where the level-headed people go from here. Can you selectively read or view what you deem non-political in nature, without developing a bias? I was watching FOX news the other night and a 27 story building was on fire. What do they do? They split the screen, the fire on the left, the program on the right and went on with their political discussion.

I guess that no one told the Democrats that they lost the election. When you lose an election, you hand the reigns over to the other party, and it doesn’t look like they are doing that. It kind of looks like the Democrats are searching for that [White/Black/Asian/Hispanic/GLBT] (pic one) knight in shining armor to come and rescue their country from the Evil Republicans. The grim reality, no more free stuff, go out and get a job.

The good thing is, with all of this “political news,” no one has to lie about how great the economy is doing.