I lived to see something that has been at the top of my bucket list since the 80s. The fall of the US press and media. I like to think that after decades of hard work, I may have had a bit of a hand in exposing their utter hypocrisy and abject stupidity.
You see, when I grew up, I respected and trusted the journalists in our country. Walter Kronkite on the evening news, and cutting my newspaper teeth on Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate was the pinnacle of American Journalism. It was also the last of their valid victories. After that there was no lie they wouldn't tell, no truth they would not stretch out of all recognizability to push whatever agenda they were following.
I quickly found that I could not trust them, their words or anything they told me. It was then that I began finding the truth by searching several stories, pulling what I knew to be the truth from each one. I quickly found there was very little truth in any one news story.
My disillusionment began with Iran-Contra, became a recognized thing during the Clarence Thomas Senate hearings. It's no coincidence that I also began to recognize a very wag the dog relationship between politicians and the press. I saw what should have been an adversarial relationship as very walking arm in arm rather than a check on political hubris. The Clinton Administration and their slobbering love affair with the press was the last straw. It was clear that there would be very little truth telling from anywhere.
Thank God for the internet.
In the mid-90s there wasn't much news online. There were the beginnings of blogging, but even that was sparse. By the late 90s Drudge was the leader, but Drudge is not a news reporting site, it's a news aggregation site. Granted, Matt Drudge gets most of the credit for exposing the Lewinsky story to the world where the press had no choice but to then report it, but he all he did was expose the story someone else had made. It's not like he was spending long hours cultivating Lewinsky as a source. No, someone else did that.
Believe it or not, and I know it's almost laughable to think of it today, but Newsweek had the story and had been sitting on it for ages. Matt Drudge merely exposed that so the story had to come out. Yes, Virginia, Newsweek used to actually be about News and not clicks and hadn't yet been sold for one dollar before it fell down into the jakes and no lime followed.
In 1998 I made a conscious effort to cultivate friends everywhere. People I could trust who were just as into finding truth as I was. It's not like some conspiracy thing. As far as I know, only two were foil hatters, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. It didn't mean they didn't have meaningful information to impart, it merely meant that I would have to check with other sources to confirm. In twenty years neither of them have fed me bogus info. I've lost a few friends. A year ago I lost the best of my life, and I still mourn his death. Not a day goes by that I don't think of him and how much he taught me. He's one of the few I've had in my home.
When Bush was elected the American Media lost their damned minds. It was then we began to see the sharp divide between real reporters and Bush Derangement Syndrome. Then Obama came and Barry made it okay to lie to America, and then rewarded them for doing so, and thus the divide between liars and truth tellers grew into a chasm.
Now, with Trump, there is a great gulf fixed between distortion and reality. Reality is the signal, Journalism is the noise, and their ratio is... dwindling. See my earlier remarks on Newsweek.
The whole two year interference in the Trump administration with the lies of Russian Collusion exploded with the release of the Mueller Report. Now, let me be very clear. I don't like Robert Mueller, don't trust him, and I think that he should have been slammed in prison for the Bulger fiasco in Boston and his involvement in the Ted Stevens murder. I didn't like Stevens either, so this should tell you how hard this is for me to accept.
The American press was all set at the table, napkins tucked into their collars, knives and forks at the ready as if prepared for a feast for that report to drop. When it turned out to be a huge nothing burger they lost their minds in full view of a credulous public, who have now had their eyes opened. They cried, they screamed, all the usual things they usually pulled when called on their bullshit, but it didn't change the report.
It's like I've always said, Leftism only works if you believe in magic. They allowed magical thinking to overcame all rationality in the face of their lies that they literally lost it on air, in print with the entire world watching and most shaking their heads. Except for the British press who were desperate to report on anything BUT Brexit.
With Trump's exoneration by this investigation they hung their entire hopes on, the American Press have lost all hope of credibility. All of them have. Every single, last molecule of them. There are very few I trust. In fact, I would opine that I could count the number of journalists I trust entire on one hand and still have fingers left over. I've met very few who aren't just ready to believe anything that agrees with their biases. The funny thing is they all scream how unbiased they are.
Does this mean I only believe conservatives? Only love Republicans? Hardly. Out of those of the trusted I could one conservative and they are Libertarian, very, very Libertarian.
I have spent over twenty years slowly chiseling away at their very sandy foundations. I've questioned, I've pushed when threatened, but I've continued. Some I've done overtly, very out in the open, and other things I've merely been a signpost pointing in the correct direction to where even those self-blinded idiots could not ignore it. But I feel we've beyond the tipping point now. There is no way to ignore, any longer, the lies they're still telling themselves and you.
I will say this, I was not a Ben Bradlee fan, but I respected the man's ethics when it came to journalism. Sources must be verifiable and you had to have at least one that would be named and could be corroborated. Read Woodstein's All The President's Men as to how much they hated that, but it had to be done to make sure there were no mistakes made for the damning evidence they had on Nixon. They exposed that rot, rightfully so. And I am a Nixon fan saying that.
Find the truth yourself. You will trust that and you will respect it more than taking the words of some idiot on TV as truth.
You see, when I grew up, I respected and trusted the journalists in our country. Walter Kronkite on the evening news, and cutting my newspaper teeth on Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate was the pinnacle of American Journalism. It was also the last of their valid victories. After that there was no lie they wouldn't tell, no truth they would not stretch out of all recognizability to push whatever agenda they were following.
I quickly found that I could not trust them, their words or anything they told me. It was then that I began finding the truth by searching several stories, pulling what I knew to be the truth from each one. I quickly found there was very little truth in any one news story.
My disillusionment began with Iran-Contra, became a recognized thing during the Clarence Thomas Senate hearings. It's no coincidence that I also began to recognize a very wag the dog relationship between politicians and the press. I saw what should have been an adversarial relationship as very walking arm in arm rather than a check on political hubris. The Clinton Administration and their slobbering love affair with the press was the last straw. It was clear that there would be very little truth telling from anywhere.
Thank God for the internet.
In the mid-90s there wasn't much news online. There were the beginnings of blogging, but even that was sparse. By the late 90s Drudge was the leader, but Drudge is not a news reporting site, it's a news aggregation site. Granted, Matt Drudge gets most of the credit for exposing the Lewinsky story to the world where the press had no choice but to then report it, but he all he did was expose the story someone else had made. It's not like he was spending long hours cultivating Lewinsky as a source. No, someone else did that.
Believe it or not, and I know it's almost laughable to think of it today, but Newsweek had the story and had been sitting on it for ages. Matt Drudge merely exposed that so the story had to come out. Yes, Virginia, Newsweek used to actually be about News and not clicks and hadn't yet been sold for one dollar before it fell down into the jakes and no lime followed.
In 1998 I made a conscious effort to cultivate friends everywhere. People I could trust who were just as into finding truth as I was. It's not like some conspiracy thing. As far as I know, only two were foil hatters, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. It didn't mean they didn't have meaningful information to impart, it merely meant that I would have to check with other sources to confirm. In twenty years neither of them have fed me bogus info. I've lost a few friends. A year ago I lost the best of my life, and I still mourn his death. Not a day goes by that I don't think of him and how much he taught me. He's one of the few I've had in my home.
When Bush was elected the American Media lost their damned minds. It was then we began to see the sharp divide between real reporters and Bush Derangement Syndrome. Then Obama came and Barry made it okay to lie to America, and then rewarded them for doing so, and thus the divide between liars and truth tellers grew into a chasm.
Now, with Trump, there is a great gulf fixed between distortion and reality. Reality is the signal, Journalism is the noise, and their ratio is... dwindling. See my earlier remarks on Newsweek.
The whole two year interference in the Trump administration with the lies of Russian Collusion exploded with the release of the Mueller Report. Now, let me be very clear. I don't like Robert Mueller, don't trust him, and I think that he should have been slammed in prison for the Bulger fiasco in Boston and his involvement in the Ted Stevens murder. I didn't like Stevens either, so this should tell you how hard this is for me to accept.
The American press was all set at the table, napkins tucked into their collars, knives and forks at the ready as if prepared for a feast for that report to drop. When it turned out to be a huge nothing burger they lost their minds in full view of a credulous public, who have now had their eyes opened. They cried, they screamed, all the usual things they usually pulled when called on their bullshit, but it didn't change the report.
It's like I've always said, Leftism only works if you believe in magic. They allowed magical thinking to overcame all rationality in the face of their lies that they literally lost it on air, in print with the entire world watching and most shaking their heads. Except for the British press who were desperate to report on anything BUT Brexit.
With Trump's exoneration by this investigation they hung their entire hopes on, the American Press have lost all hope of credibility. All of them have. Every single, last molecule of them. There are very few I trust. In fact, I would opine that I could count the number of journalists I trust entire on one hand and still have fingers left over. I've met very few who aren't just ready to believe anything that agrees with their biases. The funny thing is they all scream how unbiased they are.
Does this mean I only believe conservatives? Only love Republicans? Hardly. Out of those of the trusted I could one conservative and they are Libertarian, very, very Libertarian.
I have spent over twenty years slowly chiseling away at their very sandy foundations. I've questioned, I've pushed when threatened, but I've continued. Some I've done overtly, very out in the open, and other things I've merely been a signpost pointing in the correct direction to where even those self-blinded idiots could not ignore it. But I feel we've beyond the tipping point now. There is no way to ignore, any longer, the lies they're still telling themselves and you.
I will say this, I was not a Ben Bradlee fan, but I respected the man's ethics when it came to journalism. Sources must be verifiable and you had to have at least one that would be named and could be corroborated. Read Woodstein's All The President's Men as to how much they hated that, but it had to be done to make sure there were no mistakes made for the damning evidence they had on Nixon. They exposed that rot, rightfully so. And I am a Nixon fan saying that.
Find the truth yourself. You will trust that and you will respect it more than taking the words of some idiot on TV as truth.
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