The power of the Media is not in overt brain washing (that is the long-term effect) but in the slow and constant evolution of language — soft power. It claims the intellectual rights to our judgement and our perception of the world. It wants our allegiance and it chooses our opinions and eventually our sacred Vote.
HOUDINI
You did not vote in this year’s Election
— The Media did.
The Media influencers of public opinion have become a threat to our Republic. No other way around it. There are no political party’s now (hold that thought) only persuasion teams. The main stream media’s goal is to shape our schema, our understanding about the world and how we adapt to new information we encounter. We are only as free as who shapes our language and the Media has a hand in it.
The two main qualities of clay are absorptive and adsorptive. They act as a magnet attracting molecules, organisms, chemicals, bacteria, viruses and fake news to name a few, they really stick. This is how cognitive dissonance works; it does not get fully absorped but adsorped just enough. We accept contradicting information because disinformation from all mass media forms is intentionally ubiquitous. The power of the Media is not in overt brain washing (that is the long-term effect) but in the slow and constant evolution of language — soft power. It claims the intellectual rights to our judgement and our perception of the world. It wants our allegiance, chooses our opinions and eventually our Sacred Vote.
When looking up the First Amendment, I stumbled onto a question: Freedom of the Press for Whom? This famous question asked by former Dean of George Washington Law School, Jerome Barron more than 50 years ago is the most astute and relevant query facing the freedom of the Press of our time. And I would add to that question: free from what interference? McChesney (2007) states “When communication firms claim they work in free markets, it should provoke more howls than a Jerry Lewis film festival in France. All commercial enterprises benefit by government spending, and hence get indirect subsidies.” In otherwords, there are no major independent news outlets. Maybe there never were.
So what happens when the entire ethos of a political party is promoted by the Main Stream Media? How can media bias exist in a Democracy? How can we claim a free Press that sells propaganda to favor one political candidate and vilifies another, much less the President of the United States? On the one hand the Press is free to critize a President if that is deemed paramount to the public good (distinction from bad tendency test) that criminalizes all sedicious libels. We might refer to Watergate here in terms of breach of trust in government officials. On the other hand, as we face continual social and political unrest, it becomes of National clemency for the Press to responsibly report the news, grounded in facts and dispel political division or at least reduce it’s damage. Still, the major networks were complicit in spreading disinformation about the Trump administration and knew that it would incite riots in the streets and violent threats towards civilians. They became well acquainted with low information voters and spoon fed them the worst kind of propaganda — fake news and it’s sins of omission — What Was Left Out: (China/Biden pay to play, Hunter laptop) leaving out parts of speech or video clip which might clarify someone’s position, and news laundering. They redefined vocabulary to fit their narrative. For example: “likely” now means ‘with all certainty’ without any evidence, approval or national acceptance. “Baseless” is fake news jargon for refuting something despite evidence and without doing the research. You must accept! This is the new English! My favorite of their perjury: “Anonymous sources say” — That would be the monkey in the back pocket who “knows, trust me”.
In all fairness to the art of Journalism, I get the whole ‘Watergate Mission”, that dangling carrot to one day be that single reporter or team of reporters to expose a corruption ring behind the walls of the White House and bring to justice those perpetrators as a public service. But if those agents for transparency are corrupt themselves, we are no longer a Constitutional Republic but a Mediacracy. Apparently that is what the Media has made us believe all those years.
Ben Stein sheds light on Watergate: “I was there in the Watergate era, working at the Nixon White House. For an infraction that no one can explain yet, the government of the US investigated for two years, employed hundreds of lawyers and special agents, and provided immense (but false) documentation. As a result, the media went berserk and Nixon was kicked out of office”. If this is true and I’m inclined to trust Ben Stein (Buëller), a first person witness and lawyer’s knowledge of this, then even journalism’s Holy Grail is a myth. “Watergate” was considered to be the pinnacle of journalism in the ultimate exposé. Nixon’s impeachment then resignation became the badge of honor for journalists and from then on followed the Watergate Complex — Sound familiar? But the Watergate Mission is not the watershed moment the media had hope it would be, afterall, Nixon was pardoned by his Vice President Gerald Ford in order to “end National Division”.
Russiagate was that second chance to be the moral transparency heroes but they went home with empty dossiers, only to be stuffed with propaganda for 3.5 years. In their zeal for a new Journalistic Holy Grail of “gotcha”, they reached epidemic scale of disinformation especially as it infects the realm of foreign affairs. It is Kabuki theatre now, with hysteria and sophism in full Kumadori. It makes you wonder about the mental health of our Nation and if there should be some Surgeon General warnings on main stream news.
Has the main stream media operated outside of the First Amendment Protection by publishing so many false statements and hoaxes, to defame the President but also Trump’s supporters who are then associated with libel statements and in turn, receive death threats? (file under Bad tendency test). Or put on Gulag lists to be sent to concentration camps of unemployment exile and defamation? This is an absurd analogy, of course pushed by mass media and coincidentally it was Joe Biden’s resounding Campaign message: Trump is Hitler, I am not.
One example was how the media spread false statements that Trump believed Neo Nazis in Charlottesville were “fine people”. This became the linchpin for Joe Biden’s entire campaign fueling the fire for the narrative that Trump is a White Supremacist regardless of the fact that most reasonable people could look up the full transcript where he emphatically denounces Neo Nazis and White Nationalists. Apparently Google left that part out, swindling half the country of reality. A video used out of context in order to spread disinformation, should be considered defamation since any form of media is under the definition of speech. Under defamation law: “a deliberate alteration of words [in a quotation] does not equate with knowledge of falsity unless the alteration results in a material change in the meaning conveyed by the statement(Constitution.Congress.gov).
Deliberately leaving out the segment where Trump denounces racist groups changes then the meaning of his previous statement to be in support of racist groups.
Defamation: False statements that a person’s reputations can lead to civil liability (and even to criminal punishment), especially when the speaker deliberately lied or said things they knew were likely false. Every single reporter was aware of the entire Charlottesville transcript.
Other media liabilities included the claim that the President told everyone to drink bleach in order to kill the coronavirus. In the year 2020 anything is possible, however, CNN amplified this false statement and there were allegedly, cases of bleach intake followed by hospitalizations. True story. The hospitalizations stories may very well have been fabricated to incriminate Trump for spreading the misinformation spun by the Media. You can see how this trend in Mass Media’s public influence will have legal implications at a larger scale:
McChesney (2007) declares: “What the First Amendment means for freedom of the press is likely to be determined in the coming generation, and scholars, legal and communication, need to prepare for it beginning immediately. There has been tremendous pressure to make the First Amendment into a piece of protective legislation for media corporations and commercial values, although the Courts have not gone all the way in that direction. As cases work their way through the system in the coming generation, we need to have hard empirical research as well as thoughtful treatises on the relationship of free press to self-governance and what this means for the First Amendment”.
We have ushered in a new era in communications where decorum, respect for opinion and dignity of every person have fallen under the spell of snidely packaged amour-propre with a cacophonous barking soundtrack. “There is a nastier tone now with the press, not just in New York but all across the nation. There’s a nastiness, a disrespect that never existed before,” Gov.Cuomo(2020)
This new Mediacracy, fashioned by Main Stream News Media is not only a foundation for a political party — it is a Political Party. They appeal to their base, and I imagine have their lobbyists even though they are charged with being a free Press, but free from what interference I ask? McChesney ( 2007) adds: “The empirical evidence is devastating: In the first six months of 2006 alone, communication and technology firms spent $172 million on lobbying in Washington, more than any other sector or group Protecting 1st Amendment”.
So this new political party (MSM Party) has chosen its President: Joe Biden. They have convinced everyone that the election was impenetrable and that even doubting this makes you an enemy of Democracy. There is no evidence whatsoever of fraud, they say. BASELESS! BASELESS! They even declare the winning President. Recently the New York Times had redacted a tweet stating very confidently it is the Media that declares a winning President of an Election~
“Correction: We’ve deleted an earlier tweet referred imprecisely to the role of the news media in the U.S presidential election. The news media projects winners and reports results; it does not declare the winner of the election”. NYT
Since 1973, “Beyond attitudes and opinions, the pictures of reality created by the mass media have implications for personal behaviors, ranging from college applications to voting on election day.” Mccombs (1973). Is this ever an understatement of the power grab and influence of Big Tech and Mass Media?
The media’s injection of their own opinion discredits any facts they might have and the polymer is thick with misinformation and personal attacks. Their latest effigy of Trump as dictator for doubting the Election was fair and challenging the results of what is going to be recorded in history as the greatest Election Fraud of all time, is the final priming for the public to accept the incoming Hologram President Biden. No matter how many times hoaxes had been debunked both Main Stream media and the Biden Campaign continued to broadcast this libel as bible and got away with it! How is that protected under the 1st Amendment? We can only hope for a Great Awakening in our communications world in order to find a golden age, lest we forget:
Jerome Barron (1967) affirms: “The press, long enshrined among our most highly cherished institutions, was thought a cornerstone of democracy when its name was boldly inscribed in the Bill of Rights. Freed from governmental restraint, initially by the first amendment and later by the fourteenth, the press was to stand majestically as the champion of new ideas and the watch dog against governmental abuse.”
We have migrated from journalistic skepticism of the Government dating back to the Vietnam War to 2020 skepticism of journalism aka public information management, a euphemism now for overthrowing the Government by ascribing opinions to the public. Whose side is overthrowing whom you ask? It depends who is your news source. Republicans sincerely believe that the Democratic Party is performing a coup (a digital coup) if you believe that the election has been compromised by software (Dominion news, Smartmatic). Democrats firmly believe that the Republicans are attempting a coup by refusing to concede though there is no evidence of that but it suits the theatre that Trump is a Fascist, the trigger word of the day, who will bypass Democracy and trample over the Republic all to save his fragile ego. This is a fallacy and the Left’s ignorance of our Constitutional Republic and the character of the American People. When votes cannot be audited, there is no evidence that an Election even took place. Trump supporters are very happy to concede if they know there is transparency. Integrity of elections and the right to vote are at stake and the President is resolved to make right for future elections, our election process. That is the mandate.
Mass mail-in voting and external voting machines comprimised our election and yet the Democratic Party assures us that the election was clean and free of fraud despite the overwhelming statistics and original statements by all media agencies that mail-in voting is by nature vulnerable to hacking and fraud. They believe that any other opinion is delusional. Add to that the 74 Million (and still counting..) who believe the Election was fraudulent, including 30% of Democrats (Ramussen) and there you have the co-existence of two Presidents. President Trump represents the last pillar of Democracy within a Constitutional Republic and the Media’s President, through opinion coercion and Declaration of Government Dependence is moving furniture into the Oval Office. History will record how they accomplished this Houdiniesque cunning without standing in line to vote or licking a single stamp.
Bibliography
Robert McChesney. Freedom of the Press for Whom?The Question to be answered in our critical juncture. Law.hofstra.edu
New York Times v. Sullivan (1964)Constitution Center.org
Gov. Cuomo. Interview, WAMC, public radio station,Albany.
Jerome A. Barron. Access to the Press. A New First Amendment Right, Vol. 80, No. 8 (Jun., 1967)https://www.jstor.org/stable/1339417?seq=1
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