Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Who Do They Think They’re Kidding?

By Tim Dunkin

Conservatives have long known that the news media are biased. Starting with the journalism schools, every year class after class of reporters, editors, producers, and other general ne'er-do-wells are churned out and inflicted upon a largely unsuspecting public. These graduates go on to join the staffs of newspapers, television stations, and if from one of the more prestigious diploma mills, one of the major networks. It is in school, however, that these aspiring opinion shapers learn the leftist worldview that dominates their subsequent efforts.

One belief that nearly all of these journalism students seem to imbibe deeply is the belief that journalism is a means of “changing the world,” of “shaping the world around us,” and so forth. Long gone are the days when journalism was about reporting facts, and in which opinionating was relegated to the editorial pages. Using their position as “gatekeepers” of information, modern journalists habitually put “spin” on their stories designed to influence the way you and I think about current events. Interviewers are skilled in the art of the “leading question,” designed to trap an unsuspecting guest into an embarrassing admission or to trip him or her up into inadvertent damage. Newspaper headlines reflect this bias, and the way the nightly news reports on an event is as important as that it reported it at all.

I've said it before, and I will say it again – modern journalists, and the milieu surrounding their black art, are a knowledge-control cult. They act to filter information in such a way as to encourage the listener or reader to think about issues and events the way the journalists want them to. In many ways, journalism puts into practice a crude sort of language control such as was envisioned by George Orwell in 1984. In that novel, the whole point to the contrived language of Newspeak was to not only discourage “wrong”
ways of thinking, but to make wrong ways of thinking literally impossible, by constructing the language in such a way as to render wrong ways of expressing oneself literally unspeakable. One cannot articulate a wrong thought if no word to express it even exists.

Thus, we see Newspeak at Newsweek.

Modern journalism – controlled by the Gramscian Left as it is – is in the vanguard of the Marxist subversion of America. The means by which the journalists conduct this subversion is by working to subvert the very thought processes of the people who foolishly give them an audience. Control the information the people get, and you can control the responses they make. Provide only one option for thinking about something, and the people will take that one option. Convince the audience that contrary opinions and thoughts are bad, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and just plain sick and wrong, and people will shy away from those stances, so the journalist gatekeepers hope.

Which is why, of course, the “Old Media” so deathly hate the “New Media” made up of blogs, online journals, and other outlets that allow enterprising knowledge-seekers to run the data blockade that ABCNNBCBS has established. Nothing kills a knowledge-control cult like competition.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Old Media – with its agglomeration of talk shows, editorialists, spun news stories, and the like – still command a sizeable following in America. And it is this following that causes them to be so self assured in their ability to sway public opinion in the proper directions.

See, these leftist journalists and network wags exist in a self-imposed bubble. They operate, functionally, as if they suffered from some sort of group autism. They allow only certain information into their self-contained fact space. Everything not fitting the paradigm is filtered out, and it is this filtered information that they then attempt to pass on to the public.

This disconnect is why their reporting about current events and personalities, always laughable at best, has become downright maddening over the past year or so. As the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration have continued to meltdown; as the evidence continues to mount that the American people do not, in fact, like what the Left is doing one bit, the media have retreated further and
further into their shell.

Instead of dealing with it, the media have gone into full-spin mode. They are doing everything they can to try to convince the people that we don't really support and believe in the things we do. We hate Obamacare, but the media repeatedly report that we can't wait for it to get started. We don't believe in global warming, but the media keep right on treating the subject as if there was unanimous agreement about the matter. On and on it goes. The media are convinced that the American people love liberal policies, and that only a small, inconsequential fringe of right-wing yahoos (making up anywhere from 50-80% of the population, depending on the issue) are kinking up the works. And the media are doing their best to try to convince YOU of that too. Who are you going to believe, Chris Matthews or your lying eyes?

Yet, the testimony of reputable (i.e. non-mainstream media) polling is indisputable. The American people support conservative positions across the board. Among other things,

● By a 58%-36% margin, Americans want to repeal ObamaCare.

● American's want more offshore drilling for oil, not less, by a 64%-21% margin, and even support deep water drilling 55%-25%.

● A whopping 82%-14% of us think voters should have to show ID before being allowed to vote.

● 48% of Americans think it is too easy to get an abortion, while only 38% think it is too difficult or about right.

● By 62% to 25%, Americans oppose the Ground Zero mosque (and Rasmussen's oppose number is one of the lower ones in recent polling).

● 58% of Americans think that “anchor babies” born to illegal immigrants should not have automatic US citizenship, versus 34% who do.

● A majority of Americans (58%-38%) think voting ballots should be English-only.

● In liberal Illinois, 54%-32% oppose abolishing the death penalty.

● In purplish Ohio, 62% want to extend the Bush tax cuts, versus 30% who want them to expire. Across the border in less-purplish-and-more-bluish Pennsylvania, 61% say the same thing versus 28% opposed.

● By a 56%-33% margin, Americans think the government should stay out of the housing market.

● Americans think that our nuclear arsenal is important to national security, 77%-15%.

● More importantly for the upcoming elections, 57% of Americans think the congressional Democrat agenda is too extreme, while only 34% disagree. The same percentage also said that President Obama is more liberal than they are.

Add to this the broad popularity of the Tea Parties, the fact that Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint-approved candidates keep winning in the primaries, and that such bright Blue states as California and Maine continue to reject gay marriage by wide margins, and we begin to see that there is, in fact, a broad consensus among the American people on issues ranging across the board – fiscal, social, and on defense matters. The problem is that this broad consensus is a conservative one that is not shared by the leftists in the mainstream media.

They haven't gotten the memo, however.

In the self-contained fact space of Journalism World, Obama is wildly popular and is simply being monkey-wrenched by a handful of racist Tea Partiers using “fiscal issues” to mask a virulent hatred of America's first black President. In their world, everybody who is anybody wants to “go green,” wants to throw the borders open, wants higher taxes to pay for more “services,” thinks the stimulus packages actually did something to help the economy, desires the emasculation of the American armed forces, and wouldn't dare do something Islamophobic like opposing a triumphalistic victory mosque a few hundred feet from the site of Islam's most extensive mass murder attack on American soil.

No sirree, only a raving, dunderheaded moron would disagree with what the gatekeepers tell us is correct thinking.

Even though that's not true, they want you to think it is. The purpose to all this reporting that flies in the face of facts is that the journalistas want you to ignore the facts, and accept their version of reality. Constant repetition that is intended to subconsciously affect your reasoning. Hear it enough, and it'll sink in. Like the many push-polls that MSM outfits will release in the weeks before an election that swing way to the left of polls from professional polling houses, this style of reporting is designed to engineer its own reality.

So, the question then is, “What are you and I going to do about it?” This is where the remote control comes into play. It has a button labeled “Off.” Press it. Or if you can't bring yourself to go that far, then press the up or down channel buttons until you find some pro-wrestling, if that's your bag. Either way, refuse to allow the MSM to have any influence on you anymore. Even if you are dead set sure that they'll never fool you – why even let them try? Why let them hack away at your own confidence with their biased and shoddy reporting? All they want to do is make you doubt reality and accept their fact set as your own. Don't do it. Turn it off. Cancel the subscription. Don't waste the buck fifty on the morning paper at the barber shop.

Instead, seek out alternatives. Find the sources – the internet is full of them – that still report the news accurately and that refrain from left-wing psycho-spin. Seek out the people who still actually fact-check. Do it for your country. Do it for yourself.




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