Media in America - Sound bytes of Truth - Fighting Back Against the Media

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What do movie star Richard Dreyfuss and tennis star Kim Clijsters have in common? Both have made very subtle yet powerful statements in the last 24 hours showing how ridiculous the American media has become in their efforts to censure and trivialize the news.

In the Austrian Open tennis tournament underway last night Kim was interviewed by sports commentator Todd Woodbridge when she turned the interview into questioning the reporter about text comments he made to another tennis star saying, well, listen to what happened yourself.  Double click to enlarge video.



As for the distinguished actor Dreyfuss, a self-acknowledged liberal, he appeared on Fox News this morning to explain his new effort to teach America's youth the meaning and need for civility. His new program could make a difference in school as the goal is to increase patriotism in our much distracted youth.

Just as he was beginning to discuss the details of how the program works, he was interrupted by the Fox announcers saying his time had expired and they had to cut to another story. Richard calmly said that was another reason the country is in trouble, to which the announcer said we promised you four minutes.

Dreyfuss was making a point I mention often, the pandering of the media to the MTV model that the people of America lose interest in stories that run over three minutes, about the length of a new song on the radio. Now how in the hell can someone explain the problems with youth, the problems with our education system, and how this program can help address the problems in less than four minutes?

Why do the media think no story is worth more than 3-4 minutes? Media market researchers have sold our news media on the concept that we have no interest in meaningful stories nor in depth reports on such stories. I believe the American public is hungry for real news, not sound bytes, and cares what is happening in the world.

All news on mainstream and cable media use his strategy unless there is a reality element to the story such as the Chilean miners story or the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords in Tucson. Perhaps it is the media and their bean counters who are responsible for the loss of interest and trust in the news because the people know we are being shortchanged.

What is the point of giving Constitutional protection to the media when they don't have time to report the news?

Well I thought we could learn a lot more from Dreyfuss and his program so here is an interview he gave explaining the program in more detail.  Double click to enlarge video.

Richard Dreyfuss on Civics


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Both the Media and Political Parties are clueless about the Tea Party

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After watching the evolution of the Tea Party over the past two years I often wonder if the Main street and Lame Street media who cover the Tea Party have listened to a word said by Tea Party participants. Since we know they condemned the Tea Party back in the beginning as dangerous radical fringe, and we know some in the media like Nora O'Donnell of NBC have been bitterly jealous or hateful of Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin. Just yesterday O'Donnell said she was sick of hearing how Palin is "attractive and appealing".

So our first exposure to the Tea Party was the health care town hall fiascos of the Democrats when Nancy Pelosi said her congressmen were physically threatened by these radicals and her pit bull Steny Hoyer organized his own mercenaries to control the tea people, his being the SEIU thugs who claimed to put Obama in office.

Obama, Pelosi, Reid and all the liberal Democrats quickly joined the media trashing of the Tea Party people and apparently they thought the Tea people would just go away. Then along came the election to fill Teddy Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat and the radical Tea Party helped propel a Republican unknown named Scott Brown to a stunning capture of the Kennedy seat.

From that point on the Tea party treatment in the media changed, though not necessarily for the better. For the next year the media looked for every nut case, oddball sign and strange utterance from anyone even remotely connected to the Tea party in an effort to prove these were not ordinary citizens but were escaped mental patients.

But the scorn and disbelief by the media and politicians paled compared to the actions by the political parties as both joined in a holy war against the Tea party as both began to realize their old boy political network was threatened by these outsiders.

You see, the Tea party advocated a conservative platform aimed solely at the top issues of every citizen in America. Well, at least all the citizens except Obama and the Democrats who only seemed able to talk about health care, financial reform, and some stimulus that would keep unemployment under 8%. As the unemployment shot up to 9.7% it was obvious Obama and the Democrats had filed to see the light.

The Tea Party people wanted less government, a balanced budget and a reduced national deficit. Quite the radical agenda. There were no social issues. It didn't matter if you were Republican, Democrat or Independent, all were welcome to the Tea party movement.

It was about this time Sarah Palin and others took a very big chance and embraced the Tea Party movement and the grassroots candidates being fostered by the Tea party. The good old boys who controlled the GOP party had to be having fits and may even turned on Sarah to punish her for helping the enemy, outsiders that could not be controlled.

By the time the early primaries of this year came around the Tea party was knocking off Republican favorites and someone in the GOP machine woke up and realized if they embraced the Tea party primary winners, the Republican advantage in the off year election could be turned into a landslide.

Despite continuing efforts by a media appalled by the fact normal Tea party people thought they should be elected, and in spite of the media and Obama/Pelosi efforts to discredit and laugh off the Tea party, the outside radicals caught the attention of Main Street America and suddenly became a powerful political force Independent of the two old political parties.

Main Street Independents were first to embrace the ideals of the Tea party followed by disgruntled members of both the Democrat and Republican parties who were disgusted with the direction of both mainstream parties. Late last spring when the number of registered Independents in America surged past the registered Democrats and Republicans for the first time in over 100 years it struck a note of terror in even the old professional politicians.

Of course the media were the last to stop trashing the Tea party as the Lame Street media have never been known to catch on to popular opinion that conflicts with their own prejudices. Over 100 viable Tea party candidates got nominated to major offices and hundreds more are viable candidates for state legislatures and other local offices yet still the media focuses all attention on the political mistakes of a handful of Tea party candidates while ignoring the many legitimate candidates.

Just today the liberal mouth pieces of MSNBC were blaming the Republicans for letting "inferior" Tea party candidates run and win in primary elections when the GOP could have won the general election with traditional GOP candidates.

They still don't get it. The Tea party is not and never has been a Republican creation. Right now it is the only party in America that stands on it's principles. The Tea party would rather lose an election trying to get an outsider elected than back a candidate who will change positions to get elected. Such integrity no longer seems to exist with professional politicians or parties.

The Tea party winners will swell the GOP landslide because the GOP is opposed to the Obama agenda, pure and simple. It is the Obama agenda that has totally ignored the needs of the people. After the election, if the Tea party winners embrace campaign and campaign finance reform and force through, in order to stop special interests and the selling of America, long overdue changes, both political parties and the media will lose control of the national agenda and America will be returned to the People where it belongs.

By the way, the professional politicians might have pocketed more than TWO BILLION DOLLARS in campaign contributions, but the Main Street Lame Street media has pocketed over THREE BILLION DOLLARS in media buys from the same politicians and special interests. So just who do we think is owned by the billions in spending?
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Media Conned Again, and Again, and Again

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So much for the fair and balanced coverage, the validation of facts and being guardians of the truth as the mainstream media, entertainment media and all the other media suffered through a series of recent hijacks by people testing the gullibility of our public watchdogs. In a word, the result was "failure", a failure to fact check, to question or to validate.



First there was the case of the English group who fed false story after false story to the entertainment media to see if garbage would reach the airways and they were stunned to see their bogus tips to the media show up on news sites then rampage around the world on the Internet with no attempt to check the facts.



Then there was the case of Rush Limbaugh who was blocked from becoming an owner of a NFL team by the new American business censorship czars Reverend Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Once again malicious rumors appeared throughout the media and around the world thanks to our pit bull czars who promoted the lies and hoodwinked the public. The stampede worked as Rush lost out on his bid to act like an American and be free to invest his money where he wanted.





The White House and those defenders of liberal freedom in America were silent as they watched with glee as lies prevailed, were never challenged, and were bought hook, line and sinker by the media. At the same time the White House was unleashing their communications czar, Anita Dunn, on Fox News and Glenn Beck in particular, becoming the first presidency in our history to declare a television news channel as, well let me give you her words.



"We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told CNN over the weekend. "The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party." In a media blitz against the network, Dunn also gave interviews with Time magazine and the New York Times.



In addition the White House and the Federal Communications Commission have both begun campaigns to control Internet blogs and keep them from spreading rumors disguised as news. The blog business has exploded ever since the public realized that the mainstream media was compromised but bloggers and their incessant search for truth now threaten the very institutions in the federal government charged with the Constitutional responsibility to protect the right of free speech in America.



Obama is a constitutional lawyer, you would think his administration would know better than to use the power of the government to silence critics but then they seem to do a lot of things that ignore the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the freedom of the press and public. The White House wants you to only hear the liberal babble of their favorites like MSNBC.



The next media con was the Obama trip to New Orleans, his first since taking office. We are supposed to believe that his campaign promise to undo the damage Bush did by not helping New Orleans recover from hurricane Katrina was a promise he delivered on. Once again the media was fed the administration cop out line that we cannot make progress because of the last eight Republican years of disaster.



I, for one, am tired of the excuses for inaction. America is three trillion more dollars in debt because of the Obama agenda. One would think that much money could get some of these problems fixed but the money went to the banks, Wall Street executives, home mortgage companies, insurance companies, failed automobile companies and unions. I'm also tired of hearing how Bush is still to blame for everything that goes wrong with the Obama agenda. Bush has been gone nine months. And the last two years of the Bush presidency the Democrats under Nancy Pelosi controlled the House meaning she could have stopped anything Bush wanted.

The City of New Orleans was lost in the Obama rush to pay back campaign contributors to the tune of billions of dollars in profits, bonuses, opportunities for profit and whatever else is used to determine who gets the first cash from the greatest cash cow in history, good old Uncle Sugar. The number one Obama campaign supporter Goldman Sachs has received billions of dollars in federal aid and built a $16.7 billion pool for employee wages and bonuses, the largest in Wall Street history since he took office.

After a brief four hour stop in New Orleans to tell the people why Bush is responsible for the delays in aid to New Orleans even though Bush has been gone for nine months, Obama went to San Francisco to spend the evening at Democratic fundraisers that cost more than $30,000 per couple to attend one event and get your picture taken with Obama. He raised about $3 million for election campaigns next year. Pelosi was there to introduce him. She must have flown in on her private government owned jet too. Two jets to San Francisco for a fund raiser would cost maybe a million dollars? Who knows?

So New Orleans still cannot get $245 million this year to rebuild their hospital but the head of Obama campaign contributor Goldman can get $70 million this year for making money off government loopholes while his staff can make $16.7 billion this year. More than $40 billion has been allocated for New Orleans, most in the three years before Obama took office, and still no hospital, no housing and limited protection from future hurricanes. The truth is New Orleans was a disaster before the disaster and had to be rebuilt to survive, with or without the hurricane.

Why don't we take a few more billions from the trillions of dollars already approved for Obama stimulus, bank bailout, insurance bailout and auto bailout bills and just buy the rest of New Orleans, rebuild it, lease it out and make money for the federal government? It would be far cheaper than an unlimited amount of federal aid being pumped into a bottomless pit.



So the media con? Nothing is really being done in New Orleans, the president was just stopping by to justify the taxpayers paying for his campaign junket to San Francisco. New Orleans still has the same problems it had when he was elected. But San Francisco has Nancy Pelosi who was waiting to introduce him to the deep pockets from Silicon Valley. So while New Orleans got a four hour stopover San Francisco and Pelosi got the president for the evening and night.



Perhaps the last recent media con was the best. If it turns out that the reality show savvy family from Colorado who supposedly lost their 6 year old son in a runaway helium balloon whose flight across Colorado dominated the television airwaves across the nation and even Europe turns out to be a staged event, then the media will look stupid.



On the CNN Larry King Show the kid, who was never on the balloon but safely hidden in an attic, did say he stayed hidden in a box in the attic to help the show. What show? The one some idiotic network will sign them to star in I guess. Here was The Washington Post internet headline about this major event.



Breaking: A Six-Year-Old Is Trapped In A Homemade Helium Balloon Over Denver

Why in the world would a runaway balloon require fulltime coverage from all the news networks, mainstream and cable, tying up the most expensive television system in the world? Fifty people being killed in Pakistan or Afghanistan would never get such live coverage. I am sick of the stupid live video feeds of car chases, truck chases, runaway helium balloons and other stunts shown almost daily on what used to be our news stations and networks.



Our news media are becoming reality shows. When we are supposed to be learning about the nation and world we watch police chases. No wonder nobody believes the news media, it is a joke. News has become entertainment and reality TV and people have no clue who or what to believe. My advice, turn the television off!

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