Monday, August 02, 2010

There’s No Such Thing as Unbiased News

There’s No Such Thing as Unbiased News
by Mark Luedtke

Many Americans and most journalists have a romantic notion that in the past, news organizations had integrity and published or broadcast unbiased news. That’s a delusion. There’s never been any such thing as unbiased news.

Ben Franklin was one of the most famous newspapermen in the colonies and published the Pennsylvania Gazette. He published the original drawing of the colonies depicted as a snake cut in multiple sections in order to influence the colonies to unite to fight the French and Indians before the French and Indian War. Franklin used his paper to promote the war for independence, and Revolutionary War supporters adopted the sectioned snake with the text “Don’t tread on me” to symbolize their cause.

Newspapers in Andrew Jackson’s 1828 campaign against John Quincy Adams gleefully slandered both candidates, and Jackson went so far as to write newspaper editors with advice about how to defend attacks on him and to attack Adams in response. Nicholas Biddle, President of the US central bank Jackson wanted to shut down, printed money out of thin air just as the Federal Reserve does today and used that money to bribe newspapers to print slanderous attacks on Jackson and defenses of the bank, similar to what we saw happen to Ron Paul in 2008. Biddle wrote one editor, “If you will cause the articles I have indicated and others which I may prepare to be inserted in the newspaper in question, I will at once pay to you one thousand dollars.

We all know how William Randolf Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer led the country into the Spanish-American War. All you have to know about journalists is they named their highest award after a master of political activism posing as an unbiased newsman.

The pretense that the mainstream media is unbiased is a recent invention prompted by the FCC. Before the FCC, Americans understood that all humans are biased including journalists, and the news business was a free-for-all of competing views. But once the FCC was created and controlled who could broadcast on the airwaves, government propagated the myth that some journalists, the ones who were worthy of being blessed with licenses from the FCC, were super-human, supposedly unbiased. Of course that was a crock. It enabled more effective political advocacy by those government chose to favor - the leftist dominated mainstream media that then took over the print media too.

That’s how we ended up with “the most trusted man in America”: Walter Cronkite. Cronkite had to have been the most effective liar in America to earn that moniker, and because he was sanctioned by the FCC, Americans temporarily lost their skepticism. Cronkite was the most effective advocate of the left of his generation. His proclamation that we had lost the Vietnam war during the Tet offensive, when in fact we had won the battle, led to the murder of millions in Southeast Asia by empowering the antiwar movement ultimately leading to Democrats cutting off funding for Vietnam after Watergate.

The FCC exists for one reason - to control speech on the airwaves to government sanctioned opinions. The existence of the FCC is the most blatant violation of the First Amendment in history. But the American people instinctively rebel against the yoke of government. Talk radio and Foxnews are the happy beneficiaries of that rebellion. They provide alternate viewpoints to the leftist mainstream media, and many Americans are attracted to those viewpoints.

Without the pretense of being unbiased, the leftist media can’t compete, look up Air America, but it’s always been a fraud as the recent release of the journolist transcripts proves. One journolist transcript shows the mainstream media members actively conspired and acted as Barack Obama’s propaganda arm and protector during the 2008 campaign by spiking stories about Rev. Wright and calling right-wing pundits racists. They also plotted to smear Sarah Palin.

Until a few years ago, the leftist media had a monopoly on the news. Even after the rise of talk radio and Foxnews,  Americans had no choice but to consume the news chosen for them by others. But thanks to the internet, that’s no longer the case. So far in the internet age, the only reasons anybody limits themselves to news packaged by others is habit or intellectual laziness. The internet enables every American to search out the news that interests them and understand the whole story, not just the pieces of the story presented by news outlets in order to advance their agendas. The greatest benefit of the internet is it empowers independent thought.

People who think independently are hard to control. Government can’t stand that. Government’s propaganda arm in the mainstream media is dying because Americans prefer to think for themselves. In order to save that propaganda arm, government is calling for bailouts of the mainstream media, which has the nice side-effect of giving them even more control over the news.

Worse yet, government is working overtime to control speech on the internet.  The Obama administration recently shut down 73,000 blogs. The FCC recently lost a court case in which it tried to enforce net neutrality on Comcast. Undeterred, the FCC is changing its strategy so it can regulate the internet despite the court ruling. That’s not good enough for Joe Lieberman who wants to give the president power over an internet kill switch because the Chinese have one.

Thanks to the internet, we’re enjoying a revolution in the information available to individuals that is exposing government for what it is: a violent, criminal gang - the ultimate mafia - that cares only for expanding its own power at the expense of the people, and government will do everything in its power to crush that revolution.

1 comment:

  1. Fantastic comment , this is so true. We only have to see the results to understand the insanity of big government. Massive debt and loss of freedoms . These people are incompetent .

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