-By Frank Salvato
Did you know that the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for US Congress in VIllinois’ 27th congressional district attends a church where they worship transgender goats? Additionally, he once allowed a parking meter to expire without surrendering himself to be fined. A local merchant, who once saw him on vacation in Zanzibar, said she believes he has a Barbie doll collection. There have even been reports that he once shared a Kit-Kat bar with Charles Manson at a Grateful Dead concert.
There isn’t an iota of truth to the above statement. It is all false. There isn’t even a 27th congressional district in Illinois. But, I can just about guarantee you that someone reading this in any one of the plethora of mainstream media newsrooms has taken to the Internet to research “the facts” of this stunning breaking news report.
If I had opened this article by saying, the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate in Delaware’s US Senate race has been campaigning on a platform that includes limiting the reach of government into your personal lives, reforming the tax code, defunding and repealing the newly enacted healthcare insurance reform bill and vowing to oppose any piece of legislation that comes before her that isn’t constitutionally sound, do you think the same “journalists” would have even finished reading the paragraph? If you said no, give yourself a gold star.
The fact of the matter is this: outing a Republican, especially a Tea Party-endorsed Republican – as a Barbie doll collecting transgender goat worshiper who eats candy with mass murderers sells more papers than reporting on that candidate’s positions on the issues. It also furthers the mainstream media’s not so clandestine agenda (at least not anymore) of recruiting more intellectual lemmings to bow to the church of Progressivism, of which, it could be said, today’s “journalists” serve as the mind-raping clergy.
In today’s mainstream media newsrooms the “bright shiny thing,” the politics of distraction, reigns supreme. The age old adage of “if it bleeds, it leads” has morphed into “if it shines, it headlines,” especially where politics is concerned. The mainstream media has become thoroughly useless to the American voter, offering information that focuses on personal quirks and foibles, rather than the candidates’ positions and, if applicable, voting records on issues important to the American electorate. Perhaps this is why so many Americans are turning away from traditional media outlets for their information, political or otherwise.
Since even before the 2000 election – and poll after poll, both scientific and not, bears this out – the American public has become intensely disenchanted with not only the status quo of our political class but with the grotesquely transparent engagement in political activism by our “free press.” Our disenchantment with the political class gave birth to the Tea Party, essentially the reawakening of the American citizen’s constitutional right and duty to governmental oversight. And our disenchantment with the mainstream media has given way to the new media and a completely different way of gathering facts and information. These two “saving graces” couldn’t have emerged at a more critical time in our country’s history.
Where our elected class has become just that – a gaggle of narcissistic elitists more concerned with retaining office, power and the potency of their respective political parties than with serving the best interests of their individual constituencies – the mainstream media has become just as dangerous as the propaganda machines of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Mao’s Communist China or Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
How else can we explain the intensely disingenuous reports of Christine O’Donnell practicing witchcraft? Or the Tea Party being a racist organization? Or how the recently passed healthcare insurance reform bill would lower premiums? Or that the trillion dollar stimulus worked, even as we see home foreclosures and repossessions hitting all-time highs? Or that the southern US border is more secure now than it ever has been, even as more violence spills into our streets from Mexico and more bodies are found in the desert, the result of an almost record-breaking number of border-crossing deaths? How else to explain all this false reporting by our mainstream media – and so much more – if not to identify it as either a complete and utter failure of our nation’s journalism schools or a concerted effort at executing propaganda. Common sense mandates that we weigh heavily on the latter, if for no other reason than their reporting always – always – benefits the ideological Left.
The upcoming Mid-Term Election for US Senate in Delaware illustrates, almost to the level of perfection – the propagandizing of the mainstream media. Where the mainstream media is reporting that Ms. O’Donnell – the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for the Senate seat formerly held by Vice President Joe Biden – used to practice witchcraft, they completely ignored a substantive political issue regarding her opponent, Democrat Chris Coons.
Paraphrased from a Wikipedia entry on Coons:
In 1985 Coons wrote an article for his college newspaper, entitled “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist.” In the article, he describes his transformation from someone with traditionally conservative political leanings to someone so influenced by the teachings acquired in a college anthropology course that it “undermined the accepted value of progress and the cultural superiority of the West.” His study of the Vietnam War led him to form the opinion that “the ideal of America as a ‘beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world’ was not exactly based on reality.” He went on to write that the promises of the “miracles of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities of America” may be untrue.
In contrast, the mainstream media has consistently reported on the personal foibles of Ms. O’Donnell, and disingenuously so. Her dalliance with “witchcraft” turned out to be that she briefly dated someone who professed to having been a Wiccan. Her mortgage scandal turned out to be an economically forced short sale on her property. And her student loan delinquency? Well, let’s put it this way, Ms. O’Donnell paid back her student loan while many have not only defaulted on theirs but admitted to not having any intention of paying them back at all. Even a much ballyhooed claim by Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, that Ms. O’Donnell was illegally using campaign funds for personal use is patently bogus as the funds in question were allocated to Ms. O’Donnell as reimbursement for personal funds spent to cover her then in-home campaign office, legal under the law as overseen by the Federal Election Commission.
Lost in all the mainstream media’s personal smearing of Ms. O’Donnell is the fact that she is running on a platform of limited government, limited and equitable taxation, a potent and strong national security policy and adherence to the legislative process as mandated by the United States Constitution.
Also lost in the mainstream media’s focus on the fictional past life of Ms. O’Donnell is the fact that her opponent, Mr. Coons, who serves as the County Executive of New Castle County, Delaware, has openly stated that by his own standard, he led the county from being “fundamentally sound” to the verge of bankruptcy in just four years, lamenting that the county was “18 months from being out of money” and “unable to operate.”
So, as we examine just these few facts about the Delaware Senate race, some legitimate questions come to the forefront: If the mainstream media is truly non-partisan, then why are we not hearing about Ms. O’Donnell’s platform or Mr. Coons’ disastrous tenure in public office? If they truly report the facts in an unbiased manner, then why are we hearing false accusations about Ms. O’Donnell using campaign funds for personal use but not about how Mr. Coons derided our country while professing to be a Marxist? If they really do serve the public interest, as is inferred by their First Amendment constitutional protection, why are we hearing all of this clap-trap about Ms. O’Donnell practicing witchcraft instead of how she overcame financial adversity – adversity that every hardworking American is all too familiar with, thanks to the Obama Administration’s failed economic policies – to win a place as standard-bearer for the Tea Party movement?
No, my friends, the mainstream media is not your friend, they are your enemy. They are the purveyors of political propaganda that benefits the un-American Progressive movement. They have proved this beyond doubt time and time again. To believe anything else is to have been bewitched.
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Frank Salvato is the managing editor for The New Media Journal . He serves at the Executive Director of the Basics Project, a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(C)(3) research and education initiative. His pieces are regularly featured in over 100 publications both nationally and internationally. He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, and is a regular guest on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network, as well as an occasional guest on numerous radio shows coast to coast. He recently partnered in producing the first-ever symposium on the threat of radical Islamist terrorism in Washington, DC. His pieces have been recognized by the House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict. He can be contacted at oped@newmediajournal.us