Saturday, January 19, 2019

Buzzfeed’s lie was not an exception




How many MSNBC reporters does it take to change a light bulb?
One, provided he or she has a very gullible, corrupt, deaf, dumb or blind editor, a number of unnamed sources, and the rest of the media establishment to testify that the reporter is unbiased.
Buzzfeed’s open lying this week only showed the inner working of mainstream media – in which all of them lie or distort information, only with media such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, they rarely get caught at it.
A close friend of mine has the unfortunate privilege of sitting in on MSNBC editorial meetings where it is a daily routine of reporters and editors to seek out new stories that will humiliate, embarrass or show Trump in a bad light. If they can’t come up with a legitimate story, they twist facts of what would be an ordinary story to get the result they want – avoiding the one mortal sin of doing anything to show Trump in any kind of positive light.
While I have no friends in The Washington Post (nor would I want any), I imaging the scene is largely the same. This is not the fault of either organizations or the host of Washington Post wannabes from coast to coast, it is the nature of the news biz.
Our job is not to report facts, but to reshape them into myth.
News is a business and the product we sell is not mouthwash or any of the ads that appear on the news feed, the product is news – and we shape this to fit our perceived audience, and those perceived prejudices, and since contemporary liberalism is largely being anti-white-male, anti-god, anti-old people, anti-Jewish and pro all those things we used to take for granted as dangerous – such as the massive release of prisoners, promotion of questionable radical organizations with ties to terrorism, and a new movement mistakenly called feminism but it largely thinly disguised man-hate, these are the kinds of stories we get in our newsfeed from lying and distorted media such as Buzzfeed  as well as the so called more legitimate media.
The concept of black and white used to mean clear distinction between fact and fiction, such as the old cliché “there is it in black and white,” but black and white has since taken on racial overtones as new radical historic revisionism seeks to smear the lines between truth and non-truth, and create myths in order to keep true liberal believers happy – much the way the old church used to make up parables which may or may not have some semblance of truth or fact, but like political prisoners if tortured enough will say exactly what media wants them to say and what the audience wants to hear, becoming symbolic of some larger issue which may or may not actually have validity.
Myth is hard to undo once it has been injected into the public consciousness. For instance, there are still people who believe Ford’s clearly disprove claims against Kavanaugh (largely because that’s what they want to believe and would believe it regardless of actual evidence to the contrary.) The whole Russian conspiracy is so drenched in the traditions of former Red Scares and so desperately needed by liberals to justify why Clinton lost that media continues to spread misinformation and distortion as proof and those sad liberals who cannot bear the idea that other people have other opinions and can express them through the ballot box.
This fantasy of Russian influencing the election is perhaps the greatest myth making of our time partly because all governments interfere with other nations’ elections – a tradition that goes back to the founding fathers when such claims were made against Great Britain almost through every election from George Washington to Abe Lincoln.  But as Gore once pointed out in a different context, the Russian conspiracy is a convenient truth that allows media to create a mountain of myth out of a mole hill of bullshit – if not so obviously a lie as Buzzfeed’s was.


email to Al Sullivan

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for speaking the truth!! I found your post both refreshing and well written!!

    ReplyDelete