Green Berets (From “The Villains of the Gallows Tree”)

1966

I know all the words; but not their meaning, yet I sing them all the time, feeling like I did when me and Dave were cadets, with me blowing my horn and Dave beating his drum.

But who exactly are the Green Berets? And what do they want?

I know they are fighting in some place called Vietnam, where my Uncle has gone, though I know he’s not a Green Beret, just a soldier.

I shouldn’t like a song, but I play it all the time, even when the radio doesn’t, having recorded it with my three-inch tape recorder that makes it sound tinny, blasting it out the window of my third floor bedroom just the way I blast The Beatles and the Stones, this song feeling strange inside of me as if it should mean something I don’t understand, coming from across a wide ocean, invading me the way Dave’s father did Normandy Beach, a haunting sense of pride that leaves out the sound of gunfire, the smell of mortars and grenades and the sticky ooze of bleeding men dying.

Of my uncle dying, who has not died yet, sending pictures back to prove he hasn’t died, so as to make his mother, my grandmother, feel less scared, though my aunt, his sister, looks at the photos showing him holding a beer in some remote bar and asking who the women are that he’s with.

I don’t know much about war except from the reruns of the TV show Combat I catch on Channel 9 from time to time, a show I liked a lot more when I was very young and still played with plastic soldiers and still had a plastic gun to shoot imaginary enemies – when now all my enemies are real, and not in some distant jungle, hiding in the halls of the junior high school I go to where they hope to beat me up.

This war doesn’t even make the news like my uncle’s war does. Nobody is telling anybody to stop the bullies the way the government tells us on TV about our need to stop the communist, talking about dominos falling, and I keep thinking they mean real dominos when after awhile I realize they don’t.

I roam the halls of Christopher Columbus Junior High School constantly looking over my shoulder, the way my uncle must when he’s deep in the jungle. I hardly ever go to class or when I do, I sit near the door to make sure I can see any possible traps outside for when the bell rings and I have to leave.

Christopher Columbus is like mausoleum where I used to hide in the grave yard across the street from my house when I didn’t want to go to church but my uncles pushed me out the door to make me go.

I feel safer on the streets, roaming around with Dave, knowing that he’ll be joining me at the school in year if he ever manages to get out of the 6th Grade in School 11, a place where he’s been left behind so many times, he’s two feet taller than any of the other kids and taller than most of the teachers, too.

I ache for him to help me get even with all the bullies I have to fight all by myself, and with some teachers who are as bad as the bullies.

Sometimes, when I roam the halls I sing the song, just as Dave and I sing it when we’re in the streets.

We even pretend that we are soldiers dropping from the sky.  I guess we need heroes since we already have more enemies than we can handle.

I sing it to impress Sue, the girl next door, a blonde headed girl about Dave’s age, and who we both have a crush on, but won’t admit it, and who hates us both, though I think she hates Dave more than me, or at least, I hope so.

We’re always picking on her, teasing her in the halls of the school and when we see her somewhere between school and home.

She thinks we’re silly, and insists we stop singing our silly song, which makes us sing it louder and more often, and makes her huff and tell us to grow up, when we’re too young to grow up, and too scared, thinking that if we grow up too soon we might just become Green Berets or soldiers like my uncle, and have to send pictures home so my grandmother knows we’re still alive, and my aunt can wonder what we’re doing with the girls in the bar, the way my aunt does when she looks at my uncle’s pictures.

I don’t care about those girls. I’m just glad he’s still alive.

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Waiting for the Sun 1969

                    

                              

Los Angeles give you an odd feeling, especially in winter, when you arrive there fresh from one of the colder northern states like Michigan or New York. You suddenly realize that you've left winter behind somewhere and are floating in a limbo that isn't quite summer either, an in between twilight climate, with some rain, but never cold. In 1969, I arrived straight from New York City by bus, managing to see the land change as I came across country, hearing the warnings for snow on the radio for north in Wyoming as I slid through New Mexico, hearing reports that the worst blizzard in New York City history had hit only hours after my bus had departed. And oddly, I missed winter. Not that I enjoyed that particular season when I had to suffer through it, boots always leaking when I walked, leaving my toes frozen and wet. Yet sitting in the back of a bus, knowing that I was managing to escape an experience all my friends back home went through, left me with a slightly empty feeling, the way I felt when I had been told I was still a year too young to join the scouts while all my friends, one year older, had already won merit badges and gone to camp. I came into Los Angeles, too, at night, after being so bored with such a long ride that I began counting mileage markers to pass the time and eat up the distance, four hundred or more of the green numbered markers from the time the bus left Phoenix, each a ghostly eye in the night, illuminated by the bus’s passing lights or those of the countless tracker trailers making their way to Bakersfield. I suppose the lyrics to Arlo Gutherie's song might have come into my head had I even heard his latest album at the time, only instead of taking a bus into Los Angeles, he had taken a plane, and instead of carrying stolen cash in his suit case the way I was, he had carried marijuana. The most disorienting part of arriving by bus was the bus depot and the neighborhood around it. Stepping off a bus at the Trailways station left you in a neighborhood that looked and smelled much like Spring Time midtown Manhattan, as if three days on the bus in a straight line had deposited me back exactly where I had started. L.A.'s skid row not much different than 42nd Street near the Port Authority building. The only oddity was the lack of cold. I could feel it on the back of my neck like a warm, wet handkerchief, and feel it moistening the palm of my hand as I gripped by suitcase to walk outside. Fortunately, the wind was up, stirring the smog that settled over the city daily. In summer, I later learned, it clung to the landscape until a mighty wind from the ocean drove it out, days, weeks, even months of waiting. I suppose I was so shocked I just stood too long in the doorway, one of those supermarket style doors that opened magically before you as you walked, now kept open by my standing on the rubber pad. A cop came over and asked if I was all right. "Is there something wrong, son? Can I help you? I shook my head, yet he guessed from my startled expression that I had expected more of L.A. than what I saw. "Not quite the lap of luxury, eh?" the cop said, laughing. But the cop had missed the mark slightly in reading my mind. L.A. had not lived up to expectations, yet it was not the movie capital of Hollywood I had had in mind, or the grand style of Beverly Hills. It was the sameness, the grimy streets full of grimy people, smelling of alcohol, urine, cigarettes and filth. What as the point of coming west the way everyone in New York kept saying I should if it was going to look exactly the same as the place I had left? "Well, don't worry, son," the cop said, continuing his mistaken reading of me. "It gets better when you get out of downtown." I nodded dumbly, only then realizing who I was talking to and how much that cop would have loved to have known who I was and what I had done and how if my bag was to suddenly fly open how very obvious my crime would have been, cash fluttering down the street like so much confetti, causing even the winos to wake. Somehow, I managed to ask him for directions to "a good hotel," which he gave me obligingly and sent me on my way, a stumble of several blocks through broken glass, broken people and whole chapters of graffiti painted on building walls. Out of the middle of this rose a huge building of glass highlighted with great red lights, with revolving doors through which I managed to drag my bag without getting stuck. Inside, the doors and carpet and large room with shimmering lights seemed to deny that the blocks outside even existed. The air conditioning was set too high and brought goose bumps to my arms. I shook as I signed the register and dug out my only jacket when I got upstairs to my room, managing to pack everything into the drawers, before wandering out into the dark street again, unable to stand the room's lack of reality. Even then, I wasn't sure why I had come so far to stand on a corner with a bunch of drunks and drug addicts. You hear a million reasons why people run away. I heard many of them when I was in the army, when fellow recruits told me how their fathers hated them, or how few opportunities for success existed in the small town from which they came. If I had to define it, I had come to escape the madness of my house, mad mother, my uncles, madness as contagious as chickenpox, and had I not left when I did, I, too, would have been mad as well, stuck in the same miserable unsuccessful life my uncles led, feeling just as frustrated as they did about it. Yet looking around me, I wondered then, if I hadn't simply traded one kind of madness for another. Hours later, minus the cab fare, I found myself standing on a beach. The air was cooler, but not cold, and the sand was strangely empty -- a hard sell for a New Jersey boy for whom the only comparison was the constantly congested beaches he had seen at Seaside Heights. The east coast concessions were strangely missing. In this particular part of the state, the beaches were free and open to the public. A wetness filled the air, and not all of it from the rush of waves. Rain was on its way, dangling its wet fingers higher up in the atmosphere so that only a touch of it made its way down to places of human occupation. Through the thin clouds -- and despite the remarkable glow of the city -- I thought I could see stars. The air smelled clean, and that came from the ocean, as if each wave delivered a special kind of incense, the spirits of some other world beyond the shore. I sat on the jetty and stared out at the distant lights of passing ships. This, at least, was the same as New Jersey, the lights, the winking eyes of the sea, like a further invitation to travel west, making me wonder if I should keep on walking, out into the water, out until I found land again that didn't look like New Jersey or New York. I knew I was waiting for something, just as I had waited on the East Coast. But for what? And then it occurred to me. I was waiting for dawn to break over the ocean the way I had back East, and only then realized it would never happen, that in this land of the sun, dawn rose up over the landside, over the mountains first, rather than the sea, and set in the ocean, exactly opposite to what my senses expected. So, I turned East, and watched the sun rise over the land, and when the show was over, a keen discomfort hit me when I realized that I would later see the sun set into the ocean, watch the sun sink into the water and die, and that seemed odd to me, and wrong, and I hailed a cab back to my hotel, wondering just what to do next.

Rosanne bites the dust

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Another Trump supporter bites the dust. Anti-Trump people can’t get Trump, so they’ve finally brought down his biggest supporter.

ABC canned Rosanne Barr for what some have mislabeled “a racist rant.”

This is a major political coup for the politically correct left that Rosanne has been taunting with her tweets for more than a year, but who they feared to touch because of her high ratings.

It’s very hard to tell whether upper management in ABC such Channy Dungey and Bob Iger are as brain dead as four-day old catfish of they can’t tell the difference between a racial slur and a joke.

But it is clear that nobody messes with Obama-clone Valerie Jarrett and gets away with it.

Jarrett is the epitome of political correctness gone amok, like that spoiled brat everybody hated in grammar school who always screeched for the teacher any time anybody called her a bad name, and the girl the teachers gave extra points in class because nobody wanted to hear her whine about being left out.

She must be an absolute pip at a party, the woman in the corner nobody wants to talk to because of the crap that might flow out of her mouth – not honest crap like a real person might say, but some utter and complete bullshit we get when people at stuck on themselves and think other people think what they think is as important as they think it is, when it is all bullshit.

Naturally, Iger (some call Igor) called Jarrett to tell her about Rosanne’s firing, doing damage control in order to protect the network from the whiplash of a liberal public who might bring down ratings.

Dungey is the first African American to head a major network, which explains why ABC chose her to make the formal announcement.

Liberal media like the New York Times have been attacking Rosanne’s use of social media for some time, trying perhaps to get the network to drop her because she has become a very powerful counter force to the political correct establishment.

Bringing her down is more than just testimony to the ability of the Obama administration to still flex its muscles, but it silences a voice still needed in today’s society.

To accuse someone of racism is the current way of silencing people. To give a disclaimer, people have also falsely claimed some of my poetry is racist, partly because they are too ignorant to understand poetry, and partly because they don’t know what racism is.

To be fair, however, Rosanne and her defense of her tweet, did have questionable elements, and showed a significant ignorance on her part of racial slurs of the past.

Most likely, her crime was accidental.

If you are going to take on the establishment, you really need to be very careful of the language you use, and be very deliberate when you use it. Even then, people will read into what you say regardless of how you say it – as was true with my own poetry.

And if you are an enemy of the establishment the way Rosanne is, rightful or wrongful interpretation will be used deliberately to discredit your message.

Rosanne and her follow up tweet made several key mistakes.

No matter how big a creep Dungey is, attacking the physical appearance of an African American is inappropriate in today’s comic world. Satire of the past used physical distortion to show the inner character of a person. But these days, mocking people’s appearance is considered bullying, and is grounds for attack. Call Dungey stupid, a political hack, even someone who delves into the dark side of the force, but don’t dare compare her to an ape.

You also need to be very specific or very vague when you attack someone’s character. So, if you want to insult Dungey by calling her Obama’ pull toy or his brain-dead parrot, that is acceptable and perhaps even accurate except when compared to the upper management of ABC who actually make Dungey look like a genius.

Rosanne also originally didn’t understand what the fuss was about, since she defended the joke later saying that when she said Dungey was a marriage of Islam and the Planet of the Apes, Rosanne though people were interpreting Islam as race, and apparently didn’t understand that comparing a black person to an ape is akin to some of the past racial slurs while bigots used when comparing black people to animals – implying an interiority to whites.

Still more disturbing is the fact that some people see The Planet of the Apes movies that came out during the racial disturbances of the 1960s and early 1970s as a metaphor for the black uprising against white oppression.

Had Rosanne compared Dungey to Chewbacca, she would have been on more solid ground although might have gotten fired for insulting Chewbacca,

Rosanne with her background in TV and film should have known better.

With people like Dungey, you can mock their actions and their beliefs, but need to refrain from mocking their looks or their ethnic and racial appearance. You can attach Dungey for being brainwashed by a questionable ideology, blindly following anything Obama uttered. But then, ABC upper management appears to be guilty of the very same thing, and shuddering with the terrible misconception that they have any validity, when their history shows that they have made bland any form of art they ever touched, and are in the process of ruining Star Wars the way they once ruined Winnie the Pooh.

It’s always been puzzling why ABC even hosted Rosanne in the first place, but then until something like this happens, greed always turns a blind eye to truth.

Scranton revisited

May 27, 2018

We always return to the scene of the crime, even when it’s not a crime at all, retracing out steps through a past we cannot escape nor want to, remembering to remembering those brief moments when we came together and found each other, and then lost it all.

The paths we walked have altered, the tree house closed and contemned, because of vandals that not merely stole something we needed to possess, but access to a memory we thought involatile, right out of the vault of our hearts and minds, though still at their feet, down below, the falls still flow, heavier due to the heavy rains that preceded us, new paths leading to the place we stood, making it earlier to get their and back, even in memory.

This, of course, is the wrong season, leaves turning to green unlike that time when they faded into a coat of many colors, each somehow painting us for some eternal dance as we strode paths as if they were new.

Rain still lingers in the air, and still drips from the bits of branch, like tears cried for a reason only we can comprehend, our footsteps still following a track we made before, and must make again, over and over, as if imprinted in our genes that we must forever walk this way, and remember what we remember, and do what we did then again.

I come here this time after a long time, estranged, from you and from the other loved ones for which this place has always been important, time having passed all of us, and passed judgement on us as well, shaping us into older, weaker, but still strong beings who must continue to struggle against forces we can barely comprehend.

I walk these old paths the way the native Americans’ did, knowing they will always lead to the same place, feel the same way, and give me the same sense of hope.

I walk here because even though you are many, many miles away, I still find you hear, this season or the season when the leaves turn, and we feel the breath an autumn wind on our cheeks, like an eternal kiss.

An act of Congress

Monday, May 28, 2018

Back in the mid-to-late 1980s, I met Bill for the first time.

He was the local assemblyman and I was just making the transition from underground press to mainstream media on a weekly that covered the town where I grew up.

Bill was never an outright liar, but he loved to tell half-truths. He was the classic liberal that Will Rogers once described as a man who liked to use his own ideas in preference to a generation he knows knows more than he does.

His whole agenda was to sell media into buying his bullshit, and he knew the more provocatively his ideas sounded and the more pathetic the victims he strutted out as proof, the more likely we were to put his version of “the truth” in print.

Bill, of course, was not exclusive to this brand of politics; he simply became a master practitioner as he rose from Assemblyman to mayor and eventually came into congress where he learned the most important lesson any Democrat could ever learn.

A Democratic congressman is not there to represent the majority of the whole country. The first thing he or she learns is that he or she should never vote for anything the GOP proposes, no matter how good it looks. People didn’t elect him to pass good bills, but to keep the GOP from passing any.

As a master spin doctor, Bill’s whole career was spent building up his personal image as a leader of the liberal faction of the Democratic party and will craft all of his spin to make sure that media tells his and only his side of a story, even if it is chuck full of distortion and half-truths. Some of his spin is to make sure his opponents, inside his party or in the GOP, do not get their side of the story told, and to do as much damage to the public perception of whatever rival he targets at the time.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand how politicians like Bill persisted on spinning media with tales of self-righteousness not always borne out by fact. I thought the problem was with me, not him, and it took several decades for me to realize that Bill – regardless of what position he held – had become the model liberal politician and rarely said anything that wasn’t in his own best interest. He wouldn’t lie outright, but often neglected to tell the whole truth or give all the relevant facts.

And worse, most reporters went along with his version, and for a number of reasons.

Currently it is difficult to tell the difference between a preacher and a journalist; one is selling you phony salvation and the other is paving your way to hell.

Many contemporary journalists actually have adopted Bill’s philosophy and so wish to bash whomever Bill wants to bash, whether it is a wayward Democratic opponent in a primary or President Donald Trump.

Some reporters are simply too lazy to look up alternative views or are bound by an editorial policy that will not allow them, too.

Many reporters, however, have too close a relationship to politicians like Bill, and are scared that if they do not print his version of the truth they will lose access to him for future stories.

This is not uncommon inside the Beltway where media such as The Hill and The Washington Post buy whatever bullshit people like Bill sell them, to satisfy their own anti-Trump agenda.

The provocative politicians like Bill make their case sound, the more likely media is to give it play and not bother telling the other side – despite its relevance.

Manipulating media – especially one already slanted in your behalf – has become a principle occupation for politicians like Bill.

Not all congressmen are as dishonest as Bill is; in fact, most of those I’ve come to deal with over time are not constantly trying to manipulate media the way Bill always is, even sometimes admitting off the record that the other side may have a legitimate point – which wins them a large amount of credibility Bill’s manipulation lacks.

Bill’s whole political life is one constant political spin, and he will even hold sick kids hostage at a local hospital, marching them out to sell some piece of legislation the president won’t sign because Bill and his cohorts have saddled it with other bits of unrelated liberal baggage so that the sick kids won’t ever get fixed.

Bill always has an agenda, so, each time we indulge him, we get further away from objectivity. But media keeps going back for more from his kind like junkies. We’d father get back dope than no dope at all.

And so, this also explains why good journalists write bad and slanted stories, because access to power is our stock and trade.

Slanting news on Sandy aid cuts

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Sunday morning news always provides me with a lot of ammunition when it comes to showing just how news organizations slant their stories against Trump.

So, I was not disappointed when I opened a local daily today to find one more in a series of distorted stories designed to influence Northern New Jersey voters to vote against the GOP this fall.

In New Jersey, no subject is so sensitive as The Sandy Superstorm that hit this region on Halloween in 2012.

Therefore, the subject became a symbolic tool against the Trump Administration and the GOP who are resisting Democratic efforts to pass a pork-filled Sandy aid package – and the story was ripe with anti-Trump rhetoric by an author who has a history of ranting and raving against Trump.

Like previous stories written by the same author, the story left out critical facts and engaged in what many critics see as class manipulative tools for slanting news.

By narrowing the information to the fact that the GOP does not want to pass the aid package as it, the story implies that the GOP is attempting to screw New Jersey again.

To understand how media manipulates in stories such as this, there are particular slots in which slanted information is installed. Headlines and kickers often tell readers how they should interpret the story.

This is very much the case in this story, where the headline implies that the state of New Jersey is “under attack” by the Trump administration, because the GOP won’t pass the aid package.

Selection of sources also skews stories like this, and this is no exception with six prominent Democratic leaders quoted before the story ever gets to a Republican and when it does, it picks two republicans who are sympathetic to the Democratic cause – partly because one is in a high risk area in the 2018 midterms, and the other has a quote that largely implies misinformation – which I’ll get to shortly – even if most reader aren’t likely to get to the end of the story anyway.

The first quote in the story is from the most patrician politicians in the state, Rep. Pascrell, whose press releases would qualify him for “the spin doctor of the year award,” following a script written for him from some Democratic think tank and a leader in the anti-Trump campaign of the last year and a half.

The pullout quote – which is something larger meant to call attention to a specific biased point come from a notorious Democratic south jersey political boss, selected here to be most provocative and add to the story’s credibility, when the story is only telling half the facts in order to convince voters that the GOP is essentially evil.

What is left out, of course, is the actual argument being made on the federal level, and how common it is for the winning political party to steer federal funds to those districts that supported them. Every president does this. Reagan and both Bushs did it, so did Obama and Clinton when they were in office. But it appears that when it comes to Trump, this becomes something out of the ordinary.

So, today’s GOP according to this story helps send tax dollars to “moocher states” when in the past places like New York, New Jersey and California could have borne similar titles.

This, of course, is the story’s effort to boost support for the anti-GOP movement for the mid-term election and steer its readership into believing the GOP is stealing from them somehow.

Republicans are “reprehensible,” according to the third Democrat quoted in a row for this story.

The GOP clearly does not want to use federal funds to help New Jersey and New York build a gateway project, a rail tunnel between northern New Jersey and New York City. But part of the excuse is that both rail systems involved have failed to meet safety requirements that are conditions for the funding, a fact that this story conveniently left out. The GOP has a lot of motive for wanting not to give the region this perk since New York and New Jersey massively supported Clinton in 2016.

The story, of course, piggy backs on the fact that a GOP tax rehaul, is forcing governments in New Jersey to deal with the fact that they over tax their residents. But to divert attention, local politicians are blaming Trump for denying tax write offs the wealthiest home owners while boosting the salaries for ordinary workers.

The fourth quote in the story by another Democrat suggests that if the GOP gets away with not funding Sandy aid it will continue to come after New Jersey in other ways in the future. This, too, is classic spin, making a conclusion without any real evidence to support it, a conclusion the author conveniently did not challenge or seek proof of, and certainly made no effort to get a GOP response to.

By the time we finally get to the first of two GOP legislators three quarters of the way through the story, we have been thoroughly subjected to so much negative spin that we ignore the fact that the first of the GOP legislators is under the gun because he faces a serious challenge in the mid-term election and is already known to be sympathetic to Democratic causes.

Could the author not find any legitimate representative to explain the GOP side of this story – since it is clear the only side the author wants to give us is the Democratic one?

What the author is not telling us is why the GOP is opposed to giving New Jersey Sandy aid.

In fact, the GOP is willing to fund it, but not under the conditions Democrats have set, when the Democratic pork accounts for “billions” in aid spending unrelated to Sandy, which includes funding of The Smithsonian in Washington, and Head Start facilities throughout New Jersey that had little or not damage from the storm.

The other token Republican quoted in the story is from a shore district hit hard by Sandy and so is concerned about the loss of aid. But he also was mistakenly quoted as saying he was concerned about Trump’s unwillingness to fund a child health program called CHIP.

This quote implies a significant Democratic spin, an almost blatant lie that this story and other media have bought wholesale when two Democratic legislators brought it up in Paterson late last year.

Trump in fact is absolutely willing to fund CHIP. But Democrats are holding the bill hostage in order to force Trump to support their Dreamer legislation.

Trump has even agreed to fund the Dreamer legislation but only if the Democrats support funding his border-security measures.

Since they won’t, it is the Democrats who are preventing CHIP from being funded, just as they are preventing aid for Sandy because of the pork they’ve attached to this bill.

The story in my local Sunday newspaper mentions none of this, which is how media manipulates the public by telling only one slanted side of a story.

How media slants stories

Monday, May 7, 2018

If I had a nickel for every time I heard a reporter, or an editor say over the last two years “We got to get ride of this guy in the White House,” I could fund my own presidential campaign.

Journalists are not unbiased – worse, they don’t want to be.

Our profession – which really isn’t a profession because unlike being an attorney there is nor bar we must pass or ethics board to judge us if we violate our own rules – is about power, not information, and our goal is to sway people to a preconceived point of view, not to give people facts and let them make up their own minds.

Some news businesses are worse than others – such as The Washington Post, the Hill, Politico, the Washington Examiner, the LA Times – all of which have a single mindset about destroying the current president. Most of the reporting is rehashed crap from The Washington Post – which is trying to prove it’s still a powerful player inside the beltway and is bringing down the craft of journalism in the process.

As I have pointed out before, local media tends to be better than national media, when it sticks to reporting on local issues – since they get their information directly from the source. But even they can sometimes run afoul of journalistic integrity.

Most media hides behind the illusion of “being fair,” believing that if they give their victim a chance to respond they’ve done enough to qualify as being objective.

Many reporters and editors envision themselves as “upper west side liberals,” and subscribed to all the accepted media such as The New Yorker and Atlantic and so automatically believe the propaganda those publications spew and thus believe all Christians are bigots and poor whites are trash.

Of course, only a handful of media people realize they are biased, assuming their somehow have the right take on the world, even though many get their information on a national level second hand, from skewed sources they would never accept if they were reporting locally.

We all know that any information that comes from a single source should be questioned, yet local media when dealing with national issues frequently accepts the diatribes of the Washington Post as gospel. Even the LA. Times, the New York Times, and Politico repeat the posts’ abusive reporting unquestionably.

Most reporters view the world through liberal shaded class, seeing what they want to see, hearing what they need to hear in order to support this skewed world view.

The myth of objective reporting is so pervasive, even reporters and editors believe it.

They subscribe to the idea that a story is objective if they somehow present “both sides” in an issue, counting words so that neither argument has priority (although the NYT gave this up completely when covering Trump.)

But this is an illusion, and mostly acts as cover for a media outlet when it is attacked as being unfair. Media can attack as much as they want as long as they get a response.

If someone doesn’t respond or refused to comment, they become guilty by default.

This kind of reporting often leads to “us vs. them” kind of journalism, good guys vs. bad, supporters of an issue vs. those who oppose it, when in reality issues are often much more complex, perhaps too complex for media to handle since our bread and butter is about conflict, not resolution.

Media tends to strip issues down to extremes, seeking out the most extreme groups – such as seeking out neo-Nazis to represent issues on the political right rather than more moderate republicans.

So, when we do a story about abortion, we seek out women libers and extreme pro-life, when many women fall in-between the two extremes.

This kind of reporting automatically leads to sensationalism, a tabloid journalism that deliberately stirs up people’s emotions rather than trying to find common ground.

This slams the door on possible new solutions.

News reporters deal with stereotypes, exaggerated examples to paint characters that are hardly realistic, such as calling all Christians anti-abortion, and all feminists dikes. In this view, all GOP seem like Nazis, and all Democrats, saviors.

While reporters love to tell you how someone else is prejudice, many reporters, editors, publishers constantly pre-judge subjects in creating thumbnail sketches of them in order to simplify them for their stories.

Journalists, editors and reporters get to pick who the good guys are, and who they want the public to perceive as bad – even when sometimes both sides exhibit deplorable behavior.

Reporters reflect the culture they are raised in, so that the change from street-wise reporting of the past to college trained, changes the way they approach stories – especially because most colleges have an extreme liberal bent.

Although this may not seem obvious, media tends to support the status quo – which is why it tended to support Clinton over Sanders, and later Clinton over Trump – because both Sanders and Trump represented a populist and perhaps less controllable element in modern politics.

This was why the alternative press of the past and even of today gets dismissed because it unlike major media challenges accepted doctrine.

Mainstream media changes slowly and only when mainstream society does – which is why it took media so long to jump on the anti-Vietnam war wagon or accept gay marriage.

One critic of my blog complained that I cannot argue with “facts,” about Trump when it is clear that she does not have access to facts.

Journalists are consumed with collecting facts which legitimizes their pre-conceived point of view and justifies their bias.

The more facts you put into a story, the more charts you show, the more polls you take, the less likely people will perceive your story as fake.

An NTY article on crime involving immigrants was just such an example, filled with charts and official quotes that gave it legitimacy, since it wanted to show how most immigrants do not engage in crime. But this wasn’t the argument. It is the amount of crime associated with illegal immigration.

Journalists love official sources, and so believe that if they stuff a story full of these, no one can possibly believe they are biased or have skewed the facts.

But many of the stories that we perceive as factual come on the heals of staged events such as the Democratic sponsored women’s march or the thinly disguised Democratic anti-gun walkout of school kids.

Another way of skewing a story is to dramatize it, using fictional techniques to sway an audience to a particular point of view. We get this a lot in magazines such as Newsweek and The New Yorker, and the New York Times magazine.

This works well in helping to support the misconception of good and bad guys, creating twists and turns in the plot that forces the audience to sympathize with the people we have selected as our good guys.

Journalists are constantly playing off people’s emotions, sensationalizing news so that people feel they have more at stake than they actually do.

We also break down news into episodes – what next – much the way contemporary TV crafts stories so that we have to keep following them to get to some eventual sense of resolution. This is what media does to the Russian conspiracy, the porn actress story, and such – each fully designed to create a continuing impression of impropriety largely created in media’s lurid imagination.

All this gives the audience the illusion that they actually understand what is going on, but it mostly media created myth, designed to manipulate them for a particular purpose.

Media creates myths using violence, conflict, disaster or scandal. This is the stuff we are best at and gets the most hits on a news website.

The more media stirs up emotions, the more likely you are being manipulated.

And you can tell what a news organization is selling right from the headline. This is the thesis statement for the story. The more lurid, profane and manipulative the better. Most people don’t read passed the headlines. In fact, you don’t have to. The headline says it all. And if it’s nasty or negative, that is the point of the whole story.

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