Special Bulletin 13-2012
This is a brief on the fourth of seven main crises threatening our country, the U.S.A. As a reminder, the Health Meter goes from 1 being the lowest and most dangerous, to 10 being the highest and healthiest. The Trend Arrow is for a quick reference rating with UP for getting healthier, DOWN for getting worse and NEUTRAL for no change. These will be followed by a commentary to explain the ratings.
Media: Present State (3) Trend UP
If we were just judging this on the traditional, institutional media it would be a 2 with the trend going down. The reason for the higher rating with the positive trend is because the meltdown of credibility of the traditional media has opened the door wide for new media sources. These new sources continue to gain market share, especially those that are devoted to integrity and resist political bias. These are not only getting better at their craft, they are also bringing more accountability to all media. It is not surprising that “alternative” news sources are now the number one source of news and information for Americans. There are few countries in the world where their national news media is the main source of the people’s news and information because of obvious bias.
In the golden age of journalism, reporters and anchors were expected to keep their own prejudices out of the story, but now spin is the norm. As this has progressed the credibility of journalism has spun downward. This indicates an important fact traditional media has been slow to grasp—with all of the information sources available like the Internet, people are far more informed and independently minded, and journalists have lost their credibility as authorities to tell them what to believe. This is evidenced by how America remains a center-right nation in spite of the overwhelming spin of the left in traditional media.
In this information age, more and more people are no longer content to just be told what is happening, but want to know why and they will not accept superficial answers. This too is a positive trend. Information is illumination, or light, and the light will cast out darkness. Even so, there remains a gaping hole in media and information services for a truly unbiased source, not just one that covers from the center politically, but from a devotion to the truth regardless of where that lands politically. Some news is favorable to the right or left, and it is a basic breach of trust to spin it to one’s own political, religious, or philosophical views.
The most trusted journalist in history was Walter Cronkite, and he remains the gold standard. No one could figure out whether he was a liberal or conservative until he retired. This is because he had such devotion to covering the news accurately and without bias. After retiring he confessed to being liberal, and was very liberal, but to his credit he did not often let his personal persuasion affect how he covered the news. No one else has risen to his stature since and won’t until there is someone on that level who can disconnect from their personal bias, their network’s bias, and even what people want to hear, to seek truth and accuracy above all else.
A Falling Fox
Fox News has been the haven and hope of conservatives, filling an obviously open niche in media with its conservative slant, while seeking to be “fair and balanced.” Fox attracted more viewers across the political spectrum than any other cable or satellite network. It ultimately gained a bigger market share than all other cable news sources combined. Recently their attraction has also begun to slip because of the perception that influence at Fox can be bought. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox, has consistently and probably honestly claimed that his motive and strategy is all about ratings, which converts to profits. Certainly all media outlets have to make a profit to continue in business, but greatness in journalism cannot be attained without the truth being the main devotion.
Joseph Farah, Founder and CEO of World Net Daily (WND), explained how he thought Fox had been compromised in his editorial from December 23, 2009:
…. The media, from Fox News to CNN to ABC and the New York Times, are all pretending there is no threat to the First Amendment being made by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – the Muslim Brotherhood’s walking, talking public-relations factory based right here in Washington.
CAIR is trying to end-run freedom of the press in America by challenging the publication of a breathtaking expose of the group by WND Books and authors P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry. It’s called “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America” – and not one news agency in America other than WND has had the guts or the chutzpah even to tell you the amazing revelations found in it. That’s right. There’s been a total media blackout – including by Saudi-friendly Fox News. (You’ve probably heard about Rupert Murdoch’s deal with Prince Al-Walid bin Talal – a story also broken exclusively by WND.)
Instead of telling you the truth about CAIR – namely that it is an unindicted terrorist front group operating with impunity in America – the media have allowed CAIR easy and open access to airwaves to spread their pro-Hamas, pro-Muslim Brotherhood propaganda… CAIR sued author Gaubatz and his son, who penetrated CAIR’s inner circle operations, posing as an intern and ferreting out thousands of pages of documents headed for the shredder. WND sprang to their defense, bringing in a remarkable legal team, including Martin Garbus, Daniel Ellsberg’s attorney in the Pentagon Papers case. As a result, CAIR is now on the run.
This week, CAIR found itself on defense – facing accusations that it has no standing to file suit. It’s not even a legal corporation in Washington, D.C., as it claims, as WND’s legal team pointed out. In other words, CAIR doesn’t even legally exist!
It seems just two weeks after CAIR was named by the Justice Department in May 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist finance case in U.S. history, the organization changed its name to the Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network, explains attorney Daniel Horowitz in a motion to dismiss the case filed in federal court in the nation’s capital. But that’s not the organization that sued over “Muslim Mafia.”
A federal judge in Washington issued a restraining order Nov. 3 barring the Gaubtazes from further use or publication of the material – 12,000 pages of documents along with audio and video recordings – and demanding that they return it to the Muslim group’s lawyers. But the FBI also has shown interest in the material, stepping in with a warrant November 23 to examine the papers and recordings, apparently as part of its concern about CAIR and its terrorist links to Hamas.
Of course, none of this is newsworthy, according to the rest of the media – including Saudi-friendly Fox:
- A book that exposes a supposed civil-rights organization for Muslims as a terror front.
- A suit filed against the authors in an attempted end-run around the First Amendment.
- The FBI steps in to subpoena the documents before they go back to CAIR under court order.
- Now the defense team shows CAIR has been masquerading not only as a Muslim civil-rights group, but even as a legal corporation in the nation’s capital.
According to Farah, since Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bought 5.7% of Fox News, objective coverage of Islam stopped, a view now shared by increasing numbers. Farah had an obvious and disclosed vested interest in this issue as the publisher of Muslim Mafia, but this was a newsworthy event with major implications on freedom of speech in America. No other major media gave more than a casual mention of this unless it was to attack Muslim Mafia for being “Islamophobic.” That term has already become so overused and expected from the kneejerk liberal media for any who do not tow their party line in regard to Islam, so it is losing its power.
For CAIR to be named an “unindicted co-conspirator” means that the court established that there is evidence for indicting CAIR. It is not the court’s job to indict but prosecutors; however, to date there has not been one prosecutor willing to do their job in relation to CAIR. Instead of indictments CAIR has actually gained even more influence, remarkably even being used by some government agencies such as the FBI, CIA, the Defense Department, and Homeland Security to provide “sensitivity training” in regard to Islam. What may now seem to be politically expedient is starting to draw charges of dereliction of duty for what seems to be an ultimate folly, ultimate naïveté, or worse. This should be a major news story of our time, but instead there is an almost universal media blackout. Why?
Does Russia Have More Freedom of the Press?
Sometimes your enemies will tell you things that you need to hear but your friends won’t. Pravda, the main Russian newspaper, did an investigation1 into Arizona Sheriff Arpaio’s claim that President Obama’s birth certificate, which was released by the White House in April 2011, and concluded that Arpaio was right, it was a computer-generated forgery. Pravda then set about to chastise the American media for not exposing something that even an amateur could easily expose as a fraud. Pravda did not seem as concerned about the birth certificate as they were about the lack of professionalism, objectivity, and integrity in the U.S. media. Their conclusion was that for something this clumsy not to be exposed was proof that there was no longer freedom of the press in America, and that our media is in fact government controlled.
I have not personally done an investigation of the birth certificate presented by the White House. There are plenty of others doing this that have the expertise. Every report I’ve read from those who did check it out seemed to confirm Sheriff Arpaio and Pravda. Why has our media not picked this up?
In fact, because of the overreaction of the media towards anyone who even implies there is merit to this, one should conclude like Shakespeare in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” When there is that kind of overreaction to something there is something awry, something being covered up. Any thinking person has to see the overreaction to there being irregularities in President Obama’s documents and history, being dubbed “a birther,” as if this was the greatest of all follies. When we see that kind of overreaction and overkill on an issue, we can believe something serious is being hidden.
Think about how America now looks from the outside looking in. The following that went around the Internet in 2009 is an example:
“Isn’t it remarkable that within a week of Tiger Woods crashing his Escalade, the press found every woman with whom Tiger has had an affair in the last few years, with photos, text messages, recorded phone calls, etc and, they not only know the cause of the cause of the family fight, but they even know it was a wedge from his golf bag that his wife used to break out the windows in the Escalade. Not only that, they know which wedge!
And each and every day, they give America more updates on his sex-rehab stay, his wife’s plans for divorce, and the dates and tournaments he will play in.
Obama has been in office of over a year now, and yet this same press still cannot find any of his childhood friends or neighbors, or locate any of Obama’s college papers or grades, or how he paid for a Harvard education, or which country issued his visa to travel to Pakistan in the 1980’s, or Barry Soretoro or even Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis on Racism. They just can’t seem to find them…’
We know less about President Obama than any President in history. His school records are all sealed. Classmates seem to be non-existent, and yet with every other President, classmates would surface from kindergarten on. Why is the media allowing this weird cloak of secrecy around Obama?
Now the media is demanding Romney’s tax returns going back forever. Why did they not do this with Obama? How could this kind of double standard be tolerated in America? How could someone get to the most powerful office in the world with us knowing so little about him? As the saying goes, “If you do not have anything to hide, don’t hide it.” The following was the conclusion of an editorialist from the Czech Republic:
"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their President."
To paraphrase what one of the most brilliant and original political thinkers of our times, Alan Keyes, shared at one of our previous Oak Summits, in America the government, is not the sovereign, but the people are. If we have bad government it is because the people are not doing their duty. This witness is true—we can only blame ourselves for the people we elect. If we are not pleased with the choices then we should get more engaged and do something about it. We are the sovereign and the government works for us. If this changes, it is because we let it.
No one likes to be made a fool of, but the longer and harder our media tries to cover its delusion only makes us look worse. One of the hardest things to do is to admit we were wrong. If it is proven that Obama was not born in Hawaii as claimed then we will no doubt look like the biggest of fools to have elected him. However, with the way things are shaping up, we do not even need to find this out in order to look like some of the biggest fools in history for having elected Obama. However, as the Czech journalist implies, there is something much deeper that has gone wrong for someone like Obama to get elected in America. What has happened that allows these types of people to get elected in everything from the school board up? What has gone so awry that allows the type of judges that are now occupying the benches, and sometimes allowing a single judge to offset the votes of millions of people in a state with no mooring at all to the Constitution as their reasoning—just their judgment that the vote was not right. We are obviously sliding down a slope that has led many other nations to oligarchy and tyranny.
There will always be about 30% of Americans who favor the left, and 30% who favor the right, give or take a few percentage points at different times. These will almost all stay with their candidates regardless of how bad they get. The remaining 40% can go either way, and they are the ones most political and ratings battles for the media are over. As we have entered a time of disappointment and disillusionment with both political parties, for the first time in a very long time most Americans are now independents, and both major parties are bleeding members just as the institutional media is.
One recent major encouragement that the American people are waking up was the public opinion on the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Polls indicated that 70% of Americans opposed this mosque. When the media arose and blasted the American people as being Islamophobic for this sentiment, the people’s resistance hardened to 71%, then 72%, and more. The media backed off because it was obvious their attacks were being counter-productive. Why? Because the media has lost such credibility and Americans were so educated on the subject they could not be easily swayed with such a superficial attack by the media. This is a very encouraging sign.
The international press can give us news and insights the American media won’t cover. There is some anti-American spin in it, but not all of it is. Even some of the most anti-American publications seem to have changed into having a deep remorse about what is happening in America.
Think about it. It should get our attention when we are chastised by the Europeans in The Economist for the overregulation in America 2. We are being chastised by the Russians in Pravda for falling to Marxism 3 and for no longer having freedom of the press. Because of debacles like “Fast & Furious,” we now have the Mexicans chastising us because of our law enforcement, or lack of it, and it’s hard to argue with any of them. A couple of years ago I talked with an Al Jazeera journalist who was lamenting about how it was not long ago that the American media was a hope and light to the world, but now it is hard to get accurate information from the American media!
Over the last year I’ve been to London, Brussels, Berlin, several places in France, Switzerland, and South Africa. I have had meetings with people of influence or in high positions, and there is a growing and deep alarm about America that seems to be universal. When we first elected Obama, he was liked much more than previous U.S. Presidents because they felt he was far more compliant to their desires and perspectives. Basically, they felt that he was so inexperienced and naïve that he was easy to manipulate. Now this has given way to a growing alarm about him. They fear that he is wrecking the most powerful economy in the world and will bring the economy of the rest of the world down with it. At the same time, U.S. foreign policy has gone from being confusing to so nonsensical that it is frightening.
No doubt every nation has its own deep problems. Europe is one of the best examples of Einstein’s definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The strong countries are just trying to keep the E.U. together long enough to build firewalls around their own nations for when the inevitable meltdown comes. The potential chaos is very dangerous and could be as destructive as WWII. However, their media is now getting it and covering it. Ours is not.
When in Berlin recently I was asked by an ambassador from a Mediterranean nation to Germany how I felt about what was happening in America. I replied that I felt like a passenger in the back of a jumbo jet with a pilot flying who had never done it before and was just pushing buttons to see what they did. He looked at me gravely and said, “That’s how we all feel.”
After the Carter Presidency, it took the country 12 years to be able to elect another Democratic President. I predict that after Obama it will be twice as long before another Democratic President is elected. I’m not saying we will have Republican Presidents for that long either. Many Americans are just as fed up with the Republican Party. Republican leaders did not do things that they should have because of fear of the way it would be spun by the media, but they should have done the right thing anyway. We should always do the right thing regardless of how it will be spun by the media. We are in desperate need of a leadership that is not afraid to lead and will lead out of conviction, not just political expediency.
Presently, the double-standard coverage in media is so expected that there is not even much protest about it. Thankfully, many have been voting with their feet, seeking new sources of news and information. We must wake up and demand better. We cannot allow ourselves to be so desensitized if we are not going to be led further and further down the road to ultimate deception and the ultimate tyranny that comes with it. A free press is necessary for a free people. However, being free is not enough—we must be devoted to truth, accuracy, and a common standard that is applied to all, which is basic justice.
By the grace of God, America is going to wake up. The Spirit of truth is going to come upon us, and many things are going to be illuminated that will wake us up. We will come out of our spiritual, moral, and political stupor, and we won’t be as easily fooled again.
There can still be a transformation of our government, and the nation can still return to stable, solid ground. It can begin with a transformation in media. We need a media that is neither liberal nor conservative, neither Republican nor Democrat, nor with any other agenda other than being devoted to truth and providing accurate information. The door is wide open for this now.
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1. 'Arizona sheriff finds Obama presidential qualifications forged' 07.03.2012
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/07-03-2012/120708-arizona_sheriff_obama-0/
2. 'Over-regulated America'
The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation 0218.2012
http://www.economist.com/node/21547789
3. 'American capitalism gone with a whimper' 04.27.2009
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/27-04-2009/107459-american_capitalism-0/
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