Besides the clear and intentional smear campaign the media is positioning against Trump—and it's not just the smearing of course, but the hiding and non-reporting that is very much a part of this campaign by the media as well—people should be considering something else in all of this when it comes to the media.
We are supposed to trust all of the big dogs in the media, right? NBC, CBS, CNN, and okay I'll lump in Fox News as well just to be fair. Although of all of the media (and I honestly say this with no bias) Fox News is being the most fair in all of this with some exceptions of course. I mean, when we think of news, these are the agencies we think of mostly. ABC is in there somewhere as well, but really I don't think too many people pay attention to them anymore for news. Then you can also lump in the dead tree news outlets like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post to name some of the more noteworthy ones.
These are agencies that are supposed to be the most trusted sources for our information.
But, here we also have two sources right now giving us more dirt and real talk and frankly, real information than any of these news outlets combined. TMZ and of course Wikileaks. Wikileaks is sharing a mountain ton of emails between top people in the Clinton camp, giving us remarkable insight into the inner workings of her campaign. The emails we are learning of, by the way, are pretty damning. Or they should be damning. But the big news outlets are mostly ignoring them, instead focusing on Trump this and Trump that. The tape recently released (or leaked) with Trump being less than virtuous nothwithstanding—but it was TMZ who released information that was proved to be true that NBC had the tape for months, and that it not only intended to time the release to damage Trump, but they had clear intent to edit the tape to focus the emphasis on Donald Trump's comments and to try to keep their own Billy Bush out of the picture.
The thing that is most troubling for me really is that we have come to a very dark place when it comes to the media. It's admittedly tougher these days—or at least it seems that way, maybe the media has always slanted its coverage—to try to form an informed and educated decision about matters that are important. I have always said that in order to form an opinion on anything you can't just rely on one single source, or even a couple of them. You can't take (for me, a conservative) every word by Rush Limbaugh, or Sean Hannity, or even Ann Coulter dare I say, as the gospel. You have to painfully look at multiple sources—including by the way the liberal media.
When it comes to the NBCs and the CNNs of the world there is something you have to be able to do. And frankly you have to be able to do it no matter where you are getting the news. It's something I learned in grade school, and that is you have to be able to read between the lines. In literature, for example, we called it context and the art of interpretation. Mostly we applied these principles to fiction. What is the author trying to convey? What is the underlying message in the story? When the story is largely metaphoric, what is the author referring to?
A great example of this for me would probably be a remarkable story, and to this day a favorite of mine, by Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis. A story about a salesman, mostly an ordinary man, falls ill and slowly morphs into an insect by the end of the story. If you read between the lines, and if you examine the context, and when you dissect the theme, what you decide is that the story really isn't about a man who becomes an insect, but rather a story about a man tormented by a world crashing in on him, who becomes isolated, and how the world seems to ignore him as he changes into something very different than they recognize as the norm.
Whether it is Chris Matthews or Anderson Cooper doing the storytelling, or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, no matter who it is, you have to have the ability to see beyond just what they are saying and detect the biases, detect the slants, and detect where they may be conveniently leaving something out. When any of these guys may show a video, for example, or share a sound bite, you have to go beyond what they show you and seek out the entire video or the entire sound bite to get the real story.
The problem is that so few people actually do this. This is not to disparage anyone or call anyone stupid. It's not even to call anyone lazy. But frankly most people just hear something, and grasp hold of that, and consider it true without ever digging further. And the news media knows this. And of course, so does the democrat party. And if one thing stands firmly true over many decades, the liberal media is as much an extension of the democrat party as many have accused Fox News of being an extension of the republican party is.
It is a situation that I also find scary in many ways. Now, I am not going to in any way compare the United States to Nazi Germany. But, we are all too well aware of the effective use of propaganda films used by Nazi Germany to convince their people of things. And bringing it to present day, certainly Islamic terrorists are doing exactly the same thing as we speak. In our own country, the media can largely be classified as one giant propaganda machine. They are wielding heavily the power of their pulpit, and they are using that power to shape the minds of people into thinking one way or the other.
In this case however, there is much danger in their doing this.
Because if we don't know the truth, and if we are not willing to or able to seek out the truth, we have really lost our country. Because when the media controls the information, and when parties and factions with agendas control the information, these people also ultimately control elections. And this is, as I said, a very dangerous, and even disconcerting thing.
And it's not just what the media hides we need to be weary of. It's the stuff they don't verify for truth until much later when it's too late.
I don't care which side you happen to be on in this election, But what I do care about is that any decision being made about who becomes our next president is based on real information, real facts, and real dissection of the information and facts, to come to an informed decision about the election.
Do you see what's going on with the media here? Do you? We are being spoon fed things to try to dissuade us from seeking out the real answers, and to try to shape our opinions. They are trying to make us angry at the other side—and mostly they are doing it to make us angry at Trump. Scared of Trump. And that would be fine for them to make all of these accusations and encourage all of the innuendo if they were reporting these things fairly and accurately as it applies to both sides. It would be fine if they were equally sharing what we know about Hillary Rodham Clinton. If they weren't leaving so much out. Including in the debates mind you, which is of course controlled by the media as well. Sometimes it is not just about how you ask the question. It is about which questions you ask, and as well, which ones you don't.
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