Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 4/21/17

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One of the biggest challenges facing Donald Trump, the Republicans in Congress and all Republican presidents and Congresses to come, is the fact that the national media is almost totally controlled by committed, hard-left  liberals. As a result, most of what we still call the ‘press’ isn’t functioning in the way that was envisioned by the founders when the first amendment to the Constitution was written.

If we had a properly functioning fourth estate there would be some honest, probing and thoughtful reporting on the serious issues that now confront American society. A well-balanced reporting effort would reveal some facts about our most intractable problems that too few Americans appreciate or even know.

As an example, we could start with the crime, decay and hopelessness that plague some of our largest cities. Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago and St. Louis all have some important things in common. They are all besieged by high crime, high unemployment, high rates of poverty, business disinvestment, racial tension, corruption and scandal. They were all at one time proud cities – each of them in the top 10 by population in the United States. Only Chicago remains in the top 10 now, though it has slipped in rank and has lost close to a million residents since 1950.

They have another thing in common: they’ve all have been run by Democrats since at least 1967. (Chicago, now the gun murder capital of the Western Hemisphere, hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931.)

How many Americans appreciate this or even know it? When have you seen one of those highly produced, probing stories on 60 Minutes that makes any sort of a connection between the sorry state of these beleaguered cities and the governance they’ve had for the past half century?

Here’s another story idea. Nightline should devote an episode to America’s 50-plus year War on Poverty. Since the War on Poverty began in 1965, America has spent $17 trillion on an alphabet soup list of anti-poverty programs.

“To what effect?,” Nightline should ask.

The answer is that the poverty rate in the United States stands essentially unchanged from 1965. Eighty five percent of the country’s $20 trillion national debt is attributable to anti-poverty spending that has had next to no effect on the rate of poverty. That’s another fact of which more Americans would be aware if the national media were doing their jobs properly.

These are just two examples. There are others. But don’t expect to see these stories any time soon. The newsrooms and the executive suites of our national media organizations are almost monolithically liberal. Any honest reporting on the state of our big cities or the failure of 50 years of national policy as it pertains to poverty flies in the face of beliefs that are held by our media grandees with almost religious fervor.

Americans are not being told things that we should all know. Protected though they are by the very words of the Constitution, our media elites are failing us.

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