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.
APPLAUSE to KTBB for what is now sadly conspicuous LOCAL coverage. In most cities — even big ones — there’s simply less news (which costs money to produce) because of broadcast industry consolidation run amok, and newspapers firing-everyone-in-sight as readers graze elsewhere.
Opinion-masquerading-as-news is less-expensive to produce; and panders well to the like-minded.
Well said Paul. Wanna come to my house for dinner? I need some more conversation points for my liberal friends.
It is a shame that truth doesn’t matter anymore. It is a shame that ethics do not matter anymore. What ever happened to just REPORTING the news? Keep your opinions to yourself, Mr or Ms news reporter…just give me the FACTS and let me decide for myself if something is true or not. This used to be what news REPORTING was all about. But somewhere along the line, the FACTS were lost, sure wish they could be found again.
Tuesday i watched the closing arguments of the John Wiley Price trial in the federal courthouse. You would find it hard to believe what we were paying those attorneys to do as sorry a job as they did. The pink slips should go out by the dozens. It was a fiscal joke.
Another fine column. The liberal, the very much liberal media, is corrupt beyond repair. If the news stories that need telling get out, it will be more and more through conservative media and citizen self-education. Thanks so much for doing your part to keep us honestly informed.
Where do you go for daily news and information? Our local newspaper is so liberal, it has become a joke – the only things they publish that we can believe are the obituaries.
We need to fund some more colleges with our tax money and soon the whole nation would be PC and we would be living in a world of peace and joy. Wrong! Anyone want to live like the people in North Korea? That’s the Liberal idea of how things should be.
The dominate media is nothing more that a pervasive Socialist Democrat propaganda machine: a purveyor of a constant perversion of the truth substituting real solutions with false solutions built on the most radical Leftist dreams. One should NEVER accept the premise of their proposals that are designed to fix a societal problem – it is always the opposite. Their goal is always the opposite of the stated purpose of their plans to correct an evil. By cloaking themselves in a benevolent cause meant to correct an injustice in society, they use the issue to supplant any legitimate efforts founded on common sense. They intend to seize control and establish authority to use the issue to feed their lust for power and crush other efforts that actually work. By doing this they deliberately don’t solve the issue but in fact make it worse while complaining that additional big government resources are needed to remedy the situation.
They have become experts at deflecting attention from realistic solutions that care for the fundamental family unit founded on independent self improvement. Conversely, they are in favor of social engineering forced by government sanctioned educated idiots that wield the formidable elite force of government power to have its corrupt fingers in every pie to stop any effort to fix the problem. The War on Poverty is a perfect example of this deception. There NEVER was an honest effort by these government bureaucrats to reduce poverty. Their goal was to use the issue to grow further dependence on government largess at the expense of those that would be otherwise be productive in order to reduce their success and hinder their prospects for prosperity. The War on Poverty was a very successful War on Prosperity, prosperity born out of individual self-sufficiency which is needed to solve the problem from the start.
LBJ was one of the most corrupt southern Democrat politicians on the scene at the time JFK picked him for VP. It was only a matter of time that LBJ’s War on Poverty would create a legacy of nationalized welfare dependency built on deceit that has resulted in the $17 trillion waste and millions of ruined family units: a huge population of loyal Democrats looking for handouts.