www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Media Bias and Corruption
The Failure of the Fourth Estate and the Death of Journalism in America

Hunter S. Thompson suicide '05

Media is supposed to attempt, at least, to be somewhat neutral - serving all of us equally. Their job should be to report the news, not make the news or weight it down with spin and bias. Their job is to provide only the facts and whatever background is necessary to make the information understood in proper context. Their job is not to reprint or rebroadcast propaganda, theirs is a higher responsibility. It's obvious the media has failed us completey. It was especially evident by the way they treated presidents Bush and Obama [Ed. note: and later, especially, Trump]. The failure to really dig deep into Bush's "weapons of mass distruction" cost countless innocent lives. And, of course, the free ride the press gave Obama, Hillary, and the rest of his administration cost our society dearly. It's obvious the media has failed us completely. We don't need anymore political activists posing as journalists - they've nearly killed journalism and now the media can't be trusted.   - Roger J. Wendell (2013)   America's news media can't be trusted. Period.

Addendum: After the press' treatment of Kavanaugh, for his Supreme Court nomination in September/October 2018, is there any doubt that most media has become the enemy of the American people? As Jonah Goldberg wrote, on Oct 2, 2018; "Now, I get that most journalists are liberal, even if they deny it. I understand that most think they're just seeking the truth. But, dear champions of the Fourth Estate, you might take just a moment to understand that you need to be fair to the other side of the argument even if you disagree with it."

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Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record:
 
"Americans' trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four
  percentage points since last year to 36%, making this year's reading the second lowest in Gallup's trend."
                                  - Megan Brenan (Gallup.com), October 7, 2021

Lawsuits against media and "journalists":

On January 18, 2019, a widely reported confrontation between groups of political demonstrators took place near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The interaction between Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann (photo at left) and Native American activist Nathan Phillips was captured on photos and videos. Videos released days later showed that initial media reports had omitted key details of the incident. Sandmann's family retained lawyers who, in February 2019, filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit on behalf of Sandmann against The Washington Post. On July 24, 2020, The Washington Post settled the lawsuit with Sandmann. The terms of the settlement have not been made public.   Sandmann's lawyers filed a second lawsuit on his behalf against CNN on March 12, 2019, seeking $275 million in damages, for allegedly "vicious" and "direct attacks" towards Sandmann. On January 7, 2020, the lawsuit was settled. The terms of the settlement have not been made public.       During the Summer Olympic games in Atlanta, on July 27, 1996, a pipe bomb went off in crowded Centennial Olympic Park, killing one woman and injuring 111 other people. Shortly before the explosion, Richard Jewell, who was working as a temporary security guard in the area, discovered a suspicious-looking backpack abandoned beneath a park bench. Jewell alerted police to the backpack, which held a bomb, and moved people out of harm’s way before it exploded. In the aftermath of the bombing, Jewell was praised as a hero for his actions. However, three days later, the media reported that Jewell was being investigated as a suspect in the case. Although he was never arrested or charged with any crime, Jewell faced intense scrutiny from both law enforcement officials and the media, who combed through his background and tracked his movements.   Jewell later filed libel lawsuits against several major media companies and reached settlements with CNN and NBC, among others. Before his death on August 29, 2007, Jewell, who suffered from diabetes and other health problems, worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia. In May 2003, police in North Carolina captured Eric Rudolph, the real person responsible for the Olympic bombing...

Journalism has become the enemy of the American people:
 
September 2, 2020:

From the RTDNA (Radio Television Digital News Association) website:
 
"Americans have not only lost confidence in the ideal of an objective media, they believe news organizations actively support the partisan divide."
 
RTDNA reported that a Gallup/Knight Foundation study found that 73%, "...perceive news media bias as a major problem. More perceive a great deal of political bias in media than did in 2017..."
 
"Americans also mistrust news media because of their perceptions of errors in news. Gallup/Knight find that 8 in 10 Americans feel errors are intentional misrepresentations..."

A fond memory:

Mark R. Levin
(from his book, Unfreedom of the Press)

"Unlike the early patriot press, today's newsrooms and journalists are mostly hostile to America's founding principles, traditions, and institutions. They do not promote free speech and press freedom, despite their self-serving and self-righteous claims. Indeed, they serve as societal filters attempting to enforce uniformity of thought and social and political activism centered on the progressive ideology and agenda. Issues, events, groups, and individuals that do not fit the narrative are dismissed or diminished; those that do fit the narrative are elevated and celebrated."   "It bears remembering that the purpose of a free press, like the purpose of free speech, is to nurture the mind, communicate ideas, challenge ideologies, share notions, inspire creativity, and advocate and reinforce America's founding principles-that is, to contribute to a vigorous, productive, healthy, and happy individual and to a well-functioning civil society and republic. Moreover, the media are to expose official actions aimed at squelching speech and communication. But when the media function as a propaganda tool for a single political party and ideology, they not only destroy their own purpose but threaten the existence of a free republic."   In his book Levin also provides a few examples of ideologically and politically motivated stories: the Rolling Stone story defaming a University of Virginia dean in a false campus rape story; the false allegations of rape against members of the Duke lacrosse team; Rolling Stone story defaming a University of Virginia dean in a false campus rape story; Dan Rather's discredited report about George W. Bush's military record; the smear of Brett Kavanaugh; the smear of the Vovington Catholic students; the seemingly endless list of false reports about President Trump...

March 2020:

It's no secret that CNN, MSNBC, and other media made a lot of money off the China Coronavirus (COVID-19) panic. However, in their quest for higher ratings they scared a lot of our population - creating shortages and endangering people's health. Here's what internist Dr. Drew Pinsky had to say about the situation that month; "What I have a problem with is the panic and the fact that businesses are getting destroyed that people's lives are being upended, not by the virus, but by the panic. The panic must stop. And the press, they really somehow need to be held accountable because they are hurting people."

Elon Musk

In April 2020, during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, CNN disputed Elon Musk's claim that he was providing 1,000 venitlators to California - despite Governor Newsom confirming that the ventilators had arrived in Los Angeles and that Musk's effort was "...heroic."   On April 13, 2020, Musk shot back on Twitter; "What I find most surprising is that CNN still exists."

Malcom X

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."   - Malcolm X

Claas Relotius

Claas Relotius typifies modern journalism - he received several awards for his "detailed" reporting in a number of German publications, and was also German CNN's "Journalist of the Year" in 2014. On December 19, 2018, Der Spiegel made public that Relotius had admitted that he had "falsified his articles on a grand scale", inventing facts, persons and quotations in at least 14 of his stories in Der Spiegel, an event now being referred to as "Spiegelgate". The magazine uncovered the fraud after a co-author of one of Relotius's articles about a pro-Trump vigilante group in Arizona conducting patrols along the Mexico-United States border, the Spanish-born Der Spiegel journalist Juan Moreno, became suspicious of the veracity of Relotius's contributions and gathered evidence against him. Relotius was accused of numerous other "journalistic inaccuracies" and fraud. On 23 December 2018, Der Spiegel magazine announced that it was filing a criminal complaint against Relotius - he had been accused of embezzling donations intended for Syrian orphans he claimed to have met in Turkey. Relotius appealed to readers for donations to be paid into his personal bank account.

Joseph Goebbles

"Let me control the media and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs."

Fake News

On A Related Note: From the early 1970s, until now (the second decade of the second millennium), I regularly monitored all kinds of news in addition to listening to a lot of talk radio and monitoring internet blogs. Whether at my office, driving to work, or even repairing my car, I've always enjoyed listening (and reading) about alternative viewpoints and philosophies. And, I haven't restricted myself to just any one political persuasion or genre either - I've enjoyed hearing from both ends of the political spectrum and everything in-between. However, as time has moved on it's become increasingly evident that there's less and less objectivity on the channels and blogs than ever before. The dishonesty and misrepresentations have become so extreme that I can no longer rely on conservatives, liberals, or anyone else in the media for an objective, balanced, fair or accurate representation of the facts. Their reporting, interviewing, and talk show monologues have become nothing more than propaganda pieces for one political ideal or another. So, after having listened to them all (Beck, Boortz, Colmes, Flanders, Goodman, Hannity, Hartman, Hightower, Lavin, Limbaugh, Maddow, Savage, Schultz, Rosen, and a bunch of locals you've probably never even heard of), and even corresponding, meeting personally with, or holding private telephone conversations with a bunch of them (to conduct business, etc.) I've concluded that they're generally no more capable of assessing a political, economic, environmental, or military situation better than you or me. And, as I've mentioned above, many continue distorting the facts in support of their own political agenda or that of their employer. Because of the media's profound influence on our society the aforementioned propagandists get special attention on this page since I don't have a national newspaper or radio show to challenge them with. They, along with their cousins holding political office, need to be challenged by the owners of this country - we the people. - Roger J. Wendell July 2014 Addendum (January 2018): About 15 years after I created this page the phrase Fake News had made its way into the vernacular. Although it's a problem I've pretty much outlined on my website, all these years, the "official" defination as of 2018 went something like this; "Fake news is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often using sensationalist, dishonest, or outright fabricated headlines to increase readership, online sharing, and Internet click revenue." Unfortunately most of our major news outlets, social media, and broadcast media were engaged in fake news at the time of this entry in 2018...

"I've been a member of the media, I used to be a correspondent for NBC News. We can all tell stories about the media. It's wrecked, it's broken. Almost nobody in the mdeia is well informed of what's going on. Just like the politicians." - Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Ph.D, when asked why the media doesn't address the huge overpopulation problem. (During a radio interview on KGNU's "Connections" program, hosted by Roger J. Wendell (me!). (Click Here to hear the entire interview)

"We are living in a time in history when the mass media can no longer be counted on to provide a free and independent voice in political debate, or to be a countervailing force against large corporate commercial interests."

Me and journalist Joe Goldman

"Too much is made of anchors and their personalities, their ups and downs. The larger issues -- the role of a free press and of honest, real news in a democracy, the role of technology in supporting a free press, the 'corporatization' of news and its effects on news content -- all deserve more attention, more discussion and more passionate debate." - News Anchor Dan Rather, in his final     departure from CBS in June, 2006

"Too much of the U.S. news media have become bottom feeders, regurgitating stories on the weird, the stupid and the coarse to satisfy an 'idiot culture' hungry to see humiliation."

"Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.' There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.

An invertebrate media by Paul Campos, professor of law at the University of Colorado Rocky Mountain News, June 04, 2008, p. 31

"It's been a very bad week for American journalism. The fun began when former Bush administration press secretary Scott McClellan published a book in which he pointed out that the Iraq disaster was enabled, in part, by the failure of the media to do their job.

"Their job was to do something other than simply reprint and rebroadcast propaganda fed to them by, among other people, McClellan himself. But this turned out to be too much to ask.

"That they were reprinting propaganda, rather than engaging in actual reporting, was obvious at the time. As my friend Jon Chait pointed out four years ago in The New Republic, McClellan wasn't a very good press secretary, because he was a terribly transparent liar. This made him particularly unqualified to defend the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

"But in the end it didn't make any difference, because most of the media were more than happy to be lied to. Indeed the most shocking aspect of McClellan's book is how little new information is in it; we've known for years now that the White House was peddling pure claptrap when it claimed Iraq posed a threat to the United States.

"We've also known - because institutions such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have admitted as much - that the elite American media largely failed to ask critical questions of the government in the run-up to the war, and that they took, in McClellan's words, a markedly 'deferential' attitude toward the administration.

"What's new are some of the extraordinary arguments being put forth by the media themselves to explain and defend the commission of journalistic malpractice on such a catastrophic scale."

Focus the Nation
by Michael Welch
Home Power Magazine
Power Politics, April & May 2008, p. 118

"According to the League of Conservation Voters, since January 2007, the hosts of popular news shows on five major TV networks - ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News and CNN - have asked the presidential candidates almost 3,000 questions. Of these thousands, only six mentioned global warming. Six. That calculates to about two-tenths of 1% - and is about the same number of questions posed to the candidates about UFOs." "Is anyone besides me wondering why reporters are ignoring one of the most urgent threats to humanity? "I guess it's not much of a mystery, considering that for-profit corporations, which are legally required to put shareholder profits ahead of all other considerations, own almost all media in the United States. Many are also heavily invested in or even owned by energy companies (for example, General Electric, which owns NBC) and have board members who sit on the boards of other corporations, including oil companies and defense contractors. "Major media relies largely on advertising sales, so little impetus exists for them to focus on anything other than programming that maximizes ad revenues. Nor is there any incentive for their advertisers to support programming that deals with topical issues that could possibly countermand the need or desire for the products and services being hocked. "But six measly questions? Jeez."

The term Fourth Estate is frequently attributed to the nineteenth century historian Carlyle, though
he himself seems to have attributed it to Edmund Burke:

"Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, .... Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. ..... Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite."
- Carlyle (1905) pp.349-350

"Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question you wish had been
asked of you. And, quite frankly, I follow that rule, it's a very good rule."
- Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamera
from the 2004 Errol Morris film documentary, The Fog of War
(transcribed by me and Tami!)

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
- Edward R. Murrow from his See it Now CBS Television broadcast of March 9, 1954 in regards to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...

American Media Failes Democracy:

It's no secret that the "Fourth Estate," for the most part, has been a miserable failure for us in America. Huge media conglomerates hold and control large numbers of newspapers, television and radio stations. It became clear to me, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that much of America's media simply rolled over and allowed government and corporations to have their way with our freedoms, information, and our very way of life.

The media's failure to question or provide accurate information about the invasion, prisoner treatment, 911, or terrorism in general was a clear sign that big government and big business are in control of our information sources. For me, this era of media subservience is the darkest period in our political history. It's still hard for me to imagine that in a country like America that it's considered sedition, or a statement against our troops, to question what the government is up to around the world.

So, I started this page to not only continue questioning the illegal activities of my own government, but to question our media as well. I'll be updating this page as material becomes available.

- Roger J. Wendell
Golden, Colorado, fall '03

(Freedom of the Press)

VNRs (Video News Release)

In early 2005 it couldn't get much more bizzare than the "discovery" that VNRs were being used by the Bush Administration to mislead the American people on a variety of issues. These little propaganda videos were prepared and edited by the U.S. government and then broadcast by media outlets as though they were some kind of original news report! Some real confusion took place when it was discovered that a government VRN was being used to "sell" a controversial new Medicare law to the public.

The bigger question, to me, is how many of these propaganda type videos did the government, corporations, and political organizations use to pass their programs off to the rest of us as "news?" The most important thing to do, in regards to VNRs, is to ensure that they're properly identified. In case you're a broadcaster wondering how to handle a VNR, or you're a government propagandist involved in creating 'em, here are some simple, easy-to-follow rules when dealing with VNRs:

1. Without question, VNRs should be clearly identified along with disclosing who produced and paid for it.
2. The word "reporting" should never be used in a VNR where the narrator is not a reporter!
3. VNRs should be identified by the media outlet whenever they're aired - anything less is journalistic fraud!

Again, it's our responsibility as citizens to demand that our media provide us the information necessary to challenge government, big business, and political organizations any time they run afoul of our well-being or best interests. The media must be independent of government - it's all we have!

- Roger J. Wendell

The Elements of Journalism

In 2001, Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach co-authored the book The Elements of Journalism, which identifies,
explains and traces intellectual origins of the core principles of American journalism and their role in civil society
 

• Journalism's first obligation is to the truth.


• Journalism's first loyalty is to citizens.


• The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification.


• Journalists must maintain an independence from those they cover.


• Journalists must serve as independent monitors of power.


• Journalism must provide a forum for public criticism and comment.


• Journalists must make the significant interesting and relevant.


• And journalists should keep the news in proportion and make it comprehensive.


• Its practitioners have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience.


• Citizens, too, have righs and responsibilities when it comes to news.

1. Never add anything that was not there.
2. Never deceive the audience.Never add anything that was not there.
3. Be as transparent as possible about your methods and motives.
4. Rely on your own original reporting.
5. Exeercise humility.

Bill Kovach is an American journalist, former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times and former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Links:

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