Conspiracies and the Death of the Press Corps 10

People often ask me if I believe in conspiracies. Yes. The U.S. government has been conspiring to clandestinely accomplish whatever they feel like, often with the help of industry and mass media, for quite some time. Often the line between government, industry, and media is hard to decipher.

To realize that the media holds certain biases is a simple exercise in deduction – mass media companies, there are now five of them and will probably soon be three, are giant corporations which benefit from legislation tailored to their needs – tax breaks, deregulation, and especially a lax interpretation of anti-trust laws – and these are causes that the Republican party and their appointed extremists in the Supreme Court favor disproportionately to the other party.

In the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, for example, mainstream news networks featured experts and analysts who were around ten times more likely to support a pro-war stance than an anti-war stance . Where’s the objectivity?

It would be hard to argue that the networks didn’t benefit from the invasion. It was good coverage. And, someone is going to owe them a favor down the line.

If you think that mainstream news networks have a liberal bias you’re so fucking retarded that I have a hard time looking at you and it makes me sad that you are reproducing in large numbers.

First off, giving objectivity to lunatics like Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz or any of the other tea party members who are controlled like the lemmings that they are by the Koch Brothers and other multi-billionaires, is not unbiased coverage. These people all believe, or pretend to believe, that Jesus is going to come back to earth in our lifetimes and save whoever believes in him and kill everyone else. THIS IS A FACT. I don’t know if I’d rather they believe it or pretend to.

Lending half of an article about Global Warming to those opposing the idea is like writing a biography of Elvis and dedicating half of it to the one guy in Reno who wears a foil hat and swears Elvis lives in his basement. Its just a bad idea if you’re striving for quality.

Maybe this is getting a little broad, so let’s look at one simple case study.

In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election – which the Republican party, in a vast coup, stole and awarded to George W. Bush – this is not a conspiracy theory, this is a fact – there was a minor rumbling regarding something odd about W’s appearance during the first debate.

To put it bluntly, it was obvious that he was wearing a wire and someone was telling him what to say.

Now, this might sound a bit conspiratorial so I’ll dismiss the circumstantial evidence that Bush was pausing and obviously looked like he was listening to someone during the debate – because Bush is just a pretend cowboy anti-intellectual former cheerleader trust-fund bitch, and his behavior was usually a bit off anyway, so let’s just concentrate on the fact that multiple photographs show conclusively that Bush was wearing a wire.

So, he was wearing a wire. End of argument there. That’s not a conspiracy. There’s a photo of it.

Why do I have to go out of my way to explain that something that is bluntly documented is not a conspiracy?

Well, because the media didn’t report it.

Bush went on Good Morning America in the following days and, with his beady devil eyes squinted in a folksy fetal alcohol syndrome sort of way, explained that the bulge in his back was due to an ill-fitting shirt.

That was pretty much the extent of the coverage.

Liberal media.

Now, for all of you shitkicking hillbillies, I can feel you taking sides here. There aren’t any sides.

The New York Times decided to pass on covering this story.

You know, the paper that hates Jesus?

The New York Times along with The Washington Post dictate what every other newspaper in the country publishes. The New York Times is traded on the Dow Jones. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon.com.

The Times chose not to publish the photos, their official reasoning being that they didn’t want to influence the results of the election.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat????

Isn’t the purpose of a newspaper to report news? This seems to directly contradict the edicts of journalism, you know, the ones that slip in Michelle Bachmann’s uninformed opinions about the morning after pill in the name of objectivity?

Bush was awarded the election, so it may not have mattered, but the votes that would have been lost had the news of his wire become as reported on as Madonna’s biceps, could have conceivably swayed the election.

If this were a documentary, this is where the screen would fade to black and you’d see the following captions:

The Bush Administration did more to deregulate American corporations than any administration in history, with disastrous consequences for the average American.

The Bush Administration appointed John Roberts, the most corporate-friendly Justice in history, to the Supreme Court.

Roberts was instrumental in the upholding of the Citizens United case which allows for the unrestricted funding of political campaigns by corporations.

The Bush Administration ruined an economy which was robust when they inherited it.

Then like a thousand other captions would keep coming on for several days until people exited the theater.

This wire saga is one tiny incident. But it is telling. Extrapolate.