Yes, Virginia, there is a Democrat-media complex

Why the "mainstream media" can no longer be trusted.

Once upon a time, back in the days of vacuum tubes and black-and-white television sets, most Americans got their news from the so-called "big three" - ABC, NBC and CBS.

In those days, there was no internet, no "alternative media," no Rush Limbaugh. We pretty much accepted what we were told as truth - primarily because there simply was no other voice.

In his 1990 book, Free Speech or Propaganda: How the Media Distorts the Truth, Christian broadcast pioneer Marlin Maddoux exposed what was really going on behind the scenes.

A review at Wordsearch notes:

If so, you are like the majority of Americans, according to a Gallup poll. Yet, news reporters have become social engineers, says Marlin Maddoux. They are no longer presenting the facts.

Did you know, for instance, that ABC News staged a scene with someone who looked like American diplomat Felix Block? He handed a briefcase to another actor who was posing as a KGB agent.

Or did you know that CBS News faked battle footage and gave false news accounts of the war in Afghanistan on at least four occasions?

Fake news. Selective coverage. Advocacy journalism. That's how the American press is distorting the news. You and I are the victims. Our attitudes and beliefs are being formed by lies.

Like most, Maddoux did not want to believe the media was biased - until he saw the reporting on the Kent State massacre during the Vietnam War. He wrote:

For several years prior to this, people had called me on my radio talk show in Dallas, Texas, and expressed their view that we had biased media here in America. I usually shouted at them, "Bring me facts; then I'll take your argument seriously!" I would leave the radio station and say to myself, What a bunch of phonies. Can't they think of anything better to talk about than so-called bias in the media? After all, this country was made great through freedom of the press. We even have an amendment guaranteeing it. These people have been reading too much John Birch Society stuff.

After carrying on this little conversation with myself, I'd feel better. I trusted the media. Why shouldn't I? Then I'd wonder, Is it possible they could be right? No way! But then again, to be fair and in the interest of good journalism, maybe I at least should have a look at their viewpoint.

Now the Kent State tragedy backed me into an intellectual corner and forced me to take a long, hard, critical look at my own assumptions about the news media and how they choose to present events, people, and ideas to the American public.

I started to analyze the news, not just let it pass unfiltered into my brain. What unfolded before my eyes both amazed and frightened me.

He goes on in the book to show how left wing bias has infiltrated all aspects of the media - not just broadcast and print news.

Since then, the media has become more liberal - and more obviously biased.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, the bias in the media was so profoundly obvious that radio talk show host Sean Hannity declared 2008 the "year journalism died."

There are numerous examples of bias in the media - far too many to list here.

In 2008, Michael Graham wrote of one media fabrication at the Boston Herald involving a story that alleged rape victims in Wasilla were charged for rape kits:

The Globe-Democrat yesterday asserted as fact that "during her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, the town started charging rape victims or their insurers for rape kits."

But the truth is that there is no record of a rape victim ever being charged for a rape kit by Wasilla; there's no evidence Mayor Palin knew about the policy or took any action on it either way; and no record of a victim's insurance company being charged by the town.

How does an alleged "newspaper" make such a claim without any facts whatsoever?

The story is old news in the new media. Left-leaning Slate.com called it "a nasty and untrue rumor." National Review's Jim Geraghty, who has written exhaustively on the story calls it "unsupported by the facts." But at the Obama-Uber-Alles Boston Globe, they call it "news."

We have come to the point in the media's treatment of Gov. Sarah Palin where even the fig leaf of pretense is gone. The press has openly chosen sides and has stopped apologizing for it.

On any given day, the media presents as fact, stories easily disproven. The website Newsbusters.org presents examples of bias in the media every single day.

So blatant is the media in their bias that a majority now view the media as biased and unethical. Indeed, the majority of the so-called mainstream press has become little more than a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

And the long knives are coming out against any prospective Republican candidate in the 2012 election.

Douglas MacKinnon recently wrote that the editor of a major newspaper told him: "We plan to declare war on Rick Perry and do all in our power to crush him."

The fact is, the media will do all it can - even go so far as to make things up - to get Barack Obama re-elected in 2012.

Maddoux wrote:

If you are to become a discerning individual, able to maintain some degree of intellectual equilibrium, you must understand that the television networks' first and foremost job is to "get the numbers." The company only makes a profit if you and I watch. We are the buying, spending public. How do they attract those "numbers"? Why, by presenting a better show. It makes no difference if that show is called the evening news. It's all the same. It's show business.

Every day and every night of the year we should be questioning a great deal of what we see and hear on television and radio news shows and what we read in newspapers and news magazines. We should ask questions when we hear reports of "radical abortion protesters." We should ask questions when we read articles on sex education and AIDS and gay rights. And we should ask questions when we look over the movie and television choices produced by Hollywood.

Unfortunately few of us ever ask anything at all. We trust our eyes and ears. The interpretation of what we see and read and hear we leave to the "professionals"—the newscasters and the news writers. So most Americans never really know the truth.

Yes, Virginia, there is a "Democrat-media complex," and it, more than anything else, presents a clear and present danger to the state of American democracy.

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