Monday, August 29, 2016

A Plague too far...

For a long time, the topography of modern reportage on the radio, television and in newspapers was too full of  hills and promontories, looming so that one could not make out the "lay of the land".

Admittedly many decades ago, the reporter's laws intruded: (1) Rape is a vegetable ! and (2) Add a nickel to your "feelings" and you might get a Tampa Nugget (cigar).

Sometime during the late 1980s with the advent of Rush Limbaugh on talk radio, we all became aware that any media outlet, if it referred to him at all, called him a "conservative" commentator.

His predecessor, a  warm  and amiable Brit, Michael Jackson, was NEVER called a "liberal" or "leftist" commentator---(but he WAS !)

We have all noticed since, that  Michael Savage, Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter have been branded "right-wing" commentators.

And it is always a  bit startling, but Peggy Noonan and Dr. Charles Krauthammer are described by their peers and interlocutors as  "conservative".

While he was alive, Andrew Breitbart's  news and blogs were labeled right-leaning. And the news site that now bears his name is daily described as "arch-conservative". All these descriptions become meaningless when Rachel Maadow, Al Sharpton, Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer  escape public pigeonholing as "liberals" or "left-leaning"

The massive guile inherent in this is that by treating these talking heads as without opinion, the
indoctrinators may flood their spew with any kind of bias they choose---allegedly with impunity.

But, since Newsweek, as we breathe here now, is publishing its last issue after many years of degrading prostitution for the political left, there may be a hint in the air that the citizenry  is catching on. 

Thus is how it began on the internet.

Matt Drudge, in the 1990's was only noted for his broad brush of international links. He was then and is now, the number one agregator. If you want any wire service from  UPI to Xinhua, click. If you want a columnist, he has Maureen Dowd and Ruth Marcus. If you want Al Arabiya or  Agence France Presse (AFP) it's there. . He gets one BILLION pagewiews a month 

But when he "WENT"  with the Bill Clinton / Monica Lewinsky story, he was hauled before an INQUISITION  at the Washington Press Club, and thereafter branded "Right`wing" and "conservative". o.

Just because he printed a story that no one else, though they all knew about it, would  publish. That is still the way of it .

Many of us who saw that Press Club appearance will never forget how calmly Matt explained their own sins of omission to the  Messy-NBC, the Collectivst News Net, and all the "alphabet" networks,  NYTimes, WaPo and wire services.

They will never forgive Matt Drudge . But he is bigger than any of them now. So, when Breitbart raised its head, offering a right-leaning Gay man as a robust commentator, you will notice that the New York Times rather "applauded" the "arrival" of  Breitbart News as a force in Journalism.

But the old pall...the old  plague of name-calling and suppression goes on and will likkely never end.

Just yesterday the "editor"  at the Times in charge of reporting and commenting on the internet fairly ordered and demanded, in a letter to GOOGLE executives, that all information regarding Hillary Clinton's health be erased from the search engine's archives and suppressed in all its algorithms. We cannot know HOW they can follow his directuins.  But they must do it al the time.



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