The Sorry State of American Media Today
#BadJournos, #CorruptMedia, #RIPJournalism
Originally published in The Truth
November 2016
Admissions of Liberal Bias
Shaky Ethics and Post-Modern Gibberish
Dodgy New Funding Sources
-------------------------------------
Liberal Bias in the Media ADMITTED. Case Closed
Who better to prove to you there is liberal bias in the media than journalists themselves? Admissions against interest are the most powerful evidence in court, and equally powerful in this context. Here’s a raft of admissions, right from the horse’s mouth. Anyone who wants to argue there is no liberal bias in the media will have to jump over these multitudinous and very tall mountains:
Why the Press So Easily Goes Astray
- Media Ethics Rules and Post-Modern Gibberish
The current and previous issues of The Truth have presented 20 admissions by journalists themselves that the mainstream media is biased in favor of liberals. The admissions, going back several years, include explicit confessions of liberal partisanship and fresh apologies for the recent extreme prejudice shown against the Trump campaign.
As if this weren’t enough, other types of evidence of liberal media bias also weigh on the scale:
In 1996, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) removed the rule against opinion and bias in news stories from its ethics code. The results are plain for all to see, most prominently in the Obama and Trump presidential elections. Several reasons were given for dropping any pretense to objectivity:
Objectivity is Impossible - “No one is free of bias,” SPJ has claimed. Objectivity is now an outdated and unrealistic standard, the argument goes. It’s not practical to expect journalists to be objective, and this contributed to the change in 1996. But there is a difference between honest mistakes of judgment, on the one hand, and deliberately taking sides, on the other, as happened in the 2016 presidential race. Whatever the merits of this first argument, the removal of the rule against opinion and bias has contributed to an atmosphere in which journalists feel no compunction about favoring one side over the other in policy debates and putting their thumb on the scale for their favorite candidates.
View from Nowhere – Trying to be fair and balanced just leads to the ‘view from nowhere’ where journalists try to present the unbiased, objective reality of a political dispute, i.e., the midway point between two extremes. The ‘view from nowhere’ has been famously pilloried by Paul Krugman: “Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” Both sides can’t be right, this argument goes and, in presenting known falsehoods that support a false equivalence of viewpoints, journalism does a disservice to readers. However, the obvious problem with this second argument is that journalists under its sway now arrogate to themselves the right to declare which arguments are false and therefore to be dismissed from the conversation. Are journalists really justified in deciding what is true and what is false for the rest of us? Climate change is a prime example; the views of climate change ‘deniers’ are deemed obviously false and no longer worthy of consideration or space even though the science is anything but settled. Journalists can simply pronounce one side wrong and refuse to air its views. Thus, in filling journalists’ heads with this patent nonsense, the political Left has found another way to shut down debate. That’s all this argument is – another excuse to shut down debate.
It gets sillier.
Removing the Rule Against Bias Makes Reporters More Conscious of Bias – If removing the rule makes journalists more conscious of the rule sounds silly, that’s because it is. But SPJ actually put forth this flimsiest of rationales to explain why they removed the rule. No one is free of bias, it is argued, so reporters should recognize their own bias and not produce stories that favor their own opinion. But how does removing a clear statement against opinion and bias raise awareness of opinion and bias? It doesn’t. If it did, then we should throw out ‘Thou shalt not kill’ because that will raise awareness that murder is wrong. Further, by this pretzel logic, we should throw out every ethical rule so we will be more conscious of ethics overall. No, common sense dictates ‘out of sight, out of mind’. If you remove the rule against opinion and bias, consciousness of why opinion and bias are wrong will be LOWERED, not raised. Reporters will forget these things are wrong and produce more biased stories. Moreover, it is inconsistent with this logic not to also remove all the subsidiary rules bordering on the subject that are still present in the current SPJ code. If removing the rule against opinion will sharpen awareness of bias, why leave in the rules to avoid imposing their own values on others, to support an exchange of views, to distinguish between advocacy and news reporting, to avoid conflicts of interest, and to disclose unavoidable conflicts? By SPJ’s perverse logic, all these rules should be eliminated so reporters will be more aware of the difference between advocacy and reporting, etc. In fact, why stop there? Why not just throw out the entire ethics code? That will make reporters more ethical, right? As things stand, there is a web of rules that dance around the subject, but the bright line rule against opinion and bias is gone. No wonder journalists are confused about their ethical responsibilities and feel they have license to take sides in elections and public policy disputes.
The arguments above are so stupid something else must be going on, and that something is the insidiousness of the political Left which has infected journalism just as it has infected every other area of life, while somehow convincing people it has not.
But you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
‘It’s All a Matter of Perception’ and Other Post-Modern Gibberish – The penetration of post-modern thought in the Western psyche produces statements like the following in discussions among journalists:
No truth, no facts – really? What happens when someone jumps off a 30-story building and goes splat on the sidewalk below? Can we see the truth of the situation with our own eyes, or would it all just be a matter of perception? Did the person really die or is that only a matter of interpretation?
‘There is no truth.’ If there is no truth, how can that statement be true?
More to the point, if there are no truths and there are no facts, then what do we need journalists for? If everything is a matter of perception, we can dispense with journalism entirely. Just give us the raw cell phone footage on social media. We have our own perceptions, thank you very much. By taking the post-modern route, journalism has painted itself into an intellectual corner and argued itself out of a job.
If nobody can be objective, how can you distinguish between advocacy and news as SPJ’s code still enjoins? How do you know what to label advocacy? By post-modern logic, news is ALL opinion and advocacy (perception and interpretation), so how can you have a rule that requires you to distinguish between news and advocacy and to label them correspondingly?
How is any of this post-modern gobbledygook an excuse for deliberately trying to sabotage John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump in print and over the airwaves in successive elections? Was it an inability to latch on to concrete reality that led the mainstream media to its outrageous attempts to put Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the White House? Hardly. Post-modernism is more hogwash from the political Left to confuse people. Confusion is a weapon.
Solutions
So we arrive at the full-throated defense of the endpoint of all this rationalizing: journalists should have complete freedom to write and say whatever comes out of their empty little heads, without any responsibilities. Fred Blevens is a journalism professor at Florida International University. In correspondence with Alexandria Tea Party in 2014, Blevens wrote:
Poor Professor Blevens suffers from post-modern derangement syndrome, as described above. See if you can make heads or tails out of this:
A bias toward the audience? What the heck does that mean?
The media are not biased even though they say they are? Admitted attempts to swing elections are only a perceived problem? All the evidence cited above is not proof enough of bias in the media? Blevens is a hard case.
Go ahead and write from a particular point of view, but be upfront and label it. If the journalist is letting ideological bias color story and source selection, it is dishonest not to disclose that fact if the journalists’ work appears in an outlet that claims to be of record.
But when is the last time you saw a journalist explain why they’re doing yet another income inequality story, or failing to report on Benghazi or some other scandal in which their pet politicians are embroiled? Under this approach, they would make full disclosure in every story, or the publisher would disclose the publication’s philosophical orientation in a general statement prominently displayed where it cannot be missed. [Yes, Liberato.US proclaims its bias – “Dedicated to Keeping America a Free Country”]
If you can’t be objective, then at least be transparent. The idea is not so strange. Newspapers in colonial America routinely labeled their bias and everybody knew what the score was.
So media outlets have two choices: do their level best to present both sides – in story selection, experts consulted, sources quoted, etc. - or disclose their bias.
What media outlets cannot justifiably do is continue to pose as honest brokers of the news when they are anything but.
Vladimir Lenin wrote: “The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.” If community organizing and saving the world are your game – while pretending otherwise - we will continue to treat you with the contempt you deserve and as the threat to democracy you have become.
-------------------------------------
Soros and Slush Funds: The Media’s Dodgy New Funding Sources
Subscriptions and advertising – that’s how media used to get paid. Not anymore. The decline of their business has sent media companies scrambling for new sources of revenue. They found some, but the new sources raise the question to what extent journalism has been replaced by gangsterism in an industry which used to take in $46 billion a year but now only grosses $16 billion annually. Are media outlets now just whores that will write or say anything as long as the price is right? Funny, though, how the vast preponderance of the new money seems to be coming from the political Left.
The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics enjoins media to “act independently” and "avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived." One can only imagine how different reader reaction would be if the dodgy new funding sources were disclosed in stories presented as straight-up news from media sources posing as honest brokers thereof.
The new sources include:
Government Propaganda
Political Campaigns and Parties
Action Items
# # #
#BadJournos, #CorruptMedia, #RIPJournalism
Originally published in The Truth
November 2016
Admissions of Liberal Bias
Shaky Ethics and Post-Modern Gibberish
Dodgy New Funding Sources
-------------------------------------
Liberal Bias in the Media ADMITTED. Case Closed
Who better to prove to you there is liberal bias in the media than journalists themselves? Admissions against interest are the most powerful evidence in court, and equally powerful in this context. Here’s a raft of admissions, right from the horse’s mouth. Anyone who wants to argue there is no liberal bias in the media will have to jump over these multitudinous and very tall mountains:
- Politico’s chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush admits in leaked email “I have become a hack,” sends Podesta article draft for approval. Daily Caller (October 2016)
- Florida paper apologizes to readers for anti-Trump bias; “You deserve a more balanced approach”; open letter to readers admits other media outlets similarly biased. Daily Commercial (October 2016)
- New York Times, Vox and Bill Moyers’ websites openly admit anti-Trump bias. Truth Revolt (August 2016)
- “Facebook admits rogue employees may have shown bias against conservatives”. Washington Times (May 2016)
- CNN’s president Jeff Zucker told the Wall Street Journal, "I think it was a legitimate criticism of CNN that it was a little too liberal.” Truth Revolt (May 2016)
- Journalists “overwhelmingly progressive”, 40-year veteran journalist Marc Rosenwasser says; newsrooms should take steps to assure ideological diversity. Truth Revolt (January 2016)
- Former NBC reporter Sharyl Attkisson clashed with management over bias; her story on Obama knowing ‘you can keep your plan’ was a lie was kept off the air, shunted to website instead. Hot Air (March 2015)
- “CNN Contributor Agrees, CNN ‘Totally Biased’ Against Republicans”. Daily Caller (February 2015)
- A Big Three TV network news producer asks in morning meetings, “How do we protect Barack Obama today?” Newsbusters (December 2014)
- CNN’s Chris Cuomo: media gave Hillary a ‘free ride’ (caught on tape: “We couldn’t help her any more than we have…. We are the biggest ones promoting her campaign….”) Breitbart (June 2014)
- Former NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane: the paper’s departments “share a kind of political and cultural progressivism” that “virtually bleeds through the fabric of the Times.” Subsequent public editor Margaret Sullivan said complaints that the Times has a liberal bias are “a reasonable criticism.” National Center for Public Policy Research (April 2014) (more at Politico, Newsbusters)
- BBC execs admit outlet’s 'massive' and ‘deep’ Left-wing bias that, among other things, skewed its immigration coverage. Daily Mail (January 2014)
- Journalist Glenn Greenwald: ‘Every journalist has an agenda. We’re on MSNBC now, where close to 24 hours a day the agenda of President Obama and the Democratic Party are promoted, defended, glorified. The agenda of the Republican Party is undermined...Sure, I do defend [Snowden], just like people on MSNBC defend President Obama and his officials and Democratic Party leaders 24 hours a day.’” Daily Caller (December 2013)
- “[Politico’s Chief White House Correspondent Mike Allen asked a panel of reporters], ‘Does the media lean left,’...All four panelists replied, ‘Yes...’ In an effort to explain their one-word responses, they all swept over the same terrain – that Washington journalists need to get out of town and talk to real people, have real world experiences, acquire a few evangelical relatives and work a minimum wage job at some point in their lives… [One panelist, NYT’s Mark Leibovich, stated that], “One of the many reasons [the media is] seen as being out of touch with the rest of the country is the group think that goes on here.” Daily Caller (December2013)
- Mark Halperin admits media bias was intense in 2008 campaign: "It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war…. It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage." Politico (November 2008)
- Washington Post editor: “we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions....We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I’ve been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.” Media Research Center (October 2005)
- CBS, Washington Post, New York Times admit media bias in election, issue mea culpa’s. WND [Editor’s Note – Admission Nos. 17-19 duly noted and added to the list of admissions of liberal media bias by journalists themselves that The Truth published last week.]
- NBC’s Chuck Todd confesses long list of what the media got wrong in the 2016 election. Truth Revolt [Editor’s Note – Admission No. 20]
Why the Press So Easily Goes Astray
- Media Ethics Rules and Post-Modern Gibberish
The current and previous issues of The Truth have presented 20 admissions by journalists themselves that the mainstream media is biased in favor of liberals. The admissions, going back several years, include explicit confessions of liberal partisanship and fresh apologies for the recent extreme prejudice shown against the Trump campaign.
As if this weren’t enough, other types of evidence of liberal media bias also weigh on the scale:
- Far more journalists self-identify as Democrats and liberals than anything else
- Liberal journalists at different media outlets have conspired on stories in order to, among other things, destroy Sarah Palin (e.g., the infamous JournoList)
- Former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg has written entire books describing in great detail how biased media outlets deliberately distort the news in favor of liberal policies. They did it with homelessness and heterosexual AIDS. The same template of sending phony, advocacy group-generated statistics around the echo chamber was rolled out in the run-up to Obamacare (the media repeating incessantly ’46 million people don’t have health insurance’ when journalists knew it wasn’t true)
- Faculty at journalism schools are overwhelmingly liberal and now train students how to ‘change the world’ instead of how to get the story and report the news.
In 1996, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) removed the rule against opinion and bias in news stories from its ethics code. The results are plain for all to see, most prominently in the Obama and Trump presidential elections. Several reasons were given for dropping any pretense to objectivity:
Objectivity is Impossible - “No one is free of bias,” SPJ has claimed. Objectivity is now an outdated and unrealistic standard, the argument goes. It’s not practical to expect journalists to be objective, and this contributed to the change in 1996. But there is a difference between honest mistakes of judgment, on the one hand, and deliberately taking sides, on the other, as happened in the 2016 presidential race. Whatever the merits of this first argument, the removal of the rule against opinion and bias has contributed to an atmosphere in which journalists feel no compunction about favoring one side over the other in policy debates and putting their thumb on the scale for their favorite candidates.
View from Nowhere – Trying to be fair and balanced just leads to the ‘view from nowhere’ where journalists try to present the unbiased, objective reality of a political dispute, i.e., the midway point between two extremes. The ‘view from nowhere’ has been famously pilloried by Paul Krugman: “Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” Both sides can’t be right, this argument goes and, in presenting known falsehoods that support a false equivalence of viewpoints, journalism does a disservice to readers. However, the obvious problem with this second argument is that journalists under its sway now arrogate to themselves the right to declare which arguments are false and therefore to be dismissed from the conversation. Are journalists really justified in deciding what is true and what is false for the rest of us? Climate change is a prime example; the views of climate change ‘deniers’ are deemed obviously false and no longer worthy of consideration or space even though the science is anything but settled. Journalists can simply pronounce one side wrong and refuse to air its views. Thus, in filling journalists’ heads with this patent nonsense, the political Left has found another way to shut down debate. That’s all this argument is – another excuse to shut down debate.
It gets sillier.
Removing the Rule Against Bias Makes Reporters More Conscious of Bias – If removing the rule makes journalists more conscious of the rule sounds silly, that’s because it is. But SPJ actually put forth this flimsiest of rationales to explain why they removed the rule. No one is free of bias, it is argued, so reporters should recognize their own bias and not produce stories that favor their own opinion. But how does removing a clear statement against opinion and bias raise awareness of opinion and bias? It doesn’t. If it did, then we should throw out ‘Thou shalt not kill’ because that will raise awareness that murder is wrong. Further, by this pretzel logic, we should throw out every ethical rule so we will be more conscious of ethics overall. No, common sense dictates ‘out of sight, out of mind’. If you remove the rule against opinion and bias, consciousness of why opinion and bias are wrong will be LOWERED, not raised. Reporters will forget these things are wrong and produce more biased stories. Moreover, it is inconsistent with this logic not to also remove all the subsidiary rules bordering on the subject that are still present in the current SPJ code. If removing the rule against opinion will sharpen awareness of bias, why leave in the rules to avoid imposing their own values on others, to support an exchange of views, to distinguish between advocacy and news reporting, to avoid conflicts of interest, and to disclose unavoidable conflicts? By SPJ’s perverse logic, all these rules should be eliminated so reporters will be more aware of the difference between advocacy and reporting, etc. In fact, why stop there? Why not just throw out the entire ethics code? That will make reporters more ethical, right? As things stand, there is a web of rules that dance around the subject, but the bright line rule against opinion and bias is gone. No wonder journalists are confused about their ethical responsibilities and feel they have license to take sides in elections and public policy disputes.
The arguments above are so stupid something else must be going on, and that something is the insidiousness of the political Left which has infected journalism just as it has infected every other area of life, while somehow convincing people it has not.
But you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
‘It’s All a Matter of Perception’ and Other Post-Modern Gibberish – The penetration of post-modern thought in the Western psyche produces statements like the following in discussions among journalists:
- Everything we see is based on perception not truth. Everything we hear is based on opinion, not fact.
- “Truth” is a loaded word. There are as many interpretations of “Truth” as there are people on the planet.
No truth, no facts – really? What happens when someone jumps off a 30-story building and goes splat on the sidewalk below? Can we see the truth of the situation with our own eyes, or would it all just be a matter of perception? Did the person really die or is that only a matter of interpretation?
‘There is no truth.’ If there is no truth, how can that statement be true?
More to the point, if there are no truths and there are no facts, then what do we need journalists for? If everything is a matter of perception, we can dispense with journalism entirely. Just give us the raw cell phone footage on social media. We have our own perceptions, thank you very much. By taking the post-modern route, journalism has painted itself into an intellectual corner and argued itself out of a job.
If nobody can be objective, how can you distinguish between advocacy and news as SPJ’s code still enjoins? How do you know what to label advocacy? By post-modern logic, news is ALL opinion and advocacy (perception and interpretation), so how can you have a rule that requires you to distinguish between news and advocacy and to label them correspondingly?
How is any of this post-modern gobbledygook an excuse for deliberately trying to sabotage John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump in print and over the airwaves in successive elections? Was it an inability to latch on to concrete reality that led the mainstream media to its outrageous attempts to put Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the White House? Hardly. Post-modernism is more hogwash from the political Left to confuse people. Confusion is a weapon.
Solutions
So we arrive at the full-throated defense of the endpoint of all this rationalizing: journalists should have complete freedom to write and say whatever comes out of their empty little heads, without any responsibilities. Fred Blevens is a journalism professor at Florida International University. In correspondence with Alexandria Tea Party in 2014, Blevens wrote:
- I happen to believe that any hint of restricting opinion in news stories is a restriction on free expression. If corporations can give as much money as they want under the guise of being people covered by the First Amendment, I find it difficult to square any suppression of real expression by real people.
Poor Professor Blevens suffers from post-modern derangement syndrome, as described above. See if you can make heads or tails out of this:
- I also do not confuse truth-telling with opinion or bias. The truth manytimes is biased because it refuses to recognize clearly wrong and empirically challenged notions. Journalists must stop representing positions that are knowingly false, just for the sake of satisfying some supposed “fair and balanced” notion. That’s a bias toward the audience and I would recommend that your efforts encourage that notion, rather than some wrong-headed idea that the media are wrongly biased. So, no, I won’t encourage SPJ to do what you ask because it simply is not a solution to your perceived problem.
A bias toward the audience? What the heck does that mean?
The media are not biased even though they say they are? Admitted attempts to swing elections are only a perceived problem? All the evidence cited above is not proof enough of bias in the media? Blevens is a hard case.
- UPDATE 11/17/16 – Professor Blevens responded to the above thusly: “I could respond but won’t because you obviously are incapable of understanding.” Editor’s Note: Insults – the last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt.
- UPDATE 11/22/16 - Previously this month, The Truth confronted journalism professor Fred Blevens of Florida International University for condoning opinion and bias in news stories. His only response was a vacuous insult: “I could respond but won’t because you obviously are incapable of understanding.” The Truth then sent our story and Blevens’ response to his department chair at FIU, Teresa Ponte. There was NO RESPONSE.
- “Liberal journalism professor Jay Rosen has for quite some time advised media companies to just embrace their biases and stop pretending. It would probably earn them some goodwill from viewers, who can’t possibly take CNN seriously if the network is going to claim impartiality while its anchors are one-way pen pals with the president.”
- http://newsle.com/article/0/56502051/
Are You There Obama? It’s Me, CNN
Seth Mandel 01.22.2013
Go ahead and write from a particular point of view, but be upfront and label it. If the journalist is letting ideological bias color story and source selection, it is dishonest not to disclose that fact if the journalists’ work appears in an outlet that claims to be of record.
But when is the last time you saw a journalist explain why they’re doing yet another income inequality story, or failing to report on Benghazi or some other scandal in which their pet politicians are embroiled? Under this approach, they would make full disclosure in every story, or the publisher would disclose the publication’s philosophical orientation in a general statement prominently displayed where it cannot be missed. [Yes, Liberato.US proclaims its bias – “Dedicated to Keeping America a Free Country”]
If you can’t be objective, then at least be transparent. The idea is not so strange. Newspapers in colonial America routinely labeled their bias and everybody knew what the score was.
So media outlets have two choices: do their level best to present both sides – in story selection, experts consulted, sources quoted, etc. - or disclose their bias.
What media outlets cannot justifiably do is continue to pose as honest brokers of the news when they are anything but.
Vladimir Lenin wrote: “The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.” If community organizing and saving the world are your game – while pretending otherwise - we will continue to treat you with the contempt you deserve and as the threat to democracy you have become.
-------------------------------------
Soros and Slush Funds: The Media’s Dodgy New Funding Sources
Subscriptions and advertising – that’s how media used to get paid. Not anymore. The decline of their business has sent media companies scrambling for new sources of revenue. They found some, but the new sources raise the question to what extent journalism has been replaced by gangsterism in an industry which used to take in $46 billion a year but now only grosses $16 billion annually. Are media outlets now just whores that will write or say anything as long as the price is right? Funny, though, how the vast preponderance of the new money seems to be coming from the political Left.
The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics enjoins media to “act independently” and "avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived." One can only imagine how different reader reaction would be if the dodgy new funding sources were disclosed in stories presented as straight-up news from media sources posing as honest brokers thereof.
The new sources include:
Government Propaganda
- Obamacare – Did you ever see this disclaimer on anything? - ‘This story was brought to you by Obamacare’. “Obama operatives are setting up propaganda symposiums for journalists and giving large cash donations to journalism associations to help spread Obama’s word…. This Obamacare propaganda campaign seriously blurs the line between government and “journalism” and seems to be a blatant attempt by team Obama to write the media’s Obamacare stories for them.” Reuters, MarketWatch, and the Dallas Morning News benefitted from these government outlays which were intended to coach journalists on how to present Obamacare favorably to the public. Warner Todd Huston General Electric, which owned half of NBC Universal at the time, received $36 million from the $5 billion Obamacare slush fund. The New American
- Stimulus Money – The Obama administration paid MSNBC roughly half a million dollars in stimulus money to run 100 ads touting so-called “green jobs”. The New American
- More - “Amber Lyon, a three-time Emmy award winning journalist, said that CNN is routinely paid by the US government and foreign governments to selectively report on certain events. Furthermore, the Obama administration pay CNN for editorial control over some of their content.” Conservative Post
- As reported in The Truth in September 2015, the UN undertook the “world’s largest advertising campaign” to promote its Agenda 2030 sustainable development goals. The $6 million propaganda blitz included efforts led by a Thomson Reuters unit to train a “squadron of journalists,” plus subsidies to news organizations in 33 countries. Fox News
- In a major report, the Media Research Center documented that George Soros has paid media outlets over $52 million which has helped create a liberal media echo chamber. Soros has connections to over 30 big-name media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN and ABC. Journalists sit on boards of entities that take Soros money, raising conflicts of interest in breach of journalistic ethics. Soros media operations reach 332 million people around the globe.
- A Soros-backed election fund awards grants to media groups to seed stories and ‘educate’ journalists. One such group is New America Media, a gathering of ethnic media outlets. Washington Free Beacon
- An internal memo shows a Soros-funded group worked to discredit Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Robert Spencer and other critics of radical Islam; $700,000 was spent to engage journalists. Daily Caller
- Ploughshares Fund – According to the Washington Free Beacon, this is “an organization recently exposed as having provided millions of dollars to writers and experts who pushed for last summer’s nuclear deal with Iran…. “This is becoming a pattern with the Washington Post,” said one senior foreign policy observer who works with a range of newspapers on Iran coverage. “In the last few weeks their journalists have quoted people who get Ploughshares money and their op-ed page has run opinions by people who get Ploughshares money—and none of it was disclosed….” NPR found itself in a similar situation when the Free Beacon disclosed that it had cancelled an interview with a leading Iran deal critic while featuring pro-Iran advocates. NPR also took money from Ploughshares and conducted numerous interviews with individuals tied to the organization.”
- Ford Foundation – in 2012, the Left’s captive Ford Foundation gave over $1 million to the liberal stalwart Los Angeles Times.
- Planned Parenthood – Planned Parenthood has given grants to the National Association of Black Journalists members of which produce one-sided stories favoring abortion. Planned Parenthood has also provided speakers to NABJ conferences as experts in women’s health. Minority Messenger (August 2015).
- Nation Institute – This nonprofit media center is committed to “advancing social justice.” It funds media fellows. The fellows write for multitudinous liberal media outlets: The Nation, Harpers, the Atlantic, PBS, Rolling Stone, etc. More on the Nation Institute here (leftist conferences, awards for radical activists, etc.)
- Knight Foundation – The Knight Foundation funds journalism, according to its website. The listed areas sound innocuous (First Amendment, digital transformation, FOIA), but this is an organization that has funded the far-left race-based group La Raza, the New America Foundation (pushed Obamacare, the public option, global governance, etc.), and the left-of-center media outlet PBS.
- McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism – This program funds grants for veteran journalists up to $15,000. The 2016 Fellows have been involved in a stew of left-leaning publications including The Nation, Rachel Maddow Show, PBS, Los Angeles Times, InsideClimate News, and New York Times. [Editor’s Note – The webpage where this information was found went off-line before we grabbed the URL.]
Political Campaigns and Parties
- Hillary Clinton Campaign – Consultants from firms retained by the Clinton campaign and her affiliated Super PACs regularly appeared on TV as talking heads to support Clinton’s candidacy. Their financial ties to Clinton were not disclosed to viewers. “I think that Hillary Clinton has done everything right. She has run a good campaign,” one paid shill said on air. The Intercept
- Republican Party – A local newspaper posted a video on Facebook with the disclaimer: "This election coverage brought to you by the El Paso County Republican Party." It is dubious that paid political coverage by a political party can ever be ethical, whether it is disclosed or not. Colorado Springs Independent
- “In 1996, journalist James Fallows wrote a book called Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, in which the issue of whether reporters should also be on the paid public-speaking circuit was raised nationally. Fallows argued that when corporations or political groups with agendas pay reporters to give speeches, the mere appearance of a conflict of interest is enough to cause problems for reporters. The big speaking draw at the time was ABC’s Cokie Roberts, who Fallows called “a symbol of speech-circuit excess.” Roberts and her husband, Steve, formerly of the New York Times, took speaking fees of up to $30,000 each from groups and companies that their news organizations covered.” NewsReview.com
- Wall Street – In 2012, (Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley paid speaking fees to financial journalists at a securities conference in Miami.
- Native Advertising – Historically known as ‘advertorials’, native advertising is paid content written by sponsors intended to blend into surrounding material. Per journalistic ethics and federal law, such content is supposed to be clearly labeled (‘Advertisement”, “Sponsored by Acme”, etc.). However, media outlets do not always disclose sponsorship and, even when they do, perhaps a quarter of readers will not realize the media outlet did not write the story. Query: how much money do media outlets make from sponsored content coming from pro-Islamic or left-wing advocacy groups such as CAIR, the Sierra Club, etc.?
- Donor-Supported Nonprofit Model – E.g., The Nevada Independent
- Crowd-Funding – E.g., Kickstarter, Indiegogo.
- Amazon.com "Emerging Writer" Scholarships – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the hyper-liberal Washington Post. (The joke about WaPo’s news slant: ‘World Ends, Blacks and Women Suffer Most’).
- Conferences – The American Society of Journalists & Authors has included sessions on alternate funding sources in its conferences. You can find references to them through a Google search, but the pages have been removed from the ASJA website.
- Listings - There are various listings of journalism grants which are easily found in a Google search. The Columbia Journalism Review lists online news startups funded by grants. Startups listed include the notorious InsideClimate News.
- Local Government Funding – It has come to The Truth’s attention that local news outlets might be getting paid by city governments to boost city events, e.g., festivals, panel discussions, etc. The possibility that local news coverage is being skewed in this fashion should be investigated further.
- The Soros Document Leak – Put in ‘journalism’, ‘media’, ‘reporter, etc.’ in the search box and see what you get. Here’s a taste from the very first hit on ‘journalism’ – “U.S. Programs also supports journalism, particularly at the state level, that is providing detailed analysis and accountability on state budget matters.” U.S. Programs is an initiative of the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. Searching the Soros document cache looks like a very fruitful line of inquiry for someone who has the time to dig into it. Please let us know what you find – [email protected]
Action Items
- Liberato.US plans to approach a certain publicly held media company as a shareholder for information about funding sources for its news division, including the types outlined above. As owners of a company, shareholders have information rights that are enforceable in court. Investors would undoubtedly want to know whether the company’s business model depends on sustainable revenue from the marketplace (subscriptions and advertising)or from sketchy government grants, foundation donations, etc. – which are NOT sustainable.
- Previously this month, The Truth confronted journalism professor Fred Blevens of Florida International University for condoning opinion and bias in news stories. His only response was a vacuous insult: “I could respond but won’t because you obviously are incapable of understanding.” The Truth then sent our story and Blevens’ response to his department chair at FIU, Teresa Ponte. There was NO RESPONSE.
- Liberato.US created a Media Hall of Shame and continues to put journalists in it who write biased stories or commit other transgressions.
- Liberato.US created A Journalist’s Guide to Vetting Muslim Leaders and Mosques to set out objective standards by which to judge news stories on Islam-related topics. Liberato.US hopes to see more Guides like this created by others.
- Liberato.US has gathered a pool of experts to offer briefings to journalists whose stories on Islam-related topics do not meet the standards set forth in A Journalist’s Guide to Vetting Muslim Leaders and Mosques. Briefings have been offered to several reporters. One has refrained from further transgressions; the ones who declined a briefing are now in the Media Hall of Shame. Liberato.US will soon roll the same template out on other topics, with climate change being high on the list.
- Liberato.US has created the legal paperwork to form an investment fund to force publicly held media companies to change their editorial policies and hiring practices. If interested, contact [email protected]. Don’t just complain about liberal media, BUY IT!
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