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"Newspapers ... serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke." --Thomas Jefferson

"The liberal mainstream media is held in such low regard by the public -- in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles"--Mark Steyn

"If you watch the delusional left-wing media, they make it seem like everyone in America is a Trump-hating liberal who despises the Founding Fathers and hates guns. In reality, nearly all TV programming — news, sitcoms, movies, etc. — comes from just two radical Left-wing cities: Los Angeles and New York City. The people in these cities live in extremist Left-wing “thought bubbles” that are entirely disconnected from the real world. Their goal is to try to convince you that you’re totally alone if you believe in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment or in honoring the legitimate outcomes of elections. In truth, most of America agrees with you, but they’re all too busy working real jobs to produce crappy sitcoms and Netflix programming. LA and NYC don’t represent America; they represent fringe extremism of the delusional Left."  - Natural News

Many of us recognize (although many more, its sad to say, do not) that the electronic media with their high definition sensationalism and sound-bite are hardly an amenable venue for sound reflection on the hard realities of the human condition. For example, in our age of images and symbols(1), elections are easy to capture on film. But how do you televise the Rule of law? Still, that is no excuse for the way they are transforming what should be the news.

Listen to the current apologists for the mainstream media excusing the false reporting they do. The usual refrain of justification is a swarmy-spin that in substance concedes that sure, its fake but its believed to be true. As their great nemesis Rush Limbaugh sums it up, it isn’t the weight of the facts that matter for this media, but the extent of the seriousness of the charge they can dream up that they deem being truthful. Animal Farm anyone?

The Pew Research Center found the gap between journalists and other Americans is particularly wide on social issues. In 1995, 22% of journalists told Pew they were liberal, and 5% conservative, the rest didn’t have the guts to be honest. Now it's around 34% vs. and 7% respectively. Yet 20% of Americans now call themselves liberal, versus 33% who say they're conservative. Since human beings, especially journalists, are susceptible to the fact that we humans tend to form our views heavily influenced by emotions and our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, all news, regardless of its pedigree, is influenced by its background, therefore it seems there’s a disconnect between the audience and the fifth estate.

Reporters exert plenty of influence over their coverage and can't help missing parts of the big picture if they look at things the same way. Yet the trend toward a liberal-biased viewpoint continues to rise. Journalists are often blind to their bias, deciding to cover one story and not another, deciding some people are kooks and not worth consideration. Such practice, known in the behavioral sciences, is called anchoring, whose definition means different starting points yield different results, which are biased toward the initially presented values. As Daniel Kahneman tells us: People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the extent of the coverage in the media.” Intellectually honest people know that leaving out data is just as harmful to the pursuit of truth as getting the wrong data or making logical errors.

In a Gallup poll 45% of Americans said the news media are too liberal, while 14% said too conservative. It also found TV news and daily papers near the bottom - on par with Congress and labor unions - in its ranking of public confidence in US institutions. Approximately 66% of the adult English speaking population of the U.S. finds the national news media too liberal-biased and unbelievable. The result of years of inbreeding of management-ownership? Like minds attracting and employing like minds? Supported by an extreme left leaning education system that teaches that journalism's function is not to inform but to participate in enacting specific agenda?

For instance, 2 obvious important aspects of the news are missing from news reporting:  1st is the effect events are having on our form of government, which determines how much freedom we have as individuals. Missing is how the business of government is being performed according to the Constitution and its solid freedom producing principles.  The 2nd is the views, beliefs or philosophies of most of the American people. What you get now is rather the neo-liberal viewpoint of the major newsrooms. Even when a conservative view is expressed, it always seems to be countered by a loud, ridiculing rather than cogently fact supported neo-liberal viewpoint. The leftists in the media, in addition to those in government, including its education arm, work in unison to attack the very foundational principles and ethics that work to make our country the great nation it is. They even have to use government-supported coercion to maintain some of their sources of propaganda and subtle whining, such as NPR, which believes it cannot exist on its own without funds from forced taxation upon the citizenry.

Although there still are a few national daily newspapers with a non neo-liberal view worth reading, such as the Washington Times, the Investors Business Daily, Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, most newspapers are way too liberal for most people. And, it shows. Newspaper revenues are suffering. Has a transition away from them begun? Have new sources of information such as the Fox News Network, or the explosive growth of non neo-liberal talk radio, which holds the dominant market share component of talk radio shows, added to this effect?

Perhaps the liberal media should consider this. It should openly looking for ways to attract viewers back to his failing news programs. It's not even asking conservatives for input. That's a very subtle way of confirming the liberal bias of the mainstream media.  I'd recommend they.

-- Clean house. Replace the gangs of liberal-agenda driven newsreaders with knowledgeable people.

-- Get competent journalists and get back to delivering hard news, the who, what, where, why, how and when.

-- Bring in good editorialists to discuss the news, instead of  stacking the deck with like-minded liberals or figurehead conservatives.

-- Stop copying the liberal hierarchy’s  talking points. Think as individuals and try being original

-- Encourage knowledgeable groups to produce or research topics. They have reams of good information that is totally neglected by major media outlets. Present their work nationally so Americans will have an opportunity to judge for themselves.

-- Stop adding unnecessary liberal spin.

We all, however, have the opportunity to monitor and express our ideas freely on the Internet. Therein lies the point: That the full extent of the "news" is available to all people around the country, equally, all day every day. Could technology be the downfall of neo-liberalism in this country? Not likely by itself but, its surely likely to have a counter-balancing effect on the run away bias of neo-liberalism. The overly biased newsrooms no longer have a lock on the nation's communications.

“In the liberal mainstream media one finds the significant trivialized, and rendered insignificant, the insignificant glamorized and rendered significant. Things of the mind or of the spirit which are literally price-less are ignored…things or products with prices really matter.” ---Donald Arthur Gallagher

“More than any institution in America today the press defines reality and determines the political agenda…the press today often inflames public passions. It sensationalizes, dramatizes, and trivializes the news.”—Fareed Zakaria

“If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are  misinformed.”--Mark  Twain

(1) Affect-laden imagery overwhelms a response based on probability. Salience is enhanced by mere mention of an event, by its vividness and by the format in which described. And low probability events are much more heavily weighted when described or pictured in terms of how many than in more abstract terms of probability.