China’s Rise, Episodic Stossel Career
Highlight Free Market’s Resilience and Power
Journalism, skeptical independent journalism, used to be called the fourth estate. The meaning of the phrase in American life was that along with religion, government and business . . . the institution of the free press served as a “watchdog” over our society while keeping a free citizenry informed as they must be in a democratic republic. Today that phrase “fourth estate” has lost all meaning. Some have talked about a “fourth house of government” meaning that as the government itself has become a special interest group whose main purpose is growth and self-perpetuation, the mainstream news media have virtutally become a fourth branch (after the presidency, house of representatives and the senate) whose major purpose is also self-aggrandizement and self-perpetuation based upon their pro-government symbiotic relationship. Certainly today’s journalism as practiced by NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN is incestuous, at best^^^ *** and at worst a relationship contrived to protect the leftwing darlings of the media and their projects.
They apparently have been taken in by revisionist history$$ and intend to propagate the benefits they believe that kind of government brings:
What does Rajjpuut mean? Franklin Delano Roosevelt “transformed” government with his “New Deal.” History tells us he was elected as an overwhelming popular choice to escape the uncaring government of the Hoover years. History, at least the history written in progressive history books (those that want us to progress beyond the Constitution), that history is a record of lies. Hoover was a progressive Republican who had the same dreams as Woodrow Wilson. Hoover departed markedly from the Harding and Coolidge years by creating programs for the unemployed and several government programs for farmers. So, by understanding Hoover we understand that Roosevelt could not have won by campaigning to be like Hoover. In fact, reading the newspapers of 1932 we get a totally different picture.
FDR ran against Hoover campaigning like Reagan and like Obama. He was elected president after promising pretty much what Warren Harding delivered in 1921-22 when the “invisible Depression was cut down to size by cutting taxes 40% and cutting government spending over 49%. To be precise: FDR won the 1932 election on the promise of a 25% reduction in federal spending, a balanced budget, a sound currency based on gold, to end the “extravagance” of Hoover’s farm programs, and to remove government from areas that “belonged more appropriately to private enterprise.” The Progressive Woodrow Wilson had put us into a Depression and Harding’s efforts got us out; and Coolidge’s continuation of Harding’s policies gave us the Roaring Twenties “the single-most economically-positive decade in American history. For the first time in history a large percentage of people owned such devices as radios and refrigerators and their own automobiles and had electricity in their homes. For the first time in history, farm families mostly had both electricity indoor plumbing. So FDR ran on repeating Harding’s and Coolidge’s policies and then GASP kept NONE of his promises.
Now think clearly on this: FDR created 39 new agencies (and several others) concerned just with the three-R’s: relief, reform and recovery in his first eight years in office. Mr. Obama has already created over ten times that amount of new government agencies just as part of his Obamacare health care “reform” bill. One new law and 400 new agencies. Is that socialism?
Year after year, independent media overseers have attributed a pro-left (bigger government advocacy) bias that shows up in the news as a ratio of between 3-1-1 and 4-1-1 in story treatment. That is, for every single actually neutral treatment or every single negative reference to big government in the media, typically three or four stories glorifying Big Guv are printed or broadcast. Big journalism has thus become an advocate of Big Guv. Certainly what’s also been true is that for over 40 consecutive months now, mainstream journalists have also been unabashed supporters of today’s main messenger of the unending benefits that Big Guv can bring to all of us: Barack Hussein Obama.
While examining the role of journalism in our about to become socialist state, a very good place to start is with the career of John Stossell, an important individual in the field for well over thirty consecutive years now. He began as a crusader, a consumer-oriented reporter finding fault in big business and its products and its effect upon the every day lives of American Citizens. Almost immediately Stossel transformed into an advocate of higher taxes and bigger government which would protect the consumer from abuses of the voracious and greedy. Soon he was pro-left government all the way advocating deep government involvement in the marketplace and all sorts of watchdog Big Guv agencies to protect us from corporate greed, malfeasance and dare Rajjpuut say it? He was advocating greater government as a tonic for the evil nature of business itself, the misbegotten spawn of satan that it is . . . . Stossel gained a huge following and his career took of straight to the top at ABC News. But Stossel still retained his basic journalistic objectivity which came out in rare moments in revelations of the huge waste and continued abuses of government against both citizens and businesses. Suddenly, Stossel was seeing the world through different eyes . . . . and he stopped winning Emmy awards (he had won a total of nineteen early in his career. His coverage which used to attack corporations, now increasingly began to attack government.
He had seen in his long career, that increasingly the greater government intervention that he’d been calling for evolve into a greater problem than had existed in the first place. He began to re-examine his stance. “I viewed the marketplace as a dog-eat-dog cruel place. I saw people needing government and lawyers to protect them from business. But once I’d started seeing more and more government regulations at work, I came to believe that markets are ‘magical’ and the best protectors of the consumer.”
The magical link above, Rajjpuut avers, tells the story of the free market better than any other . . . .
Returning to Stossel after viewing up close and personal the costly failed debacles that resulted from virtually all the Big Gub solutions that he, his media friends, and the politicians they were backing had prescribed for society’s ills and watching these programs become expensive millstones around the taxpayers’ necks while making tolerable situations untolerable . . . Stossel changed dramatically. “Solutions invariable wound up creating larger problems at the cost of billions of dollars.” Stossel is now a free-market libertarian and author of two books. In October of 2009, tired of having his anti-big government exposes drowned out at ABC by the crescendo of cheerleading for Barak Obama’s prescription for America Stossel left ABC News after twenty-eight years with them, and took a position with Fox News, the clear and away “most free-market oriented network in America.” The public, by and large agrees with Stossel’s assessment. Survey after survey shows that about 64-67% of all viewers regard the mainstream media as too liberal while only 20-22% of viewers regard the media as too conservative. Those reports from Gallup over the last ten years have come as mainstream media have lost respect from the age 25-54 key demographic of consumers and viewers of news programming and suffered an across the board 40-45% drop in viewers. At Stossel’s new gig, Fox News program after program has soon viewership climb from 30-60% over the last couple years.
Today Fox has more viewers than CNN, MSNBC and CNBC CONBINED and has been the nation’s top network for well over one hundred consecutive months. Stossel’s own program thrives not on Fox News but on Fox Business Channel but he is a frequent visitor to Fox News where he delights in the fact that he seldom gets “softball questions.”
The mainstream media today is about 90% caught up in advancing Obama’s socialist agenda without ever mentioning the word “socialism.” They have, for example, totally ignored the question of “Climate Gate” giving virtually no coverage at all to the story, which is clearly the single most important “scientific” hoax of the last sixty years. Climate gate is a clearly Socialist attempt to put huge portions of our economy under government’s thumb under the guise of protecting us and protecting the environment . . . so clearly Climate Gate deserves a neutral hearing in the mainstream media, one might guess. Rajjpuut, continuing the theme, asks you the reader the following series of hardball questions that never get broached on the mainstream media even by their comparatively most objective journalists. If you can’t answer these questions logically, but still favor Obama’s agenda, perhaps Stossel might describe you, like Big Guv, as part of the making the problem worse.
1. If leftism (larger government role, more government interference in business and individual lives and much more government spending) is the answer why did communism fail so spectacularly in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact (eastern European) countries?
2. If socialism is so great, why was a wall around Berlin built and an “Iron Curtain” necessary to keep people from flooding out of Berlin and the socialist communist countries?
3. Why does the mainstream media never talk about the $108 TRillion boondoggle that the combination of Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid has become? Can they not understand that this is our children AND grandchildren’s future at stake?
4. Why does the mainstream media never remind Americans that while Hitler’s policies killed almost thirteen million CIVILIANS, Stalin’s cost the lives of almost twenty-eight million; and Mao’s policies killed fifty-five million CIVILIANS in PEACE TIME?
5. Why is it that the resurgence of Chinese power, culture and influence in the world juxtaposes with the adoption of capitalism there?
6. Why is it that Barak Obama’s “Dreams from My father” (his first autobiography) was never properly vetted by the mainstream media? . . . it clearly is a glorification of socialism, is it not?
7. Why did the mainstream media never explore Barak Obama’s communistic upbringing? We know fifty times more about the mercurial John-John Kennedy’s homelife than we do about the childhood of our 44th president, wouldn’t you say?
8. Why is Black racism never explored? 96% of Blacks voted for Obama while he received more White votes (almost 48%) than Kerry and Gore did, yet don’t the mainstream media repeat without any investigation every trumped up charge of racism, bigotry and hate-mongering against conservatives, is that neutral media coverage?
9. Why have Barack Obama’s connections to avowed communists; to violent radicals; and to out and out nutcases like the Ehrlichs and Holdren never been brought up, much less explored? Why despite one debacle after another has he had not one week since 2007 where his negative media coverage outnumbered his positive coverage?
10. Why has the mainstream media refused to explore Obama’s campaigning for a communist presidential candidate (Raila Odinga) in his father’s native Kenya? To show pictures of Obama dressed in Muslim garb twice? To explore Odinga’s “memorandum of understanding” (sharia) with the Muslim community in Kenya which in the event of an Odinga victory would have made Kenya a Muslim nation by law; banned missionaries; and banned religious programming other than Muslim on radio and TV. Why was nothing reported about Muslim riots, arson, and rapings and murders against Christian Kenyans? The nature of Obama’s connections to Kenya is a real news story, is it not?
11. Why is it that Barak Hussein Obama, Sr.’s name has become corrupted to Barack with a ‘C’ and why is it that there is no history of the names of Barack our president by the media? Barak Obama, Jr. , Barak Soetoro (his second father’s last name – at the time Barak was attending Muslim schools in Indonesia), Barry Obama, Barry Soweto and finally Barack Obama are all significant moments in Barack’s young life, no? And why has Barry Soweto’s (his name as an undergraduate during his clearly most communist and radical years) existence been completely covered up? Didn’t President G.W. Bush’s youth receive roughly one-hundred and fifty times as much coverage?
12. Why is it that Barak Hussein Obama, Sr.’s defense of 100% taxes in Kenya not deemed important, his son wrote a whole worshipful book about “Dreams from My Father” and this is an important part of those dreams? In the first paragraph of Obama’s father’s most famous economic monograph (Problems with Our Socialism) he defines the “scientific socialism” he prefers as “communism,” shouldn’t that have been of interest to neutral journalists?
13. Why is it that Stanley Anne Dunham and Stanley Armour Dunham’s unabashed communism, never been explored in the mainstream media? Isn’t the influence of the two most key people in raising our president important?
14. Why have Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Americanism; Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Americanism and anti-semitism; and Al Sharpton’s anti-semitism never been seriously discussed . . . these are three key Obama supporters, no? And why does the media give Obama a free pass on not placing his hand over the heart or repeating the words when the Pledge of Allegiance is given? What is it about this man that encourages the media to look the other way as one red flag after another is revealed to them? Perhaps the question should be re-phrased, what is it about the media that makes them willing overlook serious warning signals that Barak Obama is NOT really good for America?
Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
