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A Call for Healing

A Call for Healing
Democrats Call for Healing the Country
Showing posts with label Mainstream Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mainstream Media. Show all posts

Jul 6, 2017

Trump Fights the Chicago Way

Open letter to Never Trump Diehards

What's at stake here is whether the Constitution means what it says. If the left wins, the Constitution, and the law, mean whatever the progressives want it to mean at the moment. The rule of law will be replaced by a dictatorship of regulatory agencies staffed with progressive "experts." The consent of the governed will not be required because progressives believe the people are too stupid and ignorant to give informed consent. This is what the 2016 election was all about. This is what we're fighting about now.

I understand you didn't believe Trump would be an improvement. I had my doubts too. But now we know he is a big improvement over Obama and whatever policy Hillary Clinton might have decided would benefit her, personally, the most. Trump recently opened the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge for drilling with no opposition! He dropped the Mother of All Bombs in Afghanistan, showing he has no stupid rules of engagement.

This is not the time to become picky on style. The Pravda Press has been calling conservatives things like Nazis, fascists and racists for years with no basis in fact and no fear of retaliation. They lately accused Trump of treason and incest without any credible evidence. I don't blame him for counter attacks on twitter. Enough is enough. Being better than they are brought us to losing to Obama twice.

Obama ran a completely outlaw regime that showed every hole in the Constitution progressives could exploit. They were very close to irreversible damage. We can't afford to be nice guys any more. We're fighting Capone, the Chicago way.

Feb 14, 2017

The Internet is Killing the Mainstream Media

  • I think the train wreck of the 2016 election is the result of a shift in medium from broadcast TV to internet.  Other medium shifts in history were shifts from manuscripts to printing, from printing to broadcast radio and from broadcast radio to broadcast TV.  The shift to the internet from broadcast TV has removed all of the barriers to entry in news and commentary.  This website is an example of how anybody can be a pundit now.  The broadcast networks and, to a lesser extent, the big national daily newspapers, have lost their gate keeper oligopoly.   They used to be able to control what was "news" and what wasn't.  With the onset of the internet, circulation or broadcast audience no longer is fixed by location or logistics.   Your writing is available to anybody on the net, world wide.

    The reaction of the former gate keepers to their loss of power has been pretty poor.  It could be characterized as "more cowbell," from the Saturday Night Live Christopher Walken skit.  They have tried to bend the news even further than they used to, so they can prove to themselves that they still have the power, and so that they can push political outcomes in the direction they prefer.  It didn't work in 2016.

    After the election, when their scam was known to have failed, the TV networks and big daily newspapers started talking about the unreliability of "fake news" in order to reclaim some of their lost market share and lost political influence.  It backfired when they all started reporting on a dossier that contained demonstrably false "facts."  My favorite was that the dossier said Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met Russian agents in Prague.  That fell apart when Michael Cohen showed he had never been to Prague in his life.

    The traditional mainstream media, or what I call the Pravda Press, is struggling with a loss of influence and a failing business model at the same time.  I think the two are interrelated.  There's only one network, FOX and only one national daily newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, that take a more or less Republican editorial position on news.  Everyone else is competing for the progressive half of the country.  It's really crowded on the left, and there just aren't enough chairs over there when the music stops for all of the Pravda Press to take a seat.

    The internet is providing free news on demand.  The expense of offering an internet news article or editorial is very low.  Services like Al Monitor that use local people to report foreign news are beating out competitors that have to pay for foreign news bureaus or traveling reporters.  Competition from low overhead internet sites is killing the high overhead broadcast TV and radio networks and the national daily newspapers.  Their behavior is likely to get more erratic as their death throes continue.