Ray9
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2016
- 2,707
- 4,472
- 1,970
- Banned
- #1
There has been a lot in the public discourse lately about “fake news” and it’s a paradigm that should be studied but it’s nothing new. Fake news has another name and it’s one we all know as propaganda. What’s different today is that in order to recognize fake news we must first assume that there is real news somewhere and it’s getting more and more difficult to distinguish between the two. Real news is something that is reported professionally and objectively based on facts and verified sources. Propaganda is disinformation and misinformation used to inculcate the masses with a false notion of reality. The danger here is when the people begin to prefer fake news to real news.
In the wake of our last election a lot of questions are being asked to ensure the credibility and qualifications of the president-elect and his choices for department heads. Everything is under a microscope and journalists are leaving no stone unturned to investigate those qualifications. This appears to be a good thing but it raises a question. Where was all this investigative journalism when a man with seemingly no past appeared on the political scene and ran for president? There are not many humans in this world that can live an entire life of academic achievement and have practically no one who remembers them with scant documentation that can attest to the fact that they even exist but we just had one in the White House for eight years.
So the question we should be asking ourselves is how was this pulled off? The answer is that news reporting organizations in our democracy abandoned objectivity and authentication practices to publicly display an image of an individual that fit the media-friendly narrative of political correctness- a sparkling academic and the first black president. No media investigations were launched into his past and the watchdogs for the people made no efforts to verify anything. In fact legal roadblocks were thrown up and the favorite tools of propaganda, mockery and ridicule, were used to prevent anyone from doing so.
Now we come to the President-Elect who is the antithesis of political correctness presenting himself as an actual person with a verifiable past that fosters a very different narrative -the first “real” president in many years. He is in fact so real that he is treated like a hostile witness by factions in his own party many of whom like the opposing party have spent decades draining the public coffers to personally enrich themselves at the expense of regular taxpayers. The political establishment is replete with backstabbers like John McCain who, like Barack Obama, has never had a real job in his life.
The losing party was so sure that they had fooled the American people with the propaganda of political correctness-the first woman president-that they are unable to come to grips with the fact that the people were not fooled. So they are resorting to another propaganda tool-McCarthy-era politics to discredit and smear the incoming administration with the label of a secret fellow-traveling communist operative that conspired with the enemy to overthrow our election. It just never occurs to them to do it any other way so they have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous which works quite well with the lowest common denominator that eats propaganda like popcorn.
Buzz feed’s absurd reasoning that the people should make up own their minds in the face of character assassination with no evidence would be like one of your neighbors accusing you of molesting children with no proof and no victims. Just the accusation would follow you for the rest of your life and your reputation would be destroyed. But that’s what propaganda is all about. It’s not to disseminate truthful information it’s to destroy and stigmatize someone who doesn’t think like you do.
The American people need to take a long, hard look at their media, their intelligence organizations and their political establishment. In a democracy the people need to see and hear the truth. They don’t need a media that wants the people to believe what it says while they ignore what they actually see. This does present a pretty picture to the rest of the world.
In the wake of our last election a lot of questions are being asked to ensure the credibility and qualifications of the president-elect and his choices for department heads. Everything is under a microscope and journalists are leaving no stone unturned to investigate those qualifications. This appears to be a good thing but it raises a question. Where was all this investigative journalism when a man with seemingly no past appeared on the political scene and ran for president? There are not many humans in this world that can live an entire life of academic achievement and have practically no one who remembers them with scant documentation that can attest to the fact that they even exist but we just had one in the White House for eight years.
So the question we should be asking ourselves is how was this pulled off? The answer is that news reporting organizations in our democracy abandoned objectivity and authentication practices to publicly display an image of an individual that fit the media-friendly narrative of political correctness- a sparkling academic and the first black president. No media investigations were launched into his past and the watchdogs for the people made no efforts to verify anything. In fact legal roadblocks were thrown up and the favorite tools of propaganda, mockery and ridicule, were used to prevent anyone from doing so.
Now we come to the President-Elect who is the antithesis of political correctness presenting himself as an actual person with a verifiable past that fosters a very different narrative -the first “real” president in many years. He is in fact so real that he is treated like a hostile witness by factions in his own party many of whom like the opposing party have spent decades draining the public coffers to personally enrich themselves at the expense of regular taxpayers. The political establishment is replete with backstabbers like John McCain who, like Barack Obama, has never had a real job in his life.
The losing party was so sure that they had fooled the American people with the propaganda of political correctness-the first woman president-that they are unable to come to grips with the fact that the people were not fooled. So they are resorting to another propaganda tool-McCarthy-era politics to discredit and smear the incoming administration with the label of a secret fellow-traveling communist operative that conspired with the enemy to overthrow our election. It just never occurs to them to do it any other way so they have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous which works quite well with the lowest common denominator that eats propaganda like popcorn.
Buzz feed’s absurd reasoning that the people should make up own their minds in the face of character assassination with no evidence would be like one of your neighbors accusing you of molesting children with no proof and no victims. Just the accusation would follow you for the rest of your life and your reputation would be destroyed. But that’s what propaganda is all about. It’s not to disseminate truthful information it’s to destroy and stigmatize someone who doesn’t think like you do.
The American people need to take a long, hard look at their media, their intelligence organizations and their political establishment. In a democracy the people need to see and hear the truth. They don’t need a media that wants the people to believe what it says while they ignore what they actually see. This does present a pretty picture to the rest of the world.
