The New Ministry of Truth

It appears that the new Ministry of Truth has quietly altered President Obama's words. During a bizarre policy review and statement to the (late night talk show watching) American people, the President made a particularly awkward gaffe when he misplaced three major American cities. He said: “I don't know. As you know, for the last three years, I’ve said, let’s work together. Let’s find a financing mechanism and let’s go ahead and fix our bridges, fix our roads, sewer systems, our ports. The Panama is being widened so that these big supertankers can come in. Now, that will be finished in 2015. If we don't deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia, or Jacksonville, Florida — if we don't do that, those ships are going to go someplace else. And we’ll lose jobs. Businesses won’t locate here.”

 

This is what AP reported: 

"If we don't deepen our ports all along the Gulf — (and in) places like Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga., or Jacksonville, Fla. — if we don't do that, these ships are going to go someplace else and we'll lose jobs," Obama said.

That kind of changes the meaning a little, don’t you think? I suspect that the media propaganda machine would not offer such a correction had the person speaking been a republican or a conservative. In fact the mockery would have been epic.

‘A basic tenet of journalism (in theory at least) has always been to not have a vested interest in the story you’re covering. Personal bias, relationships with the covered, would put a reporter’s appearance of neutrality at risk and risk losing the public’s perception of unbiased reporting and journalistic fairness. If the “news” agency loses credibility, they risk simply becoming an irrelevant mouthpiece and with that go the readers/listeners/watchers and of course, revenue.

So what has happened in the last 8 years or so? One problem area is when the unbiased media and/or its reporters have relatives or a spouse who are actually part of the story. Of course, that’s exactly what we see with the Obama administration; incestuous family ties between the White House and the alphabet-soup news sources.

Not surprisingly, every news organization says there are no conflicts either real or potential involving their journalists or their programs. I guess bias depends on which side of the “news” you are on. Here is a little list of prominent news people with close ties to the White House:

 ·   ABC News President Ben Sherwood, who is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top national-security adviser to President Obama.

·    His counterpart at CBS, news division president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a key foreign-policy specialist.
·   CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, who until earlier this year was deputy secretary of state under Hillary Rodham Clinton.
·    White House press secretary Jay Carney’s wife is Claire Shipman, a veteran reporter for ABC.
·    NPR’s White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, who joined the White House counsel’s office in April.’

I mean ca’mon

I goes on… In December of 2012, four of MSNBC’s prime time TV hosts and pundits were spotted entering the West Wing of the White House for a “special” meeting with the president. These special guests were: Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton and Lawrence O’Donnell. Interestingly, Chris Matthews, a breathless Obama sycophant, was apparently not on the guest list. Maybe he didn’t want to appear biased (ah ha ha ha!   …oh,sorry).

The spin of course went like this; “This afternoon at the White House, the President met with influential progressives to talk about the importance of preventing a tax increase on middle class families, strengthening our economy and adopting a balanced approach to deficit reduction,’ White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement.”

I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but are these the sort of principled experts you want advising the POTUS on economic policy?

That other paragon of unbiased reporting, the Huffington Post, said at the time “Obama scheduled the meeting with Maddow and other ‘progressives’ to discuss the importance of extending the Bush middle-class tax cut.” When looking deeper, it seems that those “other progressive media” types were in fact staffers from the Washington Post, Daily Kos, and of course, the Huffington Post. No conservative or alternative or differing views at all.

A little further back, in November of 2012, MSNBC’s president publicly discussed how he wants to change the network’s obsequiously prObama representation. Back then even Bill Clinton saw the blatant propaganda machine that MSNBC had become. As of August 2013, it looks like there is still a lot of Obama apple-polishing going on at MSNBC. Just look at this Breitbart article.

These relationships clearly play a role in how the media covers Obama and his administration. In particular, look at the tepid response to reporting on Benghazi, and the seeming lack of interest pursuing any of the myriad of scandals piling up.

I love The National Review Online… they made very clear that such ties amount to nothing more than professional incest: NRO’s Mark Steyn wrote this in a posting titled Band of Brothers: “The inbreeding among Obama’s court and its press corps, is more like one of those ‘I’m my own grandpaw’ deals…”  

Whatever your view of the media and its apparent bias, it is hard to deny the obvious differences in treatment that this President and his administration has received compared to Republican politicians or conservative issues. Had a Republican or conservative been behind the wheel while all these scandals where going on, the impeachment proceedings would be well under way and there would be rioting in the streets. It never ceases to amaze me how liberals-progressives-leftists can keep a straight face when confronted with these facts.

Using the IRS as a weapon, NSA spying, attacks on journalists... This sort of stuff cannot be defended by anybody. But todays liberal-progressives-leftists have somehow been able to get beyond these obvious philosophical quandaries, Goebbels would be proud.

Todays media has become the Obama administrations Ministry of Truth, but I think that when George Orwell wrote 1984, it was as a warning of what might come to pass, not as a playbook. I'm afraid he couldn’t foresee that this administration would use it exactly that way.

 

(Sourced from the Washington Post, HuffPo and Breitbart news.)