Yellow Journalism Wins!

It’s official; the news media in this country is completely worthless. After taking over the country from a president who had ravaged our rights and protections, gutted Wall Street regulations, and lied to the world to start a war, President Obama and the Democrats in congress managed to get the economy growing at 3.5 percent, gasoline prices to drop below three dollars, the stock market up to record levels, deficits cut in half, ten million more Americans with health care, and unemployment below six percent for the first time since Obama took office from the moron-in-chief. But that’s not what the news media has been reporting for the past six years. Instead the media been engaged in one long war of attrition against the left by insisting on sensationalizing everything in order to get ratings. Taking their cues from right-wing entertainment organizations posing as news services, most of the mainstream media has become little more than an echo chamber for conservative talking points because of their willingness to shamelessly distort and lie about what is really happening in Washington.

The Ebola non-outbreak is just one example of this kind of completely unethical journalism, and it’s not even political. One person who flew into Texas from Liberia had Ebola and died on October 8th. Two nurses who had worked with the man contracted the virus but were treated early and recovered. Since then, a doctor who flew into New York City from Guinea and tested positive is being treated and is also recovering. That’s it. That’s all there is. There is no outbreak, no epidemic, there was simply a failure in Texas to understand what the first man’s true condition was and since then there has been nothing but successful identification and treatment of the virus. Everything has worked exactly as it should. But in looking at the media one would think that a new Black Plague had been unleashed upon the United States and is ready to plunge us all into a new Dark Age. That is yellow journalism by definition, distorting and lying about events in order to sell newspapers or attract viewership. It is the most insidious problem facing this country today, and yet the American public, lemming-like, seems perfectly willing to follow these Pied Pipers of doom right off the cliff to their own destruction. And that destruction is coming in the form of the complete collapse of our political system.

The great American philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” That was the problem, initially, but things have changed drastically in the last twenty years. Fools and fanatics are now being guided by people who know they are lying and have become so brazen about it over the last six years that they don’t care who knows it. The entire political agenda from the right has become a game. They are utter obstructionist liars who refuse to represent the people who have elected them. Instead they are playing a childish game of who-has-the-power, wresting away control of government from the people and giving it over to their corporate masters in order to line their own pockets. The right has become the party of hatred. They hate immigrants, the poor, the sick, the middle class, the educated, the left, the other in all its forms. They pander to fools and fanatics so that guns and illegal drugs can proliferate, destroying the government’s ability to protect its citizens, all the while spouting their own hypocritical adherence to family values and moral virtue. And the news media is willing to report on it as if it had any meaning at all, and thereby giving it meaning in the possess.

This last election cycle, as meaningless as it actually is, has been elevated to the status of a gladiatorial duel in which the Democrats have been named the slaughtered victims of a vengeful public who refuses to follow them down a path of political destruction. History, it is readily apparent, is not without a sense of irony. From the moment President Obama was elected in 2008, the right has been claiming that they wanted him to fail, that they wanted him to destroy the country just to prove they were right. But, of course, that didn’t happen. And when the opposite happened they took up the task of destroying the country themselves in order to blame the left for it. And apparently it has worked. The republican party wants only one thing: money. And they will harm or destroy anyone who stands in their way. That would be bad enough, but with the media clearly in their camp it now appears that Americans are not intelligent enough to see through their disingenuous maneuvers and are buying into their own destruction at the very hands of their perceived liberators.

But this should come as no surprise to anyone. The media, corporate entities themselves, benefit from the sensationalized reporting of politics and government. This is something that Noam Chomsky and others have been talking about for decades. The media has no obligation to be objective, and yet because of the way reporting has evolved Americans still have that naïve expectation. It’s time to wake up finally to the complete and total corporate control of the media and its product as little more than the reality-TV entertainment that it is. Newspapers are no better, with imbedded advertising masquerading as legitimate news the same way that PR pieces have been doing on televised news for decades. The right, along with its corporate media partners, have won a few seats in the Congress and now have a majority. Whether or not they have any actual control remains to be seen. But one thing is clear, the only thing that we’ll be hearing from the media for the next two years is how Democrats are attempting to block important legislation and continuing to destroy the country. It’s the pot calling the kettle black in its purest and most despicable form. Get used to it, however, because as long as you keep watching you can expect little else.