Propaganda for fun and profit

art credit: no-gods-no-masters.com

Corruption in the media just keeps getting worse. The anchors and pundits brazenly lie. They hardly ever retract. I had assumed the propaganda was ideologically-driven and power-driven, but I had not really considered how much money could be made by manufacturing blatant propaganda for gullible -- or at least uncritical viewers/readers. Stephen Ryan at American Thinker puts a few things together:

Right now, left-leaning mainstream media is getting flogged, and they deserve it for their dishonest reporting on the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory. Mass firings and a month of apologies by Jeff Zucker and Rachel Maddow would not be sufficient to mend the harm these organizations have done to America’s trust in news reporting.

But the folks who truly deserve to be put in their place and totally humiliated are the viewers of these pretend news shows. At what point do the Wellesley and Williams-educated elites look in the mirror and accept the fact that they have been taken for fools? They have enabled progressive media to manufacture rotten journalism. They never turned the channel.  

Most people got a glimpse of Rachel Maddow’s ringmaster act when she ran the elephants around a circle for forty-five minutes entertaining the masses with the promise that Trump’s tax returns would shortly be shot out of a cannon.  As the fuse burned and Rachel Maddow whipped the crowd into a frenzy, insinuating that she had caught the tax cheat, MSNBC producers were madly counting the gate.

Slate Magazine writes: “There was, of course, the mid-month burst of global attention surrounding the program’s unveiling of President Trump’s 2005 tax return, a scoop that yielded a series-best audience of just over 4 million viewers.”

Then suddenly… Boom!  - “TRUMP PAID HIS TAXES IN FULL!!!” Whoops. Cut to commercial.

For a nanosecond, media critics seemed embarrassed.  Slate called it a “mini-backlash among critics who accused Maddow of overhyping the discovery.”

But the ringmaster understood that nobody listens to the critics. What mattered most was the act: the bearded lady would be on the show the next day and the mob would show up.

The Trump tax return debacle, in certain ways, was a game changer for progressive media.

The fallout from the Trump tax return show was that network news producers tossed their journalistic ethics out of the window. The ghost of Walter Cronkite could finally be ignored -- the news legend’s white privilege delegitimized his legacy.  News organizations found themselves free to manipulate or willfully lie to their audience every single day.

And nobody seems to care. Certainly, Maddow’s audience doesn't care -- they show up every night.  Network news producers understand that now. In today’s world, it’s no longer the New York Times’ laughable and pretentious axiom “All the news that’s fit to print” that matters, it’s Randy Newman’s tune, “It’s money that matters,” that news media organizations dance to. Just ask Rachel.

Will there be any reckoning? The rest of the article is here.

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