Posted by
Eric Blankenburg on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 9:38:44 AM
One of America’s mainstream media icons passed away last week of a heart attack at the young age of 58. It’s so sad when someone goes before his time. By all accounts, he was a dedicated family man, good Catholic, and beer drinking sports enthusiast. In other words, he seemed like an all around American guy. I’m sure that I could have enjoyed a nice Guinness with him. I’m truly sorry for him and his family.
In spite of how nice some of the individuals are, I learned years ago not to trust the American media. Here are a few examples why:
During the early 1980s, the far left in Europe were enraged over the plans for America to deploy short range ballistic missiles in Europe. They formed the “Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)”, which staged protests in Paris, Berlin, London, and other major European cities. That year, I spent a few weeks in Greece when I was in the Air Force.
The American airbase was simply an extension of the Athens airport. There were about 50 Greeks working on the base, running the cafeteria, the janitorial service, etc. One day, they went on strike for more money. There was a small picket line. We were told not to go to work. The strike lasted a couple of days.
Every day, we would receive a three day old VHS video tape from the military of the ABC news. One day we got this tape of Frank Reynolds “reporting” on how the CND closed the airbase in Athens. They had videos of these massive protests. The video was not marked “file footage”. We were all scratching our heads. Then we asked the Greek at the front desk of the hotel to take a look. He told us that this was footage of the Greek protests against the right-wing dictatorship from over a decade earlier. It was obvious to all that ABC News was staging a propaganda campaign against Ronald Reagan.
More than ten years later, I sat and watched “This Week with David Brinkley” on ABC, when Newt Gingrich was complaining that the news was not reporting on the blatant and provable lies that the Democrats were telling about some incident. Sam Donaldson responded by telling Gingrich that it wasn’t the media’s job to “report the truth”. Gingrich was stunned.
On a subsequent show, Cokie Roberts started whining about how the Internet was going to “destroy democracy” because it enables people to talk to each other without having the media gods in Washington filter and interpret what we can hear. Luckily for Cokie, there wasn't any internet full of bloggers 25 years ago to inform the American people that the reporting on the incident in Greece was media propaganda. Otherwise, her career might have been cut short.
Finally, this year, the all around American icon unfairly savaged Ron Paul on his show, I suppose because Ron was becoming a minor threat to the establishment political culture.
I have many more examples over the years of why the American media is untrustworthy, but I hope these few examples are enough to illustrate the point.
I am so thankful that the Internet has freed us from being captives of the mainstream media.