Failings of the 4th Estate

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The Failing of the Once Proud 4th Estate

This article is not a Democrat vs. Republican article. I am not a Democrat or Republican. It is not meant to be an Obama vs. McCain/Palin article either so as reading this please keep that in mind. I just used these people as examples to illustrate what I feel is wrong and it could apply to any issue in our country today.

People in my family have been very involved in this country for many generations. On almost all sides I can trace my family tree back to the earliest times for this country. Many of the so called Puritans are related to me. In fact at least two presidents are in my family. My great grandmother’s maiden name was Adams so that should give you a hint. Many have fought for our freedoms from the time of the revolution. Some have been so recognized as to be given what would have now been called the Congressional Medal of Honor. I am not saying these things to brag, but because I feel I have inbred in me, love of freedom and democracy.

This is just one of the many reasons I am so upset about the direction of our country of late. In fact I feel from the time of FDR until today we have lost our way. We have veered onto a socialist path form which we seem to be unable to come back. The economic mess we are in and the presidential election are horrid examples of how ill we as a nation we have become. The title of this piece is “The failing of the once proud 4^th estate”. This is one of the most tragic events in our free society. Below is a good definition of what the 4^th estate is if you are not familiar with the term.

The term Fourth Estate refers to the press, both in its explicit capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues. The term goes back at least to Thomas Carlyle in the first half of the 19th century. Novelist Jeffrey Archer in his work The Fourth Estate made the observation: "In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the 'Estates General'. The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate, three hundred nobles. The Third Estate, six hundred commoners. Some years later, after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, 'Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.'"

The fourth estate or press, serves a vital roll in our free society in that they investigate and report to the people about issues mostly political so that those engaged in noteworthy or elicit acts can be found out. The public must put great trust in those so engaged in the press as to expect absolute unbiased investigations and reporting. The press has a difficult job in being unbiased and balanced in their actions an activities. As our old fictional detective Joe Friday would say “ Just the facts mam, just the facts”. Any presentations or reporting would be done in an unemotional professional way. Not leading people in interviews and editing in such a way as to bend or distort what the person being interviewed was or was not saying. In other words they would be fair to all, no matter if the reporter personally agreed of disagreed with that person being interviewed. Even beginning journalism students should understand these simple standards for the profession.

In the recent past, persons calling themselves journalists have become nothing more than puppet propagandists in the worst sense of the word or at best grossly incompetent. Some folks of the national media used to exhibit a degree of professionalism, but of recent they have somehow been transformed. I am not sure what has caused this metamorphical transformation on their part. Maybe they wanted to be cool, young, hip, I don’t know only they could tell you. Even senior newscasters that have for years toiled on the evening news have succumbed to this malady. I suspect but this is only conjecture on my part that a new Max Amann has once again appeared from the grave in many of the newsrooms around the country. A hint on looking up Max ( look under Hitler media mogul). Propaganda is the rule these days not the exception. It is a disgrace of the highest order. We as citizens apparently can no longer trust the press. Their noses are getting longer and longer and no matter what Geppetto, does he can not get them to stop telling tall tales to meet their ends and unlike the story we can not send them to Donkey Island until they grow up.

I will not be voting for any federal candidate in either the Republican or Democratic party until either or both return to the path our founding fathers set for us. I bring this up so that you may understand some of the things I am going to say next. Please read the statement below as a description of someone we may know today.

All and all, he manipulated the people. He would play on different interests to appeal to different groups, and because of his charisma and dramatic speeches, he won support throughout the world. But most of the support came because he gave these people hope and someone to blame. He convinced the people that the others were evil, and by eliminating them, he would solve all of their problems. Most important, he offered a change, and since the present system wasn't working, a change was quite welcome.

Referring to Adolph Hitler after WW2.

Does that sound like Barack Obama to you? Unfortunately it does to me. Do you feel a hook in your mouth my dear fish friends? You will not realize you have been hooked until you are laying on the cold dock gasping for breath. It was not Mr. Obama’s fault personally. Almost anyone would want to be the President of the US, so when others gave him the opportunity I do not blame him for taking the plunge. He is apparently trying to do his best and I do not believe all the crap about him being a Muslim or supporting terrorism, now or in the past. I am not accusing him of being another Adolph Hitler or anything akin to that, just that he really has nothing other than his personal appeal to offer us. He is smart, good looking and a good speaker. But he is in my view, an amateur administrator with very little experience. It is not his fault and the position the press took in this past election had little to do with him, just some very poor and dangerous actions by people in the press who should have known better. If the press just wanted an articulate black man why did they not just pick Will Smith?

For some unknown reason to me, the Max Amanns of the news rooms of MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN wanted him to be president over anyone else. They even did a masterful hatchet job on Hillary Clinton, who, in my judgment, should have been the Democratic candidate. The tears she shed were shed because she knew about the shoddy treatment she was getting in the press. They even lambasted her tears as theatrics. When Ms. Palin came on the scene, they were in a fit of panic to find some way to convince women not to go over to the McCain camp so they selected ridicule. The trick worked and the gullible public bought it hook line and sinker.

How many times did we see the asinine Palin ridicule on Saturday Night Live? Yes they did put a ridicules Hillary skit on the tube and a diminished Joe Biden on as well, but let there be no doubt that Sara Palin was the star. Lately they started to make fun of the Democrats, but knowing their evil has already been done they put on this effort to somehow prove they are balanced in their fun making. The horses had already been let out of the barn and they had achieved their goals of convincing women that Ms. Palin, was not worthy of their vote. They could then afford to be generous and make fun of the other side. How magnanimous of them.

Every woman, let me say it again, every woman in American should be outraged about this. They have made their case that a normal, or a little above normal woman with children who is a governor of a state should be a subject of ridicule and not to be taken seriously. As it is got closer to the election we got an extravaganza of ridicule from SNL as it was on Thursdays along with regular Saturday showing of excellence in comedy. How convenient. Now a man even if he has had zero foreign affairs experience, not to confused with many domestic affairs, that came from a small southern state, famous for chickens and plays the saxophone, was just fine. And he was less than a heart beat away from the president, he was running for president, but then again he was a man, and lets face it, far superior than any woman.

Many independent organizations have reported on just the supposed humor or jokes that have been pointed at McCain and or Ms. Palin. At last count Jay Leno alone had 328 on the republicans and only 18 on the democrats. How funny, how funny in the worst way. Even the comedy channel was not as unbalanced as that , they actually made fun of Mr. Obama more than McCain and Palin. There are many places to find the statistics on biased reporting and joke telling on the internet. One real good place to look at this analysis of the subject is out of George Mason University. They produce interesting reports on this subject. Snopes.com reported that there were 10 major articles on the Internet about Ms. Palin. All but one of them was false. MSNBC reported that she thought Africa was a country not a continent. That was just made up and after the election the reporter admitted he made it up and thought everyone knew it was tongue in cheek. Another report by a CNN reported stated that an article in the National Review was not favorable to her, and when they were challenged made a brief announcement about their error but never apologized or made any real attempt to correct the impression they had made to the public.

Please read the report below by one of Americas best political observers and reporters. Listen to what he says. It is about as close to what I would like to say if I had the skill. And remember again that I am not a Democrat or Republican, I did not vote for president or any federal office. I did vote, however, for candidates on the state and local level. Of the 14 partisan positions up for election this time I voted for 11 Democrats and 3 Republicans. I knew personally one of the Republican candidates or it would have been one less Republican for me.

By Orson Scott Card

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know. This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration. It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans. What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay. The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating. They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them. Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.) Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate." Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed. As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party. Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout! What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae. And after Franklin Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing. If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was. But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign. You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama. If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis. There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.) If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression. Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to. If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate. Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naïveté time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing. Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means? Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for? You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles. That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there. If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices. Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door. You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way. This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion. If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe --and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie. If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard. You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

End of his article......

I really believe we need to do what ever is required to bring pressure on these folks to bring them back on the correct path of good journalism. It is too late for this election, but maybe if they learn anything, future elections may be conducted better in the press. Almost all of the media outlets did a poor job, but certainly MSNBC and NBC were the worst of the lot. Here is some background information. NBC Universal is a media and entertainment company formed in May 2004 by the combination of General Electric's NBC with Vivendi Universal Entertainment (part of the French Media Group, Vivendi Universal (now Vivendi SA)). GE owns 80% of NBC Universal with the remaining 20% owned by Vivendi SA. The company develops, produces, and markets entertainment, news, and information to a global customer base. NBC Universal owns and operates a United States television network, numerous cable networks, a group of local stations throughout the country, motion picture companies, a number of television production companies, and multiple theme parks. Universal Music Group was not included in the 2004 deal and is not part of NBC Universal. MSNBC is a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft Corporation.

Jeff Zucker was named president and CEO of NBC Universal on February 6, 2007, replacing Bob Wright, who remains chairman of NBC Universal and vice chairman of General Electric. Zucker previously served as chief executive of the company's television operations. The logo of NBC Universal is a combination of the NBC peacock logo and the Universal Studios globe and text.

Maybe it is the French Media group that is the Max Amann here, I am not sure. I know the French are mad at us for catching them with their hands in the oil for food scam in Iraq. I would hope they would not be that petty, but only they know for sure. What I do know is that television stations and networks as part of their licensing must provide log books detailing their efforts to balance their reporting and to show they are not biased against any group or favoring any group. Maybe we need a Senate investigation into this matter and possible license review or modification by the FCC.

As for me, I will buy nothing from General Electric or it’s affiliated companies. I will never again watch SNL or the “Nightly News with Brian Williams” ever again. I really thought and hoped that he would continue on in the tradition of Huntley/Brinkley but apparently he too has lost his integrity. I would suggest that you do the same and maybe they will get it. I do not mind investigations, in fact I appreciate them. I love humor and satire and see nothing wrong in pointing fun at politics. That comes with the territory. Things like what they do on the comedy channel shows something more balanced and fair. But the yellow hatchet job done by the main stream press is shameful. Oh and by the way Fox is not getting off either, they have some work to do as well.

Please please please understand. I am trying to be fair myself, so if there are any errors or misconceptions I have made please feel free to contact me via email and I will either retract or modify the erroneous part of this article. If you love this country as I do, and want it to be the strong free place where people accurately report the news, you will help me.