Last week, new President-Elect Donald Trump called an extraordinary hour-long meeting of television journalists at Trump Tower. Invited to the convocation were Charlie Rose of CBS’ This Morning show, George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s Good Morning America, Lester Holt of NBC’s Nightly News and Wolf Blitzer of CNN’s Situation Room along with numerous other major news personalities. Also in attendance were the presidents of NBC News, Fox News and CNN.
The journalists, producers and executives were told that Trump had a number of off-the-record announcements to make regarding press access to be given to the new presidential administration.
But once Trump had gathered all of the attendees in the same room, it quickly became clear that no information was to be offered that day; instead, what the newsmen got was a thorough browbeating and excoriation by Trump, who was outraged that the media had been so clearly biased against him in the months and weeks leading up to the presidential election.
It was is if the media had been acting as an extra arm of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “I hate your network; everyone at CNN is a liar, and you should be ashamed!” Trump raged at CNN president Jeff Zucker. Other news chiefs were yelled at in similar fashion.
But it wasn’t only Trump who had come to this conclusion; at least 90 percent of the nation’s voters have lost their trust in the mainstream media, according to recent surveys. Indeed, despite editorials decrying “fake news” on third-party and independent websites and social media, it’s the major broadcast networks and newspapers who are the prime culprits of the fake news phenomenon via their incessant publishing of propaganda that favors globalist stances on trade, migration, national security, foreign affairs and the economy.
According to website The Free Thought Project, large mainstream media lies such as telling the public that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in 2002 have led to the deaths of at least 1.5 million people in the past several decades.
Currently, on the website of whistleblower organization WikiLeaks, there’s a list of 65 journalists who colluded with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to publish quotes, edit interviews and promote policy positions that were favorable to her and to the Democratic Party.
While it’s true that Trump scored roughly $2 billion in free publicity (much of which was positive) during the primary season from the major broadcast networks, once the primary season was over, that coverage turned virtually entirely negative.
In fact, there’s even an argument to be made that it was these same networks promoting Trump in the first place that’s responsible for making him Hillary Clinton’s opponent, a rival she vastly preferred over any other Republican candidate due to highly unfavorable public opinions of the reality television star, according to WikiLeaks.
In terms of media slant, two major outlets to point fingers at are CNN and The New York Times. The former, often dismissed as the “Clinton New Network” due to how biased it’s been in favor of the Democratic candidate, has gone out of its way to present heavily distorted perspectives of the news.
It’s helped Clinton via coverage that’s selectively omitted comments she made that were deemed negative and cut footage of her collapsing at a 9/11 anniversary tribute so that it merely appeared as if her aides were helping her to walk steadily that day. CNN has been extremely hostile to information provided by WikiLeaks, has warned Americans that reading WikiLeaks’ information is “illegal” and has deliberately ignored stories and issues that were raised by WikiLeaks revelations.
The New York Times in some ways has been even worse than CNN because it has a far longer history of neutral objectivity and integrity that could be pointed to prior to the 2016 campaign. But at some point — as was confirmed in a New York Post article entitled “NYT: We Blew It on Trump” — the Times made a conscious decision to favor Clinton because it considered Trump “an abnormal and potentially dangerous candidate,” in the words of Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg.
The day before the election, news stories on the New York Times website were interspersed with banners reminding readers that Hillary Clinton had a “95 percent” chance of winning the presidency.
Angry Times readers reacted predictably. One reader, Kathleen Casey of Houston, sent a letter to the paper which read in part, “you may want to consider whether you should change your focus from telling the reader what and how to think, and instead, devote yourselves to finding out what the reader (and nonreaders) actually think… Please come down from your New York City skyscraper and join the rest of us.”
Anchor Joe Scarborough of MSNBC said in the wake of the election that if the editorial board of the Times thinks that 50 million American voters are “racists and bigots… I take pity on you.”
Times executive editor Dean Baquet was behind much of the decisions to insert obvious bias into stories — decisions that the Times ended up apologizing to its readers for in a public letter from Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. on November 11, which implored readers not to cancel their subscriptions to the prestigious paper.
Of course, less discussed were any connections the paper has with influential billionaires and multinational corporations, many of which are advertisers and supporters of the Times and have connections to its ownership.
Certainly, it’s this clear lack of integrity and obvious bias that Trump is rightfully so upset about. To gather all of the news people into one room to send a message to them is a signature Trump method of communication.
The only problem is, it probably didn’t have much of an effect because these outlets already have their marching orders from globalist interests; they’re not going to give them up just because a president of the United States gathers them in a room and yells at them.
Indeed, even though Times publisher Sulzberger and many of his editors met with Trump personally the next day for several hours, the Times hasn’t changed its strategy of dropping a few unvetted or biased statements into an otherwise objective story to say that Trump’s campaign is connected to Russian propagandists, for example, or that Steve Bannon is an anti-Semite who must be kept out of the White House at all costs. Given how things have progressed after its meeting with Trump, it’s unlikely that the Times will be changing its tune anytime soon.
Nor does it appear that CNN’s Jeff Zucker got Trump’s message from his meeting the other day at Trump Tower; a recent CNN story about illegal immigrants supposedly not voting in huge numbers was entitled “Trump Falsely Claims Voter Fraud.”
Clearly, these mainstream media outlets have decided that bias is more important than objective reporting. As amazing as it appears, a decision seems to have been made that supporting globalist interests is more important (read: more profitable) than telling the truth.
In the long run, it remains to be seen if these news outlets’ viewers and subscribers will drop following their decisions. But clearly, we’re living in a new era of media that needs to be addressed with vigilance, complaints and rebuttals whenever and wherever possible if conservatives seek to have any chance at fair and balanced coverage of their issues.
~Conservative Zone
