Just like conservative blacks are shunned and smeared by the media, so are conservative gays. Deadspin, a sports blog owned by Univision, published an article titled “Conservative Gays Need to Shut The Fuck Up.”399 And when Caitlyn Jenner “came out” as a Republican, liberals went nuts and completely denounced “her” as a traitor to the LGBT community despite recently having been celebrated as the most famous transgender person in the world upon announcing “her” transition.
“She” received infinitely more hate on social media for being a Republican than “she” did for deciding to identify as a “woman,” and actually said it was harder to come out as Republican than it was transgender.400
TV “News”
Television news is very different from newspapers and magazines which tend to cover stories in much greater detail and context than a fifteen-second sound bite, and require a reader’s active attention and willingness to follow a story. Television, on the other hand, is a passive medium and relies on a quick pace, flashy graphics, and dramatic music in hopes of gaining an audience’s attention and holding it long enough for the commercial break so they can get paid.
TV news only skims along the surface of issues, mentioning a few basic points, and is often just infotainment with no real substance. What the audience sees is a carefully crafted version of a story that the producers and editors want people to see, while leaving out the parts they don’t want.
Famed media analyst Neil Postman noted, “Television always recreates the world to some extent in its own image by selecting parts of that world and editing those parts. So a television news show is a kind of symbolic creation and construction made by news directors and camera crews… and stranger still is the fact that commercials may appear anywhere in a news story, before, or after, or in the middle, so that all events are rendered essentially trivial; that is to say all events are treated as a source of public entertainment.”401
The reason intelligent people listen to talk radio is because radio shows provide long-form interviews and in-depth discussions which explore subjects in detail during a 15 or 20 minute segment, and may even continue the discussion after the commercial break for even longer. In comparison, the average television news segment on a national evening news broadcast is just 2 minutes and 23 seconds.402 For local TV news it’s just 41 seconds.403 Television news is the equivalent of reading the headline of a newspaper article and the first paragraph or two.
Aside from the limitations of the television format, the days of Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America” who anchored the CBS Evening News for 19 years, are long gone. After his era was over we got people like Dan Rather who used fake documents in a report about George W. Bush’s service record from when he was in the National Guard.404 And Brian Williams who fabricated a story about his plane being shot down in Iraq when he was covering the war.405
Most television “reporters” today aren’t reporters, but are just actors. Everyone knows Hollywood celebrities make millions of dollars a year, but most people don’t think about how much money celebrity “journalists” make. They too are performance artists not much different from a Hollywood actor reading their lines. They know when to sound somber, and when to turn up the energy and display faux outrage to the audience when the teleprompter tells them. Many of them don’t believe half the things they say, they’re just playing a part, and for that they get paid very well.
For example, before he was fired from the NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams was making $10 million a year.406 Dan Rather was making $6 million a year at CBS News.407 At CNN Anderson Cooper makes $12 million dollars a year and has a net worth of over $100 million.408 MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough’s divorce documents show that in 2013 he was making just under $100,000 per week!409 Matt Lauer was making $25 million a year before he was fired from NBC’s Today Show for sexual misconduct.410 And when Megyn Kelly was fired from NBC’s morning lineup she left with a $69 million windfall, the remainder of her contract.411
To put these figures in perspective, Anderson Cooper’s $12 million a year divided by 52 (weeks in a year) is over $230,000 a week, or over $46,000 per show. He makes more money in one day than many Americans make in an entire year! And for that kind of money, these television personalities will say and do almost anything.
Being a cable news contributor is also very lucrative, earning pundits an easy six-figure salary to sit around a table for an hour to give their “analysis” on various issues a few nights a week. They know what the host, producers, and network want, and that’s what they deliver. They’re very careful not to bite the hand that feeds them by daring to point out facts that go against the narrative the show is trying to promote.
All of the Big Three broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, and CBS) try to separate themselves from the “cable” shows, but promoting the liberal agenda remains at the core of their existence. That’s not to say they don’t have some value. The major networks are useful to learn about dangerous weather events, product recalls, health scares, etc., and they do cover some events that can’t have political spin put on them and which the general public should be aware of. And it can be important to watch what they are reporting just to be aware of the latest issues they are promoting and see what their current agenda is.
They also aren’t without their own major scandals that should cause viewers to remain skeptical about their integrity as “news” networks. CBS once killed a story about the tobacco industry covering up how addictive cigarettes are out of concerns that if they were sued by the tobacco companies for their report it would interfere with the pending sale of the network to Westinghouse.412 The incident was later made into a movie called The Insider (1999) staring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.413
After allegedly burying a story about Nike using sweatshops to manufacture their clothes out of fears they would lose the company as a sponsor for the 1998 Winter Olympics, CBS reporters wore Nike jackets during their coverage as part of the sponsorship deal in what was widely criticized as a breach of journalistic ethics.414
CBS News has even digitally inserted advertisements for their own network onto fake billboards during live shots using the same technology sports broadcasts use to display banners behind home plate at baseball games. CBS inserted them onto buildings, water fountains, and even on the back of a horse-drawn carriage during “news” reports.415
After ABC News interrupted the network’s broadcast for some “breaking news” about the “Russia investigation,” Brian Ross falsely claimed that Michael Flynn had implicated Donald Trump in the “conspiracy,” resulting in the stock market immediately dropping 350 points out of concerns that the President would now be impeached or arrested.416 General Flynn had made no such allegations and the story was completely false.
A few years earlier during their breaking news coverage of the shooting in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater by lunatic James Holmes, anchor George Stephanopoulos said that Brian Ross found something that “might be significant.” He then went on to incorrectly report that the shooter may be a member of the Tea Party because ABC found someone on Facebook with the same name who had the Tea Party listed as one of his interests.417 It was, of course, the wrong James Holmes.