Americans depend on accurate, balanced information from the media

Commentary by James Shott

After seven months since her last press conference in December, Hillary Clinton appeared before journalists last Friday. As Slate.com reported, “Clinton spoke at a joint convention being held by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).” This lengthy hiatus has brought heavy criticism from Donald Trump’s campaign, and even from the mainstream media.

Clinton held what many called a press conference in Washington, DC, last Friday that was open only to members of the NABJ and NAHJ – two ethnic groups that are generally friendly to her – according to a press release for the event. “It is notable that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has recognized the 2016 NABJ-NAHJ Convention as a vital gathering to discuss her platform and the issues impacting black and Latino communities,” said NABJ President Sarah Glover in the news release. 

While the Slate piece was generally not complimentary of the responses Clinton gave to questions from the journalists, it did not mention the positive reaction she received to campaign positions prior to the question/answer period. Slate suggested the questions were submitted in advance for approval. A campaign appearance at a minority journalist organizations’ convention, with attendance limited only to members of those organizations, does not a press conference make.

It isn’t difficult to understand why Clinton, or any candidate, would want to speak at such an event, but it is fair to ask why objective journalists of any description would allow that, let alone invite it.

The Media Research Center outlined the fondness of CNN’s “New Day” for Donald Trump issues over the issues surrounding Iran and the payment of $400 million in possible ransom money for four hostages held by the Islamic nation. MRC’s Newsbusters.org detailed the allotment of time on the two topics: “CNN set aside nearly half of its air time on Wednesday's “New Day” to various recent controversies involving the Trump campaign — 1 hour, 24 minutes, and 18 seconds over three hours. By contrast, the program clearly didn't think much of the Wall Street Journal's Tuesday revelation that the Obama administration secretly airlifted $400 million in cash to Iran. John Berman gave a 27-second news brief to the report, but didn't mention that the payment was sent on ‘an unmarked cargo plane.’ ‘New Day,’ therefore, devoted over 187 times more coverage to Trump than to the millions to Iran.”

No matter what you believe about the Iran hostage release and potential ransom payment, no matter what actually transpired, the utter clumsiness of making a payment for any purpose that way on that date warrants more than a half-minute in a three-hour program that spent 84 minutes on the Trump issues.

All major media organizations spent hours of broadcast time and dozens of printed pages on the Republican and Democrat nominating conventions. At each of these events one speaker addressed the delegates about the loss of a child.

At the Republican convention the mother of Sean Smith, one of the four American heroes killed in the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, spoke movingly about losing her son, and laid responsibility for it at the feet of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Pat Smith also noted that when her son’s body was brought home, Clinton “looked me squarely in the eye and told me a video was responsible.”

The following week at the Democrat convention Khizr Kahn and his wife Ghazala appeared and Mr. Kahn talked about the death of his son, Marine Capt. Humayun Khan, who died in Iraq heroically protecting his men. Kahn described himself and his wife as “patriotic American Muslims, with undivided loyalty to our country.” He then criticized Donald Trump for his comments about Muslims, and said, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.” Predictably, Kahn’s comments about Trump triggered a response.

“While all the grieving parents deserve sympathy, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network evening and morning shows seemed to only care about the parents that showed up at the Democratic Convention,” Newsbusters.org reported. “Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazala’s DNC appearance earned 55 minutes, 13 seconds of Big Three network coverage, nearly 50 times more than Pat Smith, whose RNC speech honoring her son earned just 70 seconds of airtime.”

The First Amendment protects free speech, and that includes newspapers, television and radio news operations; they are free to say what they like, bound generally by the same restrictions as individuals. The difference is that the public depends upon media sources for information upon which people base important decisions, such as deciding whom to elect to important positions.

Therefore, news organizations have a solemn duty to provide balance to the news they cover and how they cover it, and news journalists – as distinguished from opinion journalists – should be proscribed from injecting bias and opinion into their work. 

These recent examples show decision-making by journalistic organizations in selecting a convention speaker that raises questions about objectivity, and a clear, undeniable lack of balance in reporting on important events that Americans will use in deciding their choice for the presidency and other offices.

Surely the U.S. media can do better than this.

Cross-posted from Observations.

Potpourri: government porn, federal lands, freedom of speech, etc.

Commentary by James Shott

Here’s an example of what can happen when there are too many government employees with too much time on their hands.

A report says that an Environmental Protection Agency employee watches porn for up to 6 hours a day. He makes $120,000 a year, and still has his job.

Nothing epitomizes a government that is so big and inefficient that its left hand has no idea not just what the right hand is doing, but doesn’t even know what its own fingers are doing. Or, just doesn’t care.

When the number of employees in a department or agency exceeds the number of truly essential employees, bad things happen, as the EPA example shows.

Agencies like the EPA are regulators; they produce regulations. Too many regulations exist already, and those people are paid to create more. On second thought, maybe it’s less harmful if they watch porn.

An efficient government, the kind of government we expect, deserve and pay for, should have few enough employees that every one of them is busy 8 hours a day doing beneficial work, serving us to the best of their ability, and to our highest expectations.

One of the major reasons our government has grown so humongous and overbearing is because too many people don’t understand that government is limited in its scope by the supreme law of the land, the US Constitution, and haven’t been paying attention to what is happening, or haven’t protested it. Still others seem to like living under the federal boot or seek control over us.

Did you know that the federal government owns or controls nearly one-third of the land in the US? Do you imagine that the feds are making the most beneficial use of it?

Some of it is used for government installations, national parks and memorials and so forth, which is fine. But much of it either lies essentially unused, like the land where Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his fellow ranchers freely grazed their cattle for decades before the federal government took over the land on the fraudulent premise that a tortoise that lived there was a “threatened” species.

More than a few cited Mr. Bundy as being a law breaker, so they thought it was just fine when the Bureau of Land Management sent 200 armed Rangers to the area because Mr. Bundy has refused to pay grazing fees for many years.

Mr. Bundy’s critics apparently believe that “if government says so, we must do it.” Had our forebears had this attitude, hundreds of singers at sporting events would be badly singing “God Save The Queen” instead of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Other federal lands imprison vast stores of natural resources that would unleash new jobs and prompt energy independence.

When it was announced that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been invited to speak at the Rutgers University graduation and receive an honorary degree, some members of the faculty passed resolutions calling for her to be “disinvited.”  Students protested outside the office of the university president, some with signs calling her a “war criminal” because of her role in the Iraq War and the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding.

Showing she clearly has more class than those faculty members and students, Dr. Rice, withdrew her acceptance. “Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families,” she said. “Rutgers’ invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time.”

And so the tolerant and open-minded atmosphere of the university endures and the grand ideal of free and open debate of important, often conflicting ideas on campuses everywhere may continue for yet a while longer.

Then there is this: “I think that there are impulses in the government every day to second guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers,” warned Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee E. Goodman in an interview. “The right has begun to break the left’s media monopoly, particularly through new media outlets like the Internet, and I sense that some on the left are starting to rethink the breadth of the media exemption and Internet communications,” he added.

You have to admire the determination of the leftists to find a way to defeat contrary opinions when they cannot do so through the power of superior ideas and arguments. When they have control of government resources, they have no compunction about unleashing this power against their political enemies. “Well, we may not be right, but we will prevail.”

I’ve had an epiphany about Benghazi. I have adopted the Dem/lib philosophy: “Dude, that’s so yesterday.”

Since it happened on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s watch, and she is satisfied that all the questions have been answered, shouldn’t that be enough for anybody? What difference, at this point, does it make? Now I can focus on other liberal goals, like which of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights we should trash next.

Oh, have you heard that a new helicopter fleet to ferry the president for short distances is being considered, and that the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will only cost $20 billion?

Cross-posted from Observations

Death of a Free Press in America?

Death of a Free Press in America?
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet

*****************

Maybe it is just my natural paranoia at work, but I get the gnawing feeling that somewhere, in a dark corner of the Obama Regime, there is a huddle of “Obamanites” in a whispered discussion in which they examine the possibility of a takeover of the press in the US.

I know, I know. It’s just another conspiracy theory, right? Could be. On the other hand, it IS what a socialist government does -- and make no mistake about it -- the United States is now a socialist state run by a socialist government… at least until November.

Look, bailing out the newspapers is the same as throwing money down a rat hole. What the papers need to survive is readers – subscribers. The are losing readers and subscribers, in droves, because their readers have finally caught on to what can only be described as the mainstream media’s “leftist agenda.” The bottom line is – readers don’t like it and are no longer reading those “leftist rags.”

If the Government does, indeed, devise some way to bail out the major newspapers in America, two things are certain: One – neither the government nor the newspapers will ever refer to it as a “bailout.” Number two -- the government will “own” those newspapers and the government will control what is printed or not printed in them. For a model of how this would work simply check the old Soviet Union.

In the area of North Carolina in which I live there are three daily newspapers. Major newspaper corporations own two of them and one is an independent. All three are leftist papers. If I want to reads balanced news or news with a conservative viewpoint, I must either watch Fox News on TV, or get on the internet and look go to a conservative news site to get it. And that is exactly what those who used to be readers and subscribers of these papers are doing. But the owners and editors of those papers have their heads so far up the leftist agenda they are tone deaf to the oh, so obvious, reason for this vast migration away from their publications!

It is a sad commentary on the mainstream media in the US when Americans find it necessary to use the Internet to go off-shore to find a source of news that will inform us as to what is REALLY happening in our country, and in, what I laughingly refer to as, “our government.” But millions of Americans are doing just that. I am among them.

It is almost a ritual, at my house, to read the paper over morning coffee or breakfast. But, hey, we can do without it. By the time my carrier gets the daily paper to me these days, I have already read the news on the Internet. Such is the era in which we live.

There is already far too much government interference and just plain meddling in the affairs of business in this country. That is the nature of a socialist government such as we have in America today. Call it what you will, journalism protection, bail-outs for newspapers, it still means the government is curling its fingers around the throats of those who own those news organizations and soon they will begin to squeeze. Taking government money means you do as government says.

Those in the Obama Regime who believe that a government should never allow a crisis to go to waste are busy taking advantage of the current financial crisis in America, and around the world, to shove their socialist agenda down the throats of businesses forcing them to accept government control in exchange for a few more months, or years, of existence.

In my opinion those are Faustian deals… selling one’s soul to the devil in exchange for favors from the devil -- even if those favors are just crumbs from his table. Some make the Faustian deals because they believe in the devil’s agenda. Thus it has always been throughout man’s history on this planet.

Look, newspapers are the modern day dinosaurs of the news media. Eventually they will go the way of the dinosaurs. They will become extinct. It is not advisable to interfere with the natural cycle of progress, even in business -- one could say -- ESPECIALLY in business. As the newspapers die off they will make room for whatever is to take their place.

Having no newspaper to peruse over breakfast is much more acceptable than having a newspaper of which the government is the editor. I shudder to even think of it.

Any government bailout of the press, in any form, simply means no more free press.

A government, which controls the flow of information to its citizens, will have ultimate power over those citizens. Under the Obama Regime, America is heading in that direction as directly as a Martin flies to its gourd.

J. D. Longstreet