Continued Media Failures With Trump and the Truth

CNN, Mother Jones and Buzzfeed all reported rumors as news even though they had been unable to verify or fact check any of them as being true. I am quite sure that Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow are turning over in their graves. The problem with having mainstream media fail the most basic tenants of reporting are not just pitiful; but, put us all at risk.

This blog started about philosophy and religion. It then turned to other items, it was only in the third iteration that I began to discuss the news. Once I began discussing news I began linking to the reports and to the source documents. That isn't journalism, that is just responsible writing, which in the case of this blog is really opinion and investigating claims made in the media. I discuss things that many would not and am read by people of varying sexual preferences, races, religions and just about anything else you can imagine. I am also read in countries that I could have never anticipated. In all these 7 years I have never once received a comment calling me bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic. In 7 years I have only received two negative comments and one of them was by a relative that was high and angry and it wasn't about this blog, it was removed.

Why do I mention this. Well, I think it is because what I say is just a reasonable opinion. That doesn't mean that my readers agree with me; but, I don't think they will say I am unreasonably biased or negative unfairly. I want my readers to think about my questions, not follow my biases. I would like to think that overtime people who read this blog trust me because of how I have been in the past, at least enough to consider what I am saying. This is not NBC so I have to earn trust, that is why I link to source documents most of the time. Trust but verify. Unfortunately, that is not working for the mainstream media. We try to trust them but what they say cannot be verified about simple things, like facts.

When I began talking about self driving vehicles, gene splicing, ICANN and how the United States government owns the internet I was laughed at by my own friends and family even though I had provided links to the research reports and industry magazines. It all became apparent in the last few years, all of it. For years I have talked about the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations and other organizations that people didn't believe were real and I linked to their own web pages. This was not good investigative reporting, it was simply objective research. How sad that the mainstream media wasn't telling people what was going on at the same time I was. They knew.

Here is the problem. The mainstream media is more concerned with propaganda than reporting and this election has exposed that to everybody. WikiLeaks proved that debate questions had been leaked to Hillary Clinton and she never told anyone. In gold you are required to give yourself a penalty if certain things occur even if you are the only one that knows. I did not see ONE reporter ask Hillary why she never told anyone she had been given debate questions in advance. They sure would have asked Nixon that.

The media is no longer interested in the news, they are interested in revenue. They are no longer interested in facts, they are interested in impact. The more they influence opinion the more they make. Pretty simple equation. The problem is that the more they are openly pandering the less they are trusted. I watched a year and a half of news reports which spent everyday exaggerating and twisting the most simple things that Donald Trump said and I was a Bernie supporter.

The media is failing to discuss what is going on in many areas and increasingly only presenting a corporate perspective on the news. Here is where this becomes a problem, soon all media will be viewed as biased and incapable of being fair or accurate. When people don't trust any news, they ignore it. That happened in the Soviet Union. Even people who hate Trump will be unable to know if he ever does anything really wrong because they will be told everything he does is wrong. The media is creating a perfect situation for Trump to ignore them and the audience too by being merely propaganda machines.

I have serious questions about what Trump is going to do. Once he is President I am quite sure I will write about many of the things he actually proposes. I don't have to worry about a slow news day costing me money, it won't. I don't have to make things up to get more readers, this site is not monetized and has no advertising of any type. It also only has about 95,000 hits.

The thing to consider is that Buzzfeed, the site that published the 35 page "intelligence" report written by an ex British intelligence agent working as a private company that claimed Trump paid prostitutes to pee on a bed the Obama's had slept on was proven wrong on many aspects and that Buzzfeed could not verify any fact contained in it was true is owned by the same multinational company that owns NBC. MSN- NBC - Comey Told Trump About Dossier After Briefing. The second to last last paragraph says that "BuzzFeed is partially funded by the parent company of NBC News".