TV News LIES

Getting a straight answer in this world anymore is next door to impossible:  You can ring the doorbell for Fact all day and night, but, only Spin will come to the door. The latest case in point:  writing a corporation with a helpful suggestion, where everyone wins. You already know how this turns out, I'll bet.  For the record, and to help flesh out your imaginations, some detail:

We live out in the country, in an area where our drinking water needs filtering from various muds and murk.  We use the handy (but expensive-seeming, for our monthly budget) replaceable-cartridge water filters from PUR.  (Short commercial:  They do a pretty good job.)

Sandy Weill’s name may not be a household word, but it should be. If you want to blame just one man for the banks eating us all alive, he would be the one. As head of Citi-Group (or rather the bank that would become Citi-Group) he pushed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that had kept the banks in check for 2/3 of the 20th century.

He and others of his ilk were able to sell the idea (or more accurately buy the belief from politicians, the media and so-called experts) that modern bankers knew what they were doing. After all there hadn’t been a banking collapse since the end of the Republican Hoover administration in 1933.

Media and civil liberties groups have expressed alarm after the managers of an Olympic venue pledged to intercept and question anyone seen photographing or filming the site, even from public land, and defended security guards who wrongly tried to invoke terrorist laws to prevent footage being shot of the arena.

John Toner from the National Union of Journalists said he would seek an urgent meeting with managers of the O2, saying their tactics had no basis in law. "I’m stunned, and what they say is utterly outrageous," he said.

Americans want to believe their president when he poses as a humanitarian world leader. But Africa knows different. Literally millions have died and been displaced as a direct result of U.S. imperial strategies. “American policy in Africa is to create chaos, and then to present itself as the cure.”

The first systematic look at the New York police department's response to Occupy Wall Street protests paints a damning picture of an out-of-control and aggressive organization that routinely acted beyond its powers.

In a report that followed an eight-month study (pdf), researchers at the law schools of NYU and Fordham accuse the NYPD of deploying unnecessarily aggressive force, routinely obstructing press freedoms and making arbitrary and baseless arrests.

Willard Romney has been on the road again.  There's a picture of him in a working warehouse, standing behind a modest podium sporting this sign:  "Putting Jobs First."

Too bad he didn't have that same attitude at Bain:  It would have saved many workers, families, and taxpayers a lot of pain. But, then, you take a vulture capitalist -- surely a bane of our modern existence -- and link it up tight with pain, hey presto!  Bain!

In one of the most shocking articles that the New York Times has ever put out, a New York Times reporter has openly admitted that virtually every major mainstream news organization allows government bureaucrats and campaign officials to censor their stories.  For example, almost every major news organization in the country has agreed to submit virtually all quotes from anyone involved in the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign to gatekeepers for "quote approval" before they will be published.  If the gatekeeper in the Obama campaign does not want a certain quote to get out, the American people will not see it, and the same thing applies to the Romney campaign.  The goal is to keep the campaigns as "on message" as possible and to avoid gaffes at all cost.  But this kind of thing is not just happening with political campaigns.  According to the New York Times, "quote approval" has become "commonplace throughout Washington".  In other words, if you see a quote in the newspaper from someone in the federal government then it is safe to say that a gatekeeper has almost certainly reviewed that quote and has approved it.  This is another sign that "the free and independent media" in this country is a joke.  What we get from the mainstream media is a very highly filtered form of propaganda, and that is one reason why Americans are turning away from the mainstream media in droves.  People want the truth, and more Americans than ever realize that they are not getting it from the mainstream media.

This is a country whose people self-righteously criticize China for its human rights abuses. This is a country where the public has been aghast at Singaporean laws against chewing gum, and its “harsh” penalties for violations of the law. This is a country whose people have propagated rabid fear-mongering against Muslims, on the grounds Islam supports poor treatment of women and arbitrary and severe punishments (and I have argued in the past that American statism is not so unlike radical Islam).