America Has Become Its Own Worst Enemy. And The American News Media Is The Reason Why.

As a slightly older Canadian and border towner, I grew up at a time when America was truly the greatest country in the world, by a long shot. And believe me, as a Canadian, we were strongly influenced by everything that went on there.
But unfortunately that’s no longer the way things are. America is confused, frustrated, angry and most of all deeply divided.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMqcLUqYqrs
And this divide is being fueled in great part by the greedy ratings sluts known as the American electronic news media.
Back in the day the news took a few hours a week out of our lives and we got it delivered to us by people like Edward R Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley & David Brinkley.
These were all honorable men, who had real integrity. They were true journalists. They were also part of the world of broadcast news that wasn’t dependent on ratings or even advertising revenues to keep itself going.They were beholden only to their professionalism and getting to the truth.
People watched the news and got a fairly well balanced impression about what was going on in their world. Or at the very least an impression that made sense.
Everything in America was growing in the fifties, which is when I was a kid.
Yeah, there was a cold war with Russia but we didn’t go around living in fear about a nuclear holocaust. Because guys like Murrow explained to us that mutually assured destruction was what was keeping the world from blowing itself up. And it made perfect sense.
In the sixties and seventies all that started to change, especially when the US got into a war that they could not win, and started trying to influence the media to soft pedal that.
But the generation of people, later called boomers, who were coming of age and had very definite points of view on things. They became the conscience of the country and worked hard to expose the culture of lying that surrounded news of the Vietnam War
The great divide between the left and the right started in earnest around this time, and the media’s attitude was simply. If you can’t beat it, join it.
And so they did. And that was the beginning of a real mainstream bias applied to news reporting. It wasn’t anything really blatant. Mostly just attitude. But they knew what they were doing. 

And that would have been OK except for the fact that the majority of this stuff was happening on television, which as we all know is the greatest propaganda tool ever devised.
Mainly because people tended to believe whatever they saw on TV. Governments knew this and the people who owned the networks knew this too.
Since the amount of ideological Imperialism and internally generated conflict in the US has been growing exponentially since that time, so too has the news media grown in size and, arguably, importance in people’s lives.
Too big and important to the powers that be to be a relatively small expense for the networks, news reporting became very much a ‘for profit’ marketplace and subject to intense lobbying and other forms of information corruption.
Then came cable news, independent networks and big network satellites. Slowly but surely they expanded to round-the-clock coverage and almost immediately created a massive explosion of this biased information masquerading as news.
The average American was being assaulted from every direction by differing points of view. Because like the population, the news media was split into left and right was well.
The search for objectivity became an exercise in futility, as it is with all forms of cultural propaganda. Pretty soon the whole country became dazed and confused.
But in the process a great many people also became addicted to network news. Mainly because it had transformed itself into a new and terrible thing called info-tainment. It was presented by pretty people whose sense of journalistic integrity was non-existent, but whose ability to get the point (read bullshit) of view across was admirable.
All this stuff. All these forces: addiction to TV, biased news reporting, high TVQ requirements to make an impression, the need for ratings which meant revenue which meant expansion, turned the news business into this gnarly little intellectual torture chamber, that distorted the truth to fit its persona.
But most importantly, the medium wasn’t just as Marshall McLuhan postulated, the message. The medium was the controller of the message, and therefore the controller of a great deal of public opinion.
In America, public opinion has come to be a true oxymoron.
An excellent and relevant example of this opinion engineering is the Republican nomination race, where the media chose Donald Trump as their pick to click. They then set about creating an environment where this could happen.
Mainly this was achieved by covering Trump virtually non-stop, basically controlling the narrative of the Republican nomination race by only paying lip service to the other candidates, and forcing the front runners to match Trump’s outrageousness in order to get air time.
But hardly anybody involved with the decision to actively promote Trump ever realized just how much ego and bigotry he actually possessed and was willing to spew.
So most recently what you are starting to see is the same media who controlled the rise of Donald Trump now starting to arrange a descent.
The problem is that the Republican party has nobody to offer as a pinch runner when Trump’s ratings hit the bottom.
Following the direction set by the media, the anti-Trump movement is on the rise. Republican big shots who stated they would support the nominee no matter what, are rescinding their support. Donors are refusing to support Trump’s election run. Big sponsors are backing away from the advertising during the convention. And with the conventions looming, all the big time Democrats are using their power to throw fuel on the fire that is burning Trump at the stake.
And it’s all info-tainment and propaganda at its best.
The big problem with all of this is that the agenda of whoever has the most money and influence can now be projected through the news media, which has become the single most powerful influencer of opinion in the country.
In a way it’s as capitalistic as these things get. But in another way, its a genuine example of why America is its own worst enemy.
This is an opinion piece.
It does not apply to everyone in America, where there are still a huge number of people who don’t allow news media influence to shape their opinions. But as news media influence grows, staying objective and doing whatever it takes to really understand what’s going on has become more and more challenging.

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