During the past year, the conglomerated media outlets that self-identify as National Public Radio (NPR) committed major errors. First, it participated in the blackout campaign waged against Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, the main third party candidates contending against Mitt Romney and Barack Obama for the presidency. (Regardless of the media's efforts to stifle the free flow of information, Johnson received more than a million votes, Stein roughly three hundred thousand.) In the weeks leading up to the election, NPR consistently and repeatedly referred to the Republican (Romney) and Democratic (Obama) candidates as the only two persons running for our highest executive office; not only did NPR not cover the two separate third party presidential debates hosted by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, it didn't even mention that they took place. (Such is the complicity of today's media in maintaining and perpetuating our anti-American and undemocratic two party system that the second round of third party debates aired only on Russia Today, after aljazeera.com one of the most courageous and professional news organizations operating today.)
The second major error committed by NPR is that it reports in detail on most bombings and violent attacks carried out by non-military (insurgent) forces but ignores the daily assassination undertaken against innocent Somalians, Yemeni, and Pakistanis by Americans operating unmanned aerial systems. (Innocent in that the persons killed were never convicted in a court of law.) By tacitly supporting the absurd notion that the American government has a right to conduct and could ever win its War On Terror (terror is a state of mind, and nothing else), NPR perpetuates the lies and misinformation our government needs to keep its citizens ignorant of its regular and enthusiastic violation of international law and the Geneva Convention.
NPR will occasionally speak to a specialist or elected official who has knowledge of the American federal government's drone program, but it rarely airs reports critical of it. Not long ago, National Public Radio was a force to be reckoned with, an upstanding and self-respecting organization that provided the People with information from myriad sources that they could use to make well-rounded decisions. Now, however, NPR has lost much of its journalistic integrity as well as most of the respect it once deserved. Woe be unto us – veritas delenda est.
mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥
Showing posts with label candidate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label candidate. Show all posts
11 March 2013
07 November 2012
America fails, again
America's media outlets fail her People. So widespread is their deceit, and so brazen is their obfuscation, that the 3rd party presidential candidates' debate of 05 November 2012 streamed live only on rt.com, the website for Russia Today. No indigenous source for news – not FOX, ABC, NBC, not even fucking NPR! – has mentioned the name of a 3rd party presidential candidate in the last few weeks, and none of them – not even fucking NPR! – agreed to air Monday night's debate, let alone to acknowledge the existence of candidates besides Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, person such as governor Gary Johnson or Dr. Jill Stein. So deeply entrenched are these media giants – even fucking NPR! – and so fully have they been bought and paid for by the faceless corporations that now control the hearts and minds of millions of once-free ynki, that it is safe to say that this grand experiment of ours has failed. Now, we are following a trajectory similar to that of the Weimar Republic (see truthout.org: “History's Magic Mirror: America’s Economic Crisis and the Weimar Republic of Pre-Nazi Germany”) or the French Third Republic (see truthout.org: “How democracies die”); now, our down-spiral into widespread fascism and state-sanctioned religious extremism is not merely food for thought – it is as certain as death from an Obama drone-strike.
For most of my adult life I have been told that this land's news media is the fourth pillar of government, after, of course, the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; we have seen over the last weeks, however, the true extent of the news-media's sinister power, standing by in silent and docile witness as it corrupted democracy and deliberately destroyed equality and free speech, the very essence of this fragile republic. In that sense, the title of this piece is wrong – it is not America that has failed us, rather we the People who have failed her. I have tried to write about these matters, and I have tried to sound the warning klaxons repeatedly and with growing vigor, but, according to my new slogan: “I write because no one listens.” I could, perhaps, stand out in the cold again holding a sign in protest of or support for this idea or that policy, this notion or that cause, but my efforts would be for naught; just as one can lead a horse to water but not make it drink, so one can lead one's fellow citizens to knowledge but not make them think.
Where does this path we have chosen lead? To the jackbooted and willful destruction of diversity, life, honor, and Truth. This same path is the path taken in the early part of the last century by the people of Germany, who signed away their consciouses for the fleeting security of a chicken in every pot. So vast has our failure become, so readily have we given up our most precious ideals in pursuit of an artificial peace-of-mind and self-enslavement to our material possessions, that we no longer deserve to call ourselves patriots, let alone Americans; real Americans would fight for liberty and not give an inch to petty tyrants ruling from behind the black gates of White Houses; real Americans would demand that all voices be given equal air-time, that all candidates for the presidency be thrown into a room together without make up or polish, prepping or preening, polling or punditry; real Americans would take to the streets in the thousands in order to defend the rights of gays and women instead of shutting off their minds with a click of the television remote. Dear reader, we might have saved a bit of skin by not electing Mitt Romney to the presidency, but our struggle is far from over; indeed, it has just begun. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
For most of my adult life I have been told that this land's news media is the fourth pillar of government, after, of course, the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; we have seen over the last weeks, however, the true extent of the news-media's sinister power, standing by in silent and docile witness as it corrupted democracy and deliberately destroyed equality and free speech, the very essence of this fragile republic. In that sense, the title of this piece is wrong – it is not America that has failed us, rather we the People who have failed her. I have tried to write about these matters, and I have tried to sound the warning klaxons repeatedly and with growing vigor, but, according to my new slogan: “I write because no one listens.” I could, perhaps, stand out in the cold again holding a sign in protest of or support for this idea or that policy, this notion or that cause, but my efforts would be for naught; just as one can lead a horse to water but not make it drink, so one can lead one's fellow citizens to knowledge but not make them think.
Where does this path we have chosen lead? To the jackbooted and willful destruction of diversity, life, honor, and Truth. This same path is the path taken in the early part of the last century by the people of Germany, who signed away their consciouses for the fleeting security of a chicken in every pot. So vast has our failure become, so readily have we given up our most precious ideals in pursuit of an artificial peace-of-mind and self-enslavement to our material possessions, that we no longer deserve to call ourselves patriots, let alone Americans; real Americans would fight for liberty and not give an inch to petty tyrants ruling from behind the black gates of White Houses; real Americans would demand that all voices be given equal air-time, that all candidates for the presidency be thrown into a room together without make up or polish, prepping or preening, polling or punditry; real Americans would take to the streets in the thousands in order to defend the rights of gays and women instead of shutting off their minds with a click of the television remote. Dear reader, we might have saved a bit of skin by not electing Mitt Romney to the presidency, but our struggle is far from over; indeed, it has just begun. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
24 October 2012
no third candidate
Occasionally, while at home or in my car, I listen to NPR, to catch the news and maybe an interesting show or two. In the weeks leading up to the period in this year of 2012 when the electoral collage shall again appoint someone to be president of these United States of America, my local public radio station, WITF, has been focusing much of its attention on this impending appointment, analyzing debates, reporting on the results of different polls, and airing interviews of average citizens and government officials alike. During one segment, this news outlet asked political scientists, pollsters, and focus groups to craft a third-party candidate who might stand a chance of liberating our electoral process from the chains of our current two-party political duopoly (which is effectively a single-party-monopoly, since the asses and the pachyderms are so similar to one another as to be two sides of the same coin). I admit that I only caught the first segment of this show, and part of the second; I did not hear the opinions of the focus groups, only a brief summary thereof; but I fully agreed with the political scientists, who conjured up a candidate bent on freeing America from under the weight of her massively overgrown federal government, a person dedicated to the idea that all persons of legal age should have the right to decide what substances to put into their bodies, be those substances alcohol, hashish, cocaine, tobacco, heroin, or caffeine.
Curiously, however, I did not hear mention of governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian Party in America, who, with a few exceptions, is (with a capital I) the physical embodiment of the the third-party candidate dreamed up by WITF's political scientists. Furthermore, this once-dependable medium failed to mention Dr. Jill Stein, the candidate for America's Green Party, who made such a strong showing at last night's third-party candidates' debate that she has all but won my vote. Pollsters and focus-groups aside (poll numbers are so easily skewed as to make them all but useless, and focus-grouping is for rich people and big corporations that are too risk-averse to make up their own minds), I found it shameful that a public radio group would prove itself so deeply entrenched in the political status-quo as to not even consider mentioning the Libertarian or Green Parties as valid third options for voters sick and tired of America's twin big-business political juggernauts. (It is inconceivable, undemocratic, and unjust that in a land of more than 150,000,000 persons of voting age just 2 political parties have all the power.)
When the wealth of a nation is on the table, the few persons holding the purse-strings will rarely let them go; when the long-term future of a nation is at stake, the fools who got it into the mess in the first place will say anything to shift the blame onto someone else's shoulders. I cannot truly fault WITF, or NPR, for staying with the herd and pretending that debates between but two of the half-dozen candidates contending for the electoral college's appointment to the presidency could in any way change the outcome of the farce that will occur this November 6th. The only hope for America, the only way for us to strip the bloated political machines of their power, is to reshape the entire fabric of this nation; we start by saying, aloud: “This bullshit has gone on for too long”; we start by demanding that the ideals set forth in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are secured for us diligently and without further waffling; we start by standing out in the cold and in the rain and forcing the slumbering among us back into wakefulness. We can have Liberty, equality, and justice in this land, but only if we are willing to fight for them, every day of our lives. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
Curiously, however, I did not hear mention of governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian Party in America, who, with a few exceptions, is (with a capital I) the physical embodiment of the the third-party candidate dreamed up by WITF's political scientists. Furthermore, this once-dependable medium failed to mention Dr. Jill Stein, the candidate for America's Green Party, who made such a strong showing at last night's third-party candidates' debate that she has all but won my vote. Pollsters and focus-groups aside (poll numbers are so easily skewed as to make them all but useless, and focus-grouping is for rich people and big corporations that are too risk-averse to make up their own minds), I found it shameful that a public radio group would prove itself so deeply entrenched in the political status-quo as to not even consider mentioning the Libertarian or Green Parties as valid third options for voters sick and tired of America's twin big-business political juggernauts. (It is inconceivable, undemocratic, and unjust that in a land of more than 150,000,000 persons of voting age just 2 political parties have all the power.)
When the wealth of a nation is on the table, the few persons holding the purse-strings will rarely let them go; when the long-term future of a nation is at stake, the fools who got it into the mess in the first place will say anything to shift the blame onto someone else's shoulders. I cannot truly fault WITF, or NPR, for staying with the herd and pretending that debates between but two of the half-dozen candidates contending for the electoral college's appointment to the presidency could in any way change the outcome of the farce that will occur this November 6th. The only hope for America, the only way for us to strip the bloated political machines of their power, is to reshape the entire fabric of this nation; we start by saying, aloud: “This bullshit has gone on for too long”; we start by demanding that the ideals set forth in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are secured for us diligently and without further waffling; we start by standing out in the cold and in the rain and forcing the slumbering among us back into wakefulness. We can have Liberty, equality, and justice in this land, but only if we are willing to fight for them, every day of our lives. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
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