CRYING WOLF

  If you are as old as I am you have been seeing media bias for a long, long, time. It took me a while to catch on. I thought that Walter Cronkite was completely unbiased until I read his autobiography and discovered how liberal he was. His statements during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, calling the war "unwinnable" began to make sense to me. Tet was the most complete, and greatest comeback victory for American military forces since the Battle of the Bulge. However Cronkite's comments, from the most trusted man in America, was devastating to the American war effort. It would signal the beginning of the end and the final American defeat in Vietnam. Johnson supposedly said  “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” There is debate as to whether Johnson even said this or how much impact Cronkite's comments even had on the course of the war but there is no doubt Cronkite injected commentary into his news reporting, which is totally out of line in my opinion. A reporter should either report the news or become a commentator. They should not mix the two. The news media has always been biased but it's credibility has reached an all time low. According to Gallup polling the media enjoyed it's highest level of trust in 1976. This was because of it's Watergate coverage and reporting on the Vietnam war. From 1976 until 2007 trust in the media slowly fell but the average was above 50%. Since 2007 a minority of Americans polled have faith in the media. In just the last year trust for the media among Republicans has fallen from 32% to 14%. Even among Democrats it has fallen from 55% to 51% and among independents from 33% to 30%.

  When Bill Clinton ran for office in 1992 he and Hillary had been involved in a multitude of scandals in Arkansas. Not to mention Bill's many affairs, and the women he molested and raped, Then there were the other scandals like Whitewater, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, Troopergate, Cattlegate, the Rose Law firm billing records. Between 1992 and 1996 they were involved in Travelgate, FBI records collected on political enemies, Vince Fosters suicide and the removal of evidence from his office, perjury, Blackhawk Down, and the list is a lot longer than I want to deal with here. All of these scandals were skimmed over, ignored or delegated as too minor to report by the mainstream press. The Jennifer Flowers scandal, that nearly derailed Clinton in his 1992 campaign, was revealed to the public by a grocery store tabloid. The Troopergate story was exposed by a Conservative magazine called the American Spectator. Bill Clinton's butt was saved by Don Hewitt, the producer of Sixty Minutes. Hewitt was caught on tape bragging about it. This was the same Don Hewitt that directed the camera crew in the Kennedy-Nixon debates. He purposely shot close ups of Nixon sweating profusely and any shot that was detrimental to Nixon and complimentary to Kennedy. It has been claimed that the debates made the difference in getting Kennedy elected and it was one of the closest elections in American history.

  Then there is the Obama scandals. As a child he was mentored byFrank Marshall Davis, a notorious Communist. His relation with Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentant terrorists. Obama's long relationship with the racist preacher Jeremiah Wright and his controversial statements in his autobiography Dreams From My Father. Obama's many scandals in his first term such as Fast and Furious, Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress. All the lies about Obamacare and the illegal Obamacare executive orders. Spying on journalists. The IRS scandal where conservative groups were investigated and harassed. Benghazi, Hillary's secret server, the Pigford scandal, the NSA spying scandal, Bowe Bergdahl, the Iran nuclear deal and ransom payments. The V.A. death list scandal, and Solyndra, These are just a few of the scandals associated with the Obama Administration.

In all fairness does anyone really believe that Bill Clinton and Obama could have been elected and re-elected if they had been under a Watergate style scrutiny by the mainstream media or the kind of scrutiny that Trump is experiencing now? Or even the scrutiny that Reagan and both Bush's experienced. There is more to the media than just the news. Conservatives are blasted on prime time television shows, late night comedy shows, awards shows, Saturday Night Live, cable movie networks like HBO, and Hollywood, It is a full court press. Amazingly, in spite of all of their efforts, the country is still mostly red. The modern day Democratic Party could not survive a fair press. They would have to change or die.