Wikileaks and 4chan vs. NYThymes and CNN Part II: They're feeling the slide

Everytime the USA media wants a nice war to report
they turn on the yellow journalism. We should read between
the lies. Bad Russian policies do not mean we should want
war with Russia. Louis Dalrymple, Punch.

You know, this US presidential election has been a sad time for a lot of people: libertarians, socialists, and the all important public that wants to behave like normal human beings.There's one positive outcome to it though: We are separating the wheat from the chaff. AND GOOD LORD THERE'S A LOTTA CHAFF!

Yellow journalism? It's been around, and it's back with a vengeance.

Joseph Pulitzer's NY Journal and rival
WR Hearst's NY World both had a a hand in
starting one of America's least necessary
wars between the USA and Spain.

Cable news is a pathetic joke. We have three networks that are full of squawking opinionated corporate agents representing a special interest. Maybe true journalism never existed, As kids we had to learn a very small unit in US history class called the Spanish-American War. How did this conflict start? Two competing New York daily newspapers, the New York World and the New York Journal hyped up an explosion on the USS Maine while it was moored in Havana harbour and blamed it on Spain, the colonial rulers of Cuba at the time. They also whipped up sentiment against Spain's brutal colonial occupation calling it barbaric. Truthfully, Spain had only abolished slavery in Cuba in 1886, and had never run the colony in a humane manner.

 Long story short, the USA kicked the Spaniards out of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. But did they grant those territories full sovereignty? Of course not!

• Cuba had to comply with eight conditions outlined by the Platt Amendment (1901). These included leasing territories and islands of Cuba to the USA by agreement to the president, as well as that no other foreign power could compromise Cuba's "independence". The Platt Amendment basically shoehorned Cuba into being a US vassal state and would set the stage for the Castro Cuban Revolution of 1959 that allowed Cuba to fall under the rule of a pro-Soviet communist dictatorship. The USA also tried to peel off of Cuba the ownership of La Isla de los Pinos (Isle of Pines, now Isla de Juventud or Isle of Youth), the second largest Cuban island with an area of 934 sq. mi.
• The Philippines fought wars of independence with the USA from its "liberation" in 1899 up  until 1913. The USA was forced to end the military government of the Philippines by the 1901 Spooner Amendment, but would not grant independence until 1946. 
• Puerto Rico remains a United States "commonwealth" while Spain's other overseas territories Guam and uninhabited Navassa Island are permanent US possessions.

Ultimately, all of the noble claims of liberating the islands proved to be a bunch of trash talk. The USA merely replaced Spain as Cuba's colonial overlord. We did not concede to them direct democracy that we claimed would be their path to liberty, as the USA kept them tethered to us by treaty obligations. We can't avoid that truth, nor of other similar arrangements across Latin America, Vietnam, and more countries. The USA and its media have waived direct democracy in front of the world in war after war (excluding a couple like WWII and Korea) only to pull the football out of Charlie Brown's way after the war ends and say that the society in question has not matured enough for democracy. Sorry, but that's called a deception. Anyway. . .

It used to be you couldn't even fact check. . .

Why is it that media today are being assailed for manipulating the truth or outright lying to fit their agenda? Simple answer: Because we do possess better tools today to check their statements. We have both better technological tools like the internet and other electronic means including audio recordings that didn't exist in 1998 and are much better than they were back then. 

Think about it this way, in 1964 whether you agreed there should have been a war or not, President Johnson did fabricate the circumstances of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Whereas our media was given a narrative that North Vietnam naval vessels assaulted the USS Maddox without provocation in international waters. In actuality it was long suspected and confirmed only in 2008 by a Federation of American Scientists release that the Maddox had not even been attacked and in reality had been skirting the maritime barrier with North Vietnam in order to provoke an incident. Johnson in 1965 admitted that for all he knew the boats out there in the Gulf of Tonkin were shooting at whales.

Our media is no longer even remotely independent

The sad truth is that while the media has gained progressively better tools for researching and delivering important stories, it has also caved to being a tool for whatever interests the journalist or media body serves. As explained in the last installment the print media (newspapers) has been forced steadily to embrace an on-line format where they have to be more responsive to reader comments. And as mentioned in the previous segment, these newspapers that had once been noble voices for their communities are now merged under corporate lordship. The Boston Globe was taken over in 1993 by the New York Times and then resold in 2013 to John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox. This means that two of the highest circulation dailies were basically on the same team for twenty years. When it was sold, a San Diego businessman and rival bidder claimed that the New York Times turned down his higher bid due to his conservative political leanings.

This is true of the television and radio media as well. The AOL/Time Warner merger in 2000 brought together internet provide AOL, the Turner Broadcasting System that includes such media giants as CNN and Head Line News, Time magazine, and more. As for online news media, as mentioned before there are media sources that purport to be "alternative" and in reality are not, such as the Daily Beast which is owned by IAC on whose board of directors sits Chelsea Clinton as well as traditional media mogul Barry Diller. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, the Daily Beast was used as  part of the Clinton campaign's media phalanx against Bernie Sanders. Even after Sanders lost, Daily Beast columnists like Barrett Holmes attacked him and his followers for going after Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other crooked Democratic Party officials that helped Clinton skew the election towards her.

The Cost: Our corrupt media doesn't just screw us on politics

The Onion's parodying of the Jayson Blair
scandal at the New York Times is not far from the truth.

If you are a person that hates the media, because of its treatment of Donald Trump. . . slap yourself in the face. Not because you're wrong, but this is bigger than Trump. These squawking malcontents have been spreading nonsense for years, and only now are we seeing the backlash take effect not just through the internet but even in the court system. The best examples to use are cases where journalists have been caught red-handed lying, and then analyzing what happened:

Discredited Rolling Stone journalist Sabrina Erdely.

• Issue: In 2003 the New York Times admitted that reporter Jayson Blair had lied and plagiarized numerous stories. Response: Blair then published his own so-called tell-all book Burning Down My Master's House in which he accused the NYTimes of closet racism. The book was widely panned. 
• Issue: Dan Rather in 2004 fell under scrutiny for giving credence to the "Killian documents", a series that purported to show that Pres. George Bush had tried to avoid combat in Iraq. After it was revealed that the typographical features of those documents would not have been common to military typewriters in the 1960s, Rather's story fell apart and he eventually left CBS. Response: As late as 2007 on CNN's Larry King Rather refused to admit that his story had been discredited as a hoax.
• Issue: The Duke lacrosse players case is credited as a shameful moment of shame in American media coverage. A black exotic dancer in Durham, NC accused three affluent white players for the Duke team of sexually assaulting and raping her. Black radical leaders showed up in order to condemn what was taken to be abuse of a weak minority female by a group of privileged white boys. It was later revealed that the police and prosecution had seriously tampered with the investigation in order collar someone for the alleged crime, and that the whole affair had been a hoax. Response: A number of newspapers issued apologies and retractions, while prosecutor Mike Nifong was eventually tried for his misconduct and disbarred. Nevertheless, black "leaders" consistently painted the accused as racist and bigoted, while even claiming that it was inconsequential whether the victim's account was true.  An earlier iteration of this was the Tawana Brawley case in the 1980s. 
• In Sept. 2014 noted actress and writer Lena Dunham released Not that Kind of Girl, her autobiography. The book attracted controversy for her confession to having sexually touched her younger sister as an infant. But what landed her in hot water was her claim to have been raped while attending Oberlin College in Ohio in the mid-2000s by a man named Barry, who she described as being a Republican. Because this person in her autobiography resembled in many ways a real person, Dunham was threatened with legal action. Therefore her publisher soon issued a disclaimer with new editions of the book. There are those like Emily Zanotti who now claim that Dunham's pattern of not reporting the rape at the time, giving inconsistent descriptions of the accused, as well as the details in the story that suggest it was awkward but consensual sex undermine the very premise that it was a sexual assault at all. Response: Far from receiving any career hurting consequences from this saga, Dunham has gone from strength to strength and is now associated with the Clinton/Kaine campaign as a surrogate; alongside accused rapist Bill Clinton.
• Also in November 2014 Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely published "A Rape on Campus", an account by female student "Jackie" of a gang-rape in which frat brothers of the Phi Kappa Psi lured her into a party and took advantage of her while drunk. After police investigating the story discovered that there had been no party on the night in question, other members of the stress began to question the story, and eventually it was revealed that "Jackie's" entire account had been crudely fabricated and Erdely had been taken in. Worse, Erdely also claimed that Jackie's and other victims' complaints had been ignored by university administrators as represented in the story by Nicole Eramo. Response: Following the retraction of the story, Eramo and the fraternity members fired separate defamation lawsuits. On Nov. 3, 2016 a jury ruled against Rolling Stone in the Eramo suit. On Nov. 8 the jury then awarded $3 million. The fraternity's suit is still pending.

The Outlook

I started this very article prior to the 2016 presidential election, and I'm finishing it as it's over. It has exposed critical media prejudice on numerous topics, but we should never have needed it to realize that. On Jan. 23, 1996 Bill Clinton during his State of the Union address claimed "the era of big government is over", and was wrong. Today more than 20 years earlier you, the internet user, have declared that the era of big corporate media is over. He was lying, but you should keep your word:

• Start supporting your local or alternative media both with readership and criticism.
• Minority communities should start supporting their own alternative media and keep it independent.
• Parents should monitor their children's texts and other school materials and discuss them with them, rather than either embracing what they say or blindly criticizing them.
• Students should stop acting like they can DEMAND everything because they will in the end INHERIT everything. Just like children must do their chores at home, every person should think about ways to add value to our way of life here in America. Whining like little bitches and blogging about it is not the way. The people on the BOLD page all have day jobs; we do this writing for fun and to exchange our views. 

Next up I am going to award my 1st (and maybe last!) annual BOLDIE awards for independent media. But unlike most awards the BOLDIE may or may not be something you wanna have!