The Los Angeles Times is up for sale, and there are super-wealthy conservative bidders. Get out the popcorn out and watch the liberals squeal. The hilarious kickoff came when two leftist collectives — the Daily Kos website and the California-based Courage Campaign Institute — set out to buy an ad in the LA Times to protest the Koch brothers pondering a bid.
I kid you not, the ad began: "WE NEED NEWS, NOT MORE SPIN." This would assume that today's Los Angeles Times — which just endorsed Obama's re-election — is an oasis of objectivity in a desert of media bias. They were outraged when the Times used their owner's prerogative and refused to run the ad.
The Koch brothers are unqualified to own a newspaper, according to this ad. Why? Because they're conservative: "They bankroll the Tea Party. They deny global warming. They buy politicians and bust unions."
Michael Bloomberg bankrolls the anti-gun lobby. He "buys politicians" in that cause: He just spent $2.2 million in Chicago for a barrage of ads to beat gun-rights Democrat Debbie Halvorson in the House race to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr. He's even been accused of "union-busting." And he's presently the mayor of the nation's largest city. The Left hasn't run any ads against his qualifications to run Bloomberg Media, have they?
This is also funny because the Daily Kos crowd serves up a daily diet of counter-factual radical spin and nonsense, such as how the tea party is a gaggle of racist Nazis. They just argued Fox News was a "clear and present danger to America" because they weren't running enough live coverage of President Obama being applauded by supporters in Israel.
The Kos crowd has argued the liberal media are completely worthless in defending the Left's agenda. "This supposedly Liberal media was the media that allowed Republicans to almost sink the Affordable Care Act," they've complained, and "allowed birthers to have the semblance of plausibility" (?) and "provided a false equivalence to Republicans holding the entire country hostage to get their will because of the President's refusal of draconian cuts to the social safety net."
The Koch brothers aren't the only potential bidders for the LA Times that upset the Left. Rupert Murdoch is also quite interested in buying the Times and the Chicago Tribune from the troubled Tribune Company.
One might think that Murdoch's sober journalistic operation of The Wall Street Journal after he bought it might calm the panic. You would be wrong.
In front of a graphic reading "Murdochopoly," Fox-hating Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" announced the government has prevented cross-ownership of TV stations and newspapers in the past. "We wouldn't want Rupert Murdoch to be disproportionately powerful," said Jon Stewart. He fake-interviewed Murdoch with old video clips and asserted, ""I assume you are asking us to waive our laws as a courtesy, so you don't have to break them."
Stewart ran clips of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and associated Murdoch himself with "rampant law-breaking." Then he cracked, "and now you'd like a waiver to have another whack at a newspaper."
Stewart was also alarmed that Murdoch would boast that his media properties could swing elections or change the political agenda. "The law against media consolidation was really written with people like you in mind," Stewart lectured. "Well, actually you in particular, because of how you like to do the exact thing the law was created to prevent."
Liberal hypocrites claim to be defenders of freedom of speech — but they can't stand it when a conservative owns a media outlet because that's not freedom. That's somehow an abuse of capitalism and of democracy. Liberal hypocrites think conservatives use their media outlets for partisan gain, but they somehow can't admit they've all been happily broadcasting from Obama's back pocket for five years. Time Warner's magazine can name him "Man of the Year" and compare him to Jesus in a manger, but that's defined as "independent" journalism.
But Stewart's hyperbolic hypocrisy may be the richest, as he pronounces his verdict from the mountain top of Viacom, which Stewart's leftist compatriots at PBS's "Frontline" have ranked as the second largest media conglomerate in the world, larger than Murdoch's News Corporation.
The Los Angeles Times used to be considered a Republican rag before Otis Chandler took the reins in 1960, just as the Chicago Tribune was considered a conservative outlet under Colonel Robert McCormick. At worst, the papers would only be returning to the their alleged old form. But liberals want to hold on to these media properties like they're captive nations, and they're going to fight it using the same phony argument that the conservative media make propaganda, and liberals just produce "news."
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
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Sir;... Communication is truth, and truth is our common property, and is essential for our wellbeing and survival... Those people making a commodity of reality, who package this or that view of reality so it can be sold to people instead of the truth because where the truth might serve them as it serves all impartially, the vision of reality may injure, and even destroy them if not sufficiently true...
I believe in this sort of freedom of speech made possible by the internet... But corporation news is not going to result in anything by injury to the public, and profits for business... People do believe what they are told until it gets too dangerous, or to injurious to believe it...
If you say year after year that there is not money is social security and the age is going to have to be raised, and people do not hear the other side of the issue, then what are they going to do??? But the fact is that people have no defense when they get older, and no rights...They may have worked all their lives without a pension, and whether the system is broke because it was robbed, or not, is not as much an issue as the fact that those people are worn out, broke down, and have zero job protection...If they had ever had protection and rights they would not be broke down and financially broke...
If government does not have that money when it should, when it could have read the facts as well as anyone else, when it could have taxed better, and didn't, then government has a problem... Only when government, at the insistence of the rich denies its problems do the people have a problem, and that problem is, the failure of government to govern in the interest of the people...
If you take our constitution which is as much as any constitution written or unwritten a thing of disputes, and a bone of contention, you have also the perfect example of the way bad medicine has been sold as good...We have an almost religious devotion to it and that is the most remarkable fact considering how few of our rights it has protected, and how little good has actually come out of it...
Our great civil war was the direct result of a conflict and contradiction buried in the constitution to be resolved with little means by a later generation... The Civil War was bluntly: a constitutional failure... Never mind that the great conservatism of humanity made change of it nearly impossible...Inertia was built into it by requiring a 2/3 majority to change it... Human conservatism was enough impediment to change, and so the people went to war; with one side fearing change and one side demanding change; but no one being able to manage 2/3s of the population... Still, we finish the war, resume vertual slavery for blacks, and a certain black second class status, a contintue in our belief that the constitution is infallible...
It is what we are told and what we are taught and the fact that it is total nonsense and untruth means nothing... Facts have little value in the eyes of myth...There is no freedom of the press when only the rich own the presses... That is the only reason they want the media, because it gives them the means to sell stupid ideas to stupid people, and get them them to pay for it...And the people, stupid and uneducated because they have no rights to our common property of truth and knowledge are in such numbers that they can dominate the political battlefield...
I do not think that more partisanship is the cure for too much partisanship... We need the truth, and any one who denies us the truth is a criminal who should be tossed into prison...The parties are not specifically sanctioned by the constitution, and yet they have come to own our government... The media which is a part of our commonwealth is sold cheaply to the rich, and they grow rich on the partisan battle both sides must pay the media to wage on their behalf...Not one in the media is accountable for the truth in what they broadcast, so when they are lying- they are freely turning a public property against the public that deserves and needs the fact upon which to base their judgements....
These people are running us out of our rights and entitlements by turning rights that belong to the people against the people... The privilages of press, and of property and religion are not above our rights, not things in themselves; but are entirely dependent upon our rights which they each freely attack... How dare the churches attack our rights... Do they suppose their rights are in the constitution because God put them there??? The people grant those privilages believing them in their interest as well as in the interest of those who hold the privilage and this is not the fact of the matter, not the result... The press is against the people...Property is against human and civil rights just as the churches are against human right... There are two sorts of people in this country... While all people may reverence the constitution for the good it has done us; still some people believe without foundation that the good for which the constitution was written will some day flow out of it, and other people know better...
The press, the media, the churches, and especially and directly, Property and Wealth stand against our civil rights and want to make them meaningless... It is time to refuse privilages, and to demand rights beginning with the right to the truth which is as essential to democracy as equality or justice...
Thanks...Sweeney
Comment: #1
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Wed Apr 3, 2013 6:34 AM
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