The Aftermath, Part 5

Whatever happened to the media in this country? Per the founders’ intentions, they were supposed to be an independent, impartial agency that called balls and strikes. They were once the great tellers of truth, who had no problems speaking that truth to power, because it had a power all its own. Since the height of the Vietnam War though, what we’ve seen instead has been this lurch to the political left, where instead of being on a quest for the truth, they have become the de-facto gateway and arbiters of the truth. As a result, the major casualties of this move away from the middle, have been the truth, the facts, and I daresay, reality itself.

The hyper partisan world we now find ourselves in, is a direct result of a media that has been derelict in its duties as the Fourth Estate. Fortunately, for the rest of us, this fact wasn’t lost on a handful of intrepid souls who saw an opening, given the lack of objective reporting by the media. They decided to boldly chart a new course in what had been a niche market, and chose to fill the void left behind by their mainstream/legacy counterparts.  It’s often been repeated ad nauseum that nature abhors a vacuum. In this case, it was an information vacuum. Conservative media was coming of age as it filled that vacuum, and was giving its legacy counterparts one heckuva run for their money.

Rather than wax on eloquently (or the point of boring you) about the malpractice that we’ve been subjected to at the hands of these organizations, it’s best if I just took everyone on a stroll down memory lane and pointed out examples along the way:

• 1.    Atlanta Olympics bombing. Richard Jewel was a security guard at Centennial Park in Atlanta during the 1996 summer games. One evening he found a suspicious package and brought it to the attention of a senior official in charge security. While waiting for a response team from a nearby military facility to verify whether the package was truly an explosive device, it detonated, killing one woman and injuring 110 park goers. Initially Jewel was hailed as a hero, since his actions prevented what could have been a mass casualty event.  His status was short lived though, as a profile worked up by an FBI psychological team indicated that he may have been the actual culprit of the blast. Somehow this was leaked to the media and of course, took on a life of its own. Mr. Jewel eventually lawyered up. When it was learned by counsel that they had a pretty serious defamation case on their hands, they put together their own Dream Team. This was the first time that America had heard of Lin Wood, but it most certainly wouldn’t be the last. Eventually, the authorities, after having conducted an exhaustive investigation into Mr. Jewel and his family, came up dry. It wasn’t until after a similar bombing in Birmingham at an abortion clinic, that Eric Rudolph, an individual with anti-government leanings, popped up on the FBI’s radar. But, by then, Mr. Jewel’s reputation had already been ruined. The only thing that could be done to make him at least partially whole, was to go after the media outlets who irresponsibly ran with the story.

 

• 2.   Dan Rather and Mary Mapes. In the runup to the 2004 presidential election, a CBS News producer named Mary Mapes was put into contact with an individual who claimed to have some derogatory records from George W Bush’s time in the Texas Air Guard, specifically his Officer Performance Report (OPR). Rather than thoroughly vet the source of this info, she and news anchor Dan Rather decided to run with the story. That would be a fatal error for the both of them. Not too long after the story broke, several individuals pointed out that the font used in the performance report did not exist when this report was supposedly written. It was a creation of the computer age years later. When interviewed, the source of the report stated that he told Ms. Mapes that he could not guarantee the authenticity of the document when they were communicating with each other. Mr. Rather conveniently decided to retire and Ms. Mapes was summarily shown the door.

 

• 3.    Obama era scandals. Fast and Furious was supposed to be an operation whereby guns were sold to Mexican drug cartels, in order to trace the flow of illegal weapons through various pipelines in the US and Mexico. Instead, what would up happening was that a Border Patrol Agent, Ryan Terry, was killed in a shootout with smugglers who were armed with the very weapons that had been part of the program. Attorney General Eric Holder refused to cooperate with Congress on trying to get to the bottom of what happened, and wound up being the first AG to be held in contempt of Congress. The Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was attacked on the evening of September 11^th of 2012. Four Americans lost their lives, including the newly installed Ambassador to Libya. The Muslim Brotherhood sponsored a series of protests throughout the Arab world over a film disparaging the Prophet Muhammed. Given the timeframe that the film was originally released, it is widely believed that these protests were intended to coincide with the anniversary of the attacks on September 11^th. We were told by Susan Rice, as she made her rounds on the Sunday news shows, that this attack was a violent reaction to that very video. What we didn’t know, until a congressional committee was convened to get to the bottom of what happened, was that the Consulate and the associated annex were attacked by an Al Qaeda affiliated group. Worse yet, was the fact that then Secretary of State Clinton was communicating with the rest of the world via an unsecure email server in her home in Chappaqua, New York. She even sent her daughter Chelsea, via an email alias, an assessment of what had happened in Benghazi. The mastermind behind this charade was the Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes. Coincidentally, his major in college was Creative Writing. Since 2012 was an election year as well, it wouldn’t be complete without election hijinks. In this case, they came to us courtesy of one Lois Lerner and the IRS. As the Director of the Exempt Organization section of the IRS, it was her job to ensure that deserving organizations were granted tax exempt status. What she did instead was to slow roll applications or just not grant them at all if they had conservative affiliations. She and her boss, John Koskenin, the IRS Director, were brought before Congress to testify on what had occurred. Ms. Lerner was pushed out the door, but allowed to retire with full benefits. All of this occurred despite claims of a scandal free administration in the waning days of the Obama presidency, by the media and the administration itself.

 

• 4.    Covington Catholic School. High schooler Nick Sandman was supposedly caught on video smirking at Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist, as he and other students from Covington Catholic High School were at the Lincoln Memorial waiting for their bus in January of 2019. The media automatically picked up on this and savaged him and his schoolmates. It wasn’t because he or they had done anything wrong to Mr. Phillips, it was because they dared to wear MAGA caps. The students had come to Washington to participate in the March for Life, which was taking place that weekend. As more videos of the incident surfaced, it became apparent that the youngsters had initially become targets of a radical religious sect that called themselves the Black Hebrew Israelites. As the chanting from both sides grew louder and more raucous, Mr. Phillips, according to his account of things, took it upon himself to try and calm things down. He and his fellow supporters of the Indigenous Peoples march, which also took place that day, started moving in the direction of the Covington Catholic students, chanting and beating drums. What was captured on several phones and broadcast to the world, was the aftermath of the incident. It gave no context at all to the events leading up to that point. But it was enough to start a firestorm on social media and in the legacy media. Once the full video finally made an appearance, it put things into proper context and caused an awful lot of consternation among conservatives, who as a whole, had been attacked for no good reason. The parents of various students, including Nick Sandman, lawyered up and went after the media organizations who had irresponsibly peddled this story. The Washington Post and CNN, collectively, are a few hundred million dollars poorer as a result, courtesy of one Lin Wood.

 

• 5.    Papa John Schnatter.  During a media training session in 2018, the company founder was allegedly caught on tape using the N word supposedly disparaging blacks. The leaked audio made its way to media outlets and took off like wildfire (seems to be a pattern here). In the end, Mr. Schnatter was forced to step down from the leadership of the very company he helped found. Former FBI Director, Louis Freeh, recently released a report detailing the results of an investigation his firm conducted at the behest of Mr. Schnatter’s lawyers. The last major investigation his firm was involved in concerned the actions that Penn State University undertook in relation to the Jerry Sandusky case. A lot of heads rolled at the conclusion of the investigation, including that of legendary PSU football coach Joe Paterno. Anyway, back to the discussion at hand. Freeh concluded that Schnatter had not used the word in a derogatory manner and there had been an intentional misrepresentation of the situation by the media. Where in the world does this man go to get his good name back?

 

• 6.    James Comey. The question as to where to start with this “sterling” individual is a good one. So, let’s start at the beginning. His dinner with Donald Trump wasn’t the product of some sort of machination as we’ve been led to believe by the politicos and their sycophants in the media. In testimony before the House Intel Committee (the same one that interviewed Messrs. Clapper, Goldstone, and Henry) former Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, let it slip (intentionally or unintentionally) that when the President had been mulling over whether to keep Mr. Comey, that he (Coats) threw out the idea of having dinner with him to get a feel for the man. The rest, as they say, is history. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was set up. We now know that as an incontrovertible fact, but how did this happen? For starters. It happened on Comey’s watch, with him as one of the major participants, along with his deputy, Andrew McCabe. Shortly after the 2016 election, the then National Security Advisor designee had a series of phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak about de-escalation of sanctions in the wake of charges of interference in the 2016 presidential election. Those calls were the genesis of an investigation into whether General Flynn had violated any federal laws (he hadn’t). One of the calls had been leaked, by parties unknown, to the media, which in and of itself, is a criminal offense. As a pretext for setting up a perjury trap, McCabe called Flynn to ask if he could send a couple of agents by his office to ask a few questions about his calls. We know that had been the plan all along, because in an interview with an MSNBC host, Nicole Wallace, Comey all but admitted that was what they were attempting to do. It’s ironic that he chose the language he did in the video, because just five days before Flynn’s firing on 13 February, Comey himself discussed with White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, how the process was supposed to work regarding sensitive legal matters. Worse yet was his handling of the Carter Page fiasco. Page had been an asset of the CIA and a cooperating government witness in his dealings with the Russians. An FBI attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, intentionally changed an email from the CIA to read that Mr. Page was not an asset for the agency. This was done to ensure FISA approval of a warrant to spy on the Trump Campaign. When Mr. Page became aware of what was going on, he personally wrote to Comey explaining his relationship with the agency. There was no response from Mr. Comey or any one else at the Bureau, not even crickets. Coincidentally, Mr. Clinesmith was scheduled to be sentenced earlier this month, but that has been pushed back to sometime in January, possibly after Inauguration day, methinks. I guess the Swamp really does take care of its own, but you won’t see one iota of intellectual curiosity on the part of the media about any of this.

 

• 7.    Chris Krebs firing. Mr. Krebs had been the Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He was fired by President Trump in the wake of the 2020 elections, given his comments that this had been the most secure election in recent history. Claims of election irregularities and fraud notwithstanding, there were valid reasons for him to be let go. A recent IG report dated 30 September, 2020 (OIG-20-77) detailed several failings of his agency during an audit conducted for fiscal year 2019. In three of the five categories examined, his organization received a score of 1 out of a possible 5. Level 1 (ad hoc), meaning that there were no systems in place to mitigate certain issues and Level 5 (optimized), meaning a verifiable process existed and was in use regularly. When taken by itself, one might think okay, no big deal, but couple this with the recent revelation of infiltration of God only knows how many federal agencies, as well as federal contractors by Russian cyber forces (Solar Winds hack), and this becomes a really big deal. The media played up Mr. Krebs’ firing as a retaliatory move on the part of the President, but failed to bring up the fact that his agency is responsible for the cybersecurity of the federal government and this nation. This train wreck happened on his watch and he needed to be held accountable.

As stated earlier, I could go on ad-nauseum, but I figured that there’s already enough here to make the case. If the legacy media is to be considered the Fourth Estate, then it goes without saying that conservative media would most certainly be considered a fifth column within the overall media establishment. Given the dictionary definitions of fifth column movements, it’s quite apropos to view them in this way. The move away from the truth, the facts, and reality, and towards political partisanship, wound up causing self-inflicted wounds that the legacy outlets may never recover from. The fact that their conservative counterparts are exploiting those weaknesses, should serve as a warning to everyone. An incompetent, corrupt, and highly partisan media establishment has led to where we now are as a country, and that’s not a good thing. The fact that we’ve tossed away civil discourse and are at each other’s throats, is a sure sign that it’s time for a change. So, instead of putting up with the rot that’s being passed off as the gospel truth by these folks, it behooves everyone to start paying more attention to the goings on beyond their little spheres of influence and start doing their own homework to verify and validate what’s being disseminated. As Ronald Reagan was fond of saying “trust but verify”. It always worked for him and it continues to work for me.