A Brief History of the Modern Media

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Dear Fellow Media Watchdog:
The wheels are grinding to a halt. After years of unprecedented spending, borrowing, promising, and ultimately deceiving, push has come to shove. Not just between Republicans and Democrats over the issue of raising the debt ceiling, but also in the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Greece. Frankly it is hard to see how any of these matters will be resolved, though presumably they will. At some point.
The one that is getting the most attention is the debt ceiling issue. Is it possible to arrive at a solution that will get the approval of the Republican controlled House, the Democratic controlled Senate and the White House? That may depend on the amount of smoke and mirrors they can assemble, so that Obama and the Democrats can claim they got tax increases as part of the package, in some form or another, and the Republicans can claim that they allowed none. Common ground could be found in some combination of lower corporate tax rates and the closing of some tax loopholes.
President Obama returned to the use of violent imagery and combined it with his often-used class warfare when he said at the Twitter Town Hall on July 6th that “The debt ceiling should not be something that is used as a gun against the heads of the American people to extract tax breaks for corporate jet owners, for oil and gas companies that are making billions of dollars because the price of gasoline has gone up so high.” As Jim Geraghty pointed out in National Review, this came one day after calling for a summit on the debt ceiling issue, in which Obama said, “I’ve asked leaders of both parties and both houses of Congress to come here to the White House on Thursday so we can build on the work that’s already been done and drive towards a final agreement. It’s my hope that everybody is going to leave their ultimatums at the door, that we’ll all leave our political rhetoric at the door.” Add hypocrisy to that list, when you consider his constant attack on tax breaks for corporate jets. That loophole was included in his stimulus bill in 2009; it would only generate an estimated $3 billion over 10 years; and it will almost certainly cost American jobs in that industry.
A big part of the calculation on each side is how the media will cover this. In other words, the blame game. Obama knows he can count on the media to paint the Republicans as obstacles to a deal, who are looking out for corporate special interests. In his June 29th press conference he referred to corporate jets six times. This gave the media a perfect opportunity to point to Obama’s hypocrisy, but instead they praised his fighting spirit. Republicans know, or should know, that the media aren’t on their side.
For Accuracy in Media, Roger Aronoff


Media Lobby for Life of Killer-Rapist
By Cliff Kincaid
“Mr. Leal, convicted of murder during a sexual assault, had grossly incompetent legal representation. If he had been given access to a Mexican diplomat, he would have had a chance at better counsel and likely the opportunity to strike a plea deal, avoiding the death penalty.”
So said The New York Times in a June 17 editorial about convicted rapist-murderer Humberto Leal. Just before his execution, the Times quoted the Associated Press as saying, “In his last moments, Mr. Leal repeatedly said he was sorry, and shouted twice, ‘Viva Mexico!’” What the AP reported was that he said, “I have hurt a lot of people. … I take full blame for everything. I am sorry for what I did.”
In other words, he was guilty as hell, which was proven beyond a doubt. Nevertheless, for Leal to shout this from his death bed was extremely newsworthy and egg in the face of those in the media who had designed their coverage in a manner sympathetic to his well-deserved plight.
The Times story was headlined, “Mexican Citizen Is Executed as Justices Refuse to Step In.” In fact, he was an illegal alien in the U.S., as the shouts of “Viva Mexico!” attest. He was executed in the U.S. not because he was here illegally, but because his crimes were committed here.
This is the killer that the Times wanted to be able to avoid the death penalty. His victim was a 16-year-old girl, Adria Sauceda. He raped and killed her, obliterating her face and head with a chunk of asphalt, and then left a large stick in her that he had used to sexually assault her.
The Obama Administration intervened to save his life, calling it a “stay of execution.” It wanted the Supreme Court to let him live at least until Congress decided to pass Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy’s bill, the Consular Notification Compliance Act. The copy of the bill on Leahy’s website didn’t even have a number, meaning that it was not a serious piece of legislation. Not even listed on the “legislation” page of Leahy’s website, it was subsequently assigned S. 1194 and has no co-sponsors. Clearly, he introduced the bill in order to facilitate the activities of the left-wingers anxious to exploit the case for the purposes of creating a massive miscarriage of justice.
Incredibly, in a move that is even more questionable than the jury verdicts in the Casey Anthony case, the Obama Administration asked for the killer’s life to be spared so that the Supreme Court could preserve “its potential future jurisdiction” in the case. This is actually in the brief.
The Supreme Court ruled against Obama. It said that “…we are doubtful that it is ever appropriate to stay a lower court judgment in light of unenacted legislation. Our task is to rule on what the law is, not what it might eventually be.”
So why would the Obama Administration go to such drastic and absurd lengths to save the life of an illegal alien killer?
The answer provided by crime blogger Tina Trent, an advocate of victims’ rights, is that Obama’s constituency demanded it. This is the part of the story the Times, The Washington Post, and other liberal media refuse to tell. These “progressives,” many funded by George Soros as part of the “anti-incarceration” movement, believe criminals are the real victims and that international law should supersede national law.
As Trent revealed, Leal’s attorney, Sandra Babcock, has been funded by the government of Mexico and works at Northwestern University Law School with former communist terrorist Bernardine Dohrn.
Dohrn had participated in a 2003 conference, sponsored by all of the major liberal groups, on how to force U.S. courts to use international law and U.N. treaties in place of laws passed by Congress and state legislatures. Incredibly, the bomber Dohrn, a friend of Obama’s and former fundraiser for him, is now accepted by the progressive community as an advocate for families and children and spoke on this subject at the conference.
The treaty at issue in the Leal case had never been implemented by Congress. The Obama Administration argued that the treaty should be observed because legislation to implement it might be passed by Congress, even though the Leahy bill to do so, introduced on June 14, had no co-sponsors. This would be comical were it not so tragic. It was a fraud on the courts.
The story is not a “Mexican national” being executed in violation of a treaty that has never been implemented. That is a bad enough version of the story. The story is that the “progressive” community, with some Republican dupes, wanted to have the courts implement a treaty, in the absence of congressional action, so that international lawyers and their media allies could use Leal to press their ultimate objective—abolition of the death penalty in the U.S. I wrote about this campaign over 10 years ago, in a report entitled, “Saving the Lives of Killers, Traitors, and Spies.”
And yet the Supreme Court rejected this ploy only by a 5-4 vote. This is as shocking as Leal’s in-your-face acknowledgement of his crimes and tribute to Mexico.


AP Tells Staff to Keep Opinions to Themselves
By Don Irvine
Concerned that some of their employees are a little too open with their opinions on social media, the Associated Press has issued an internal memo to remind them about the proper use of Twitter and Facebook.
According to The Cutline, AP deputy managing editor for standards and production Tom Kent sent an email memo to the staff on Wednesday outlining his concern that the staff may be going a little too far when using social media. Kent told the staff that “In at least two recent cases, we have seen a few postings on social networks by AP staffers expressing personal opinions on issues in the news,” mentioning posts on the New York Senate gay marriage vote and on the Casey Anthony trial.
Kent added that “These posts undermine the credibility of our colleagues who have been working so hard to assure balanced and unbiased coverage of these issues.” He also referred employees to the company’s social media guidelines and warned of potential disciplinary action if these guidelines are violated.
The AP has a right to be concerned about social media. Facebook, and in particular Twitter, pose a very real threat to the company’s business. As information moves around the globe at an ever increasing speed, social media has become a de facto news wire to millions of people including many members of the news media. Even though the AP is a creator of news content as well as a distributor, its business model as a wire service is threatened nonetheless by the vast expansion of social media.
But what seems to concern Kent even more than that is the potential for social media comments by the staff exposing the inherently liberal nature of the AP and destroying the carefully crafted idea that the wire service is unbiased and balanced.
Kent and the AP may have fired a warning shot in the battle between social media and news organizations but they are likely to lose the war as it overtakes their business.
http://www.aim.org/aim-report/a-brie...e-modern-media