We Begin Tonight With…
Here’s a multiple choice question for you.
The ONE AND ONLY GOAL for the following corporations (The Walt Disney Company, Paramount, Comcast, Time Warner, Fox Entertainment) is:
Ensuring credibility and factuality
Restoring democracy
Upholding journalistic integrity
Making money
If you answered anything but 4, you’re not only incorrect, but you’re delusional. The corporations I listed above are the major media companies which own and operate ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX. They care about the truth, so long as it keeps stock prices high. They are interested in serving their audience, so long as the audience buys the products they advertise. You may think MSNBC is the “Libtard” channel and FOX News is the “Redneck Deplorable” channel and CNN is… well, whatever CNN is. And you’re right. But it’s not necessarily because of their politics. It’s because of the audiences they cater to. The corporations that decide programing for these networks don’t have meetings and decide “We’re going to air the Republican point of view because we’re Republicans and we want to push Republican agendas.” They look at YOU and say “We’re going to air the most outrageous and extreme liberal points of view because our audience is largely Republican and we want to outrage them and keep them watching the commercials we air in between whatever bullshit programs we produce.” Or “We’re going to air Donald Trump 24/7 because we know our audience hates him and can’t wait to hear how he will end up in jail. So long as they wait through the commercials.”
What we call “Mainstream Media” is not news. They don’t care about news, they don’t care about truth. Some of their journalists might care. Some of their correspondents, guests and hosts might care about the news. But not the parent companies. They are only interested in what makes money for the shareholders. There are a lot of things I care about too. But I work for a Fortune 100 company, and if they decide that elephant testicles make money and want me to focus on elephant testicles, well, I guess I have to focus on elephant testicles.
Actual, hard, unbiased news broadcasting is a dead medium. Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Chet Huntley are long gone, and so is the manner in which they reported and presented the news. What do we have now? Well, allow me to make this comparison; In 1982, Vince McMahon Jr. purchased the World Wrestling Federation from his father. He decided that he wouldn’t make enough money producing and airing professional wrestling, so he changed the industry. He created more colorful, exaggerated characters, and “Sports Entertainment” was born. A hybrid of competition and engaging, scripted stories that kept the viewer cheering one side and hating the other. It also kept them coming back week after week. And it kept fans buying t-shirts, hats, toys and any other merchandise they could fit a logo or a picture on. That is what we have now in the industry once known as news. We turn on prime time shows to see stories about larger than life characters who we either root for or boo. Or in some cases, threaten to hang.
One thing is for certain, most of us are not on one extreme side or the other, like the MSM tells us we are. We are probably a lot closer to the middle than we realize. And probably have much more in common than they would like us to. They don’t really want us to throw common sense out the window and join them. If that happened, we would all don the riot gear and bust down the Capitol doors. They want us to be outraged just enough, so that we watch the MyPillow guy or Limu Emu and Doug five times an hour. And that’s the way it is.