The original publishing of this article was on Facebook ·Saturday, February 18, 2017 and again on medium.com on Jun 24 2017.
By: Dustin Micheli (with editor/contributor Tiffany Wright)
Even the tiny hand of a broken clock is right twice a day. That’s what I keep telling myself as I witness the spectacle that is Donald Trump and find myself obliged to agree with him on occasion. His current sparring partner, the mainstream media, is manifestly consequential to us all. There is an inherent danger in the normalization of institutions that have routinely lied, colluded, sensationalized and conflated- without any real consequence, apology, or retraction. The mainstream, corporate media being at odds with Donald Trump should not overshadow the fact that they have become the entertainment division of the military industrial complex and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
These are also the same media outlets mechanically responsible for the election and popularity of Donald J. Trump. Not since Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal has a president garnered such media frenzy and attention. Trumps detractors have gone to great lengths to publicize almost every word he has spoken since he first entered the Republican primaries. No one in history has gotten this much free press to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. A wealth of media and press coverage was devoted to Donald Trump’s campaign, at the Democrats request: first on over-reporting, then on fear-mongering about his candidacy while sensationalizing every second of it at the same time.
Bernie Sanders’ campaign, with its populist message, managed to get more contributions from real individual people than any other candidate in U.S. history. It was absurdly under-reported by mainstream media at the behest of their corporate co-conspirators in the Democratic Party. These media inconsistencies are directly responsible for the peoples answer: to start creating and/or gravitating to small independent media outlets and whistle blower organizations (such as Wiki Leaks, Truth Dig, The Intercept and many others).
Literally millions of people have been murdered by our military and government at the behest of the military industrial complex- through warfare that funds the very media outlets that are conveniently failing to cover our military actions reliably. Every major conflict since before Vietnam to the current Russian conflation can be attributed to the collusion of corporate media and the military and securities industries- who consequently benefit from our failed foreign policies abroad. Our entire NATO alliance seems to be predicated on arms sales. The idea that Russia is always an imminent threat is one which our so-called allies Israel and Saudi Arabia also benefit greatly from, being the chief arms dealers in the region besides the United States.
Any of this ring a bell? Not if you’ve been watching CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC. The mainstream media is failing at its job and worse, working against us. The benefits or necessity of U.S. military conflicts and intrusions taking place in my lifetime have yet to be demonstrated without relying on false information. The buildups to these illegitimate conflicts seem to have some common denominators. An example of this is the repetition of assertions over facts for months on end. Those who benefit greatly from these conflicts are in direct relation to and in collusion with the very journalistic outlets that dominated our media spectrum up until the last 20 years. Part of the reason net neutrality became an issue is because the powers that be cannot censor that medium. If these groups hate anything more than the idea of losing their positions of power, it is transparency and open discourse. This contempt for free media shows the underlying fear that they may fail to subordinate a well-informed working class.
WikiLeaks documents prove and document much of this, but are far from the only source. A simple YouTube or Google search can produce countless clips and articles exemplifying our mainstream media outlets misrepresenting information. If it weren’t for independent investigative media and whistleblower organizations, many of those lies would have gone unexposed.
While the establishment left is proclaiming President Trump to be the ultimate enemy to freedom of the press, the ink is still wet on unconstitutional legislation just passed under Obama to attack dissenting and progressive journalism in McCarthy-era fashion. When considering the “Trump vs Fake News” theatrics currently on display, we may do well to remember that even the tiny hand of a broken clock is going to be right some of the time.