Joan Swirsky
Media whores
By Joan Swirsky
All apologies to the hard-working street-walkers and penthouse prostitutes who, unlike the modern-media harlots and rent-boys, have no illusions and offer no excuses about what they do and why.
For well over 75 years, Americans have naively trusted that the people who bring them the news every night – and today 24/7 – are highly informed, deeply sincere, remarkably unbiased
public servants.
After all, why would anyone go into a notoriously low-paying profession if he or she was not at heart an idealist?
Motives, of course, vary. Some are attracted to the "profession" because they are news junkies and want to be where the political action is. Others seek the limelight because the narcissist in them likes to be on camera. Then there are those who genuinely believe that their exposés and hard-hitting reporting can make a helpful difference in people's lives. Finally, we have aspirants with dollar signs in their eyes, hoping that they will be among the few who actually rake in the big bucks.
But for a public who still believe the "news" they read and hear and watch is even remotely related to "the truth," allow me to burst that bubble.
As ace journalist Ashley Lutz scrupulously documented in a Business Insider report last year, in 1983 there were 50 media companies, but today only six organizations are now responsible for 90 percent of all the "news" we read, watch, and listen to! They include:
Over the years, these globalist business titans have all made massive investments in the global economy, thanks largely to the leftist con men and women – the Clintons and Obamas, the communists, tin-pot dictators, and America-haters of the United Nations, and the leftist billionaires who thrive on and denounce capitalism at the same time – who wined and dined and charmed them into believing that America was on the decline and that the open-borders, one-world-government crowd was in imminent ascendance.
But big ideas, like the notion of a diminishing America, are never successful without the full-time help of a media that is run by – ta-da – the globalists themselves!
THIS IS HOW IT WORKS
Ms. Wide-Eyed idealist and Mr. Upwardly-Mobile go-getter apply for jobs at their local or national radio or TV stations or newspapers. Or they "know someone" who facilitates an interview that leads to their being hired. A good example of the latter is the nice-enough but remarkably untalented Chelsea Clinton, who landed an astronomically high-paying job with NBC that, mercifully for viewers, lasted about a minute.
Once hired, these wannabe journalists are thrilled to be on their way, until it dawns on them that their bosses don't give a damn about anything they think or believe or want to convey to a hungry public.
For most media employees, it soon becomes clear that they are expected – indeed, mandated – to reflect and convey the belief systems of their employers. And unless they do that, they are
completely DISPENSABLE!
My favorite example is Alysin Camerota of CNN. When she was at Fox, she was Ms. Reliable Conservative, or at least was fair and balanced. But the very millisecond she moved to CNN, she became as rabidly partisan as any leftwing fanatic has ever been.
Why? Because Ms. Camarota knew immediately that she was dispensable. That's how big business works. Toe the line or you're out! The same can be said of all the self-important newscasters who are literally given their marching orders – or more accurately, their talking orders – by their media bosses.
Not just talking orders, but word-for-word memes, which is why no matter which lefty network or cable show you turn to, they're all using the same vocabulary, expressions, key words. I first noticed this when Dick Cheney was chosen as a VP candidate by George W. Bush. All of a sudden, the media talking heads discovered the word "gravitas"!
Today, vis-à-vis Hurricane Harvey, the buzz word is the "empathy" that President Trump supposedly lacks – this in spite of an entire nation watching the people of Houston embrace and thank him. But objectivity has never been part of the media whores' repertoire, only slavish obeisance to their bosses.
Watch for yourself...in fact, take notes. There is a remarkable absence of originality in today's political reportage; it's all an echo chamber of talking points and leftist propaganda that the anchors and reporters have received beforehand and been literally commanded to utilize at the risk of their job.
And watch these (dispensable) media whores try to impress their bosses by competing in the categories of "best gotcha question," "most (feigned) outrage," "most blank-faced faux objectivity," and "most vilification of President Trump," who these disrespectful (dispensable) employees insist on calling "Trump." Again, watch for yourself.
But the question still remains: Why the ferocity against President Trump? Why the fanatical mission to depose him from office, to bring him down? The answer is quite simple: in every single case of what used to pass for politics as usual, he has single-handedly destroyed and brought down the prevailing powers-that-be: the Democrat Party, the Republican Party, the globalist agenda, treaties that were bad for America, the open-borders fetish, and the monolith known as the American media.
How? By giving voice to what the American people have known and been angry about for decades – i.e., that the powers-that-be are all corrupt, permeated with bribes and payoffs, self- serving, and in too many cases anti-American, anti the U.S. Constitution, and anti the Judeo-Christian ethics upon which our exceptional nation was founded.
PAYING THE WHORES
What we've been witnessing since June of 2015, when billionaire real-estate mogul and TV celebrity Donald Trump announced for the presidency, is a three-part phenomenon.
The first part was based on the arrogance of the establishment media poohbahs – the globalists – who spent over a year believing that the directives they gave to their (dispensable) media whores to deride, insult, sneer at, defame, vilify, and laugh at candidate Trump would destroy him.
But they failed! And as candidate Trump succeeded in vanquishing not five or 10 or 15 but 17 formidable opponents and gaining the nomination, the globalists shifted into second gear.
This second part involved the vast expenditures the globalists were willing to make to stop Mr. Trump's presidential campaign in its tracks, the kind of money – including, I suspect, huge payoffs – to polling firms to literally lie about the reliability of their numbers.
Every poll showed the worst candidate in American history, Hillary Clinton, ahead of the charismatic Mr. Trump. And every poll in states that have historically been a reliable slam-dunk for Democrats
– Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, etc. – showed Hillary far ahead. And let's not forget that every lying poll was reported earnestly as the gospel truth by the globalists' reliable
(but dispensable) media whores.
I don't have to guess about the, ahem, contributions made to the poseurs who call themselves Republicans, but who we now know are really in the thrall of anyone who puts money into their bottomless pockets. Those windfalls include – according to opensecrets.org and Matthew Boyle of Breitbart.com – the hefty largesse from hedge-fund billionaire and mega-funder of all things leftist, George Soros, whose name is attached to no fewer than 206 leftwing U.S. organizations, according to Dr. Eowyn. Here is the short list of sell-out Republicans who accepted Mr. Soros's, um, influential money: Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, presidential candidates former governor Jeb Bush and current governor John Kasich; senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Ron Johnson, Chuck Grassley, and senator and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio; the list goes on.
It is noteworthy that, as reported by Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, Mr. Soros has also funded every major protest since the November 2016 election, including the Women's March on Washington (see my article "The March to Nowhere"), the protests in front of Trump Tower in NY City, the thug-fests at Berkeley and elsewhere, and of course the fascists-on-display demonstrations of the anti-American, anti-Semitic Black Lives Matter and Antifa, where bought-and-paid for miscreants – dressed up like and imitating ISIS terrorists and Hitler's Brown Shirts – proceeded to smash windows, light cars on fire, and brutally attack supporters of President Trump.
All the while, the media honchos have kept up the negative drumbeat to defeat the president – to find something criminal to pin on him, to impeach him – even exhorting their (dispensable) media whores to ramp up the attacks.
In fact, a Harvard study released in May by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy revealed that in the president's first 100 days in office, 10 major TV and print outlets reported negatively 98 percent of the time!
The third part is what we've been witnessing since the election on November 8, 2016, when the globalists and moneybags who control both the media and the politicians realized that all of their efforts to stop the Trump Triumph had failed miserably. Every last dollar down the drain. Every "news" report for naught. Every article worthy only of lining a thousand birdcages.
DESPERATE MEASURES
What to do? First, the media whores created the colossal fiction that the Trump camp had colluded with Russia to rig the election. For days and weeks and months on end, these (dispensable) prostitutes studiously eschewed actual news, instead robotically intoning their anesthetizing talking points: Russia-Trump, Trump-Russia, Russia-Trump, Trump-Russia. That was it. No evidence, no first-person testimony, just the feeble attempts by their supposedly intelligent bosses to accomplish what they had failed at in the first place – getting rid of Donald Trump.
After that huge fizzle, the now-desperate get-Trump cabal trotted out the über-corrupt head of the FBI, James Comey, who astonishingly admitted that he used a Columbia professor to plant an article in the New York Times so President Trump would be forced to appoint a Special Counsel. Sure enough, it was Comey's close pal, former FBI director Robert Mueller, who got the job and has now appointed 17 attorneys, seven of them contributors to Hillary's Presidential campaign and/or the Clinton foundation.
But again, this witch hunt went nowhere, and so the (dispensable) media whores launched into their next mantra. While both domestic and international news demanded coverage, the American media's globalist bosses ordered their lackeys to keep up their anti-Trump efforts in the preposterous form of Breaking News: "obstruction of justice," "Jared Kushner's 'illegal' business dealings with Russian companies," the supposedly nefarious goings-on of POTUS advisors Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, Charlottesville with its bogus claims of "racism, racism, racism," and now Melania's stilettos!
THE NET RESULT
Adding it all up, we have a president who is zooming along at warp speed, amassing unprecedented accomplishments for the American people (see my articles, "The Juggernaut & the Jerks" and "The Unstoppable Trump Train").
The (dispensable) media whores have had zero effect on President Trump's performance or his continuing popularity with the American public, as attested to by the huge and enthusiastic audiences he attracts wherever he goes. Or, for that matter, his mood, which is clearly and consistently ebullient, upbeat, enthusiastic, and optimistic about America's future.
In addition, the mass gatherings of thugs, malcontents, anarchists, and basement dwellers have had zero effect on convincing our citizens that the left's fairy-tale vision of America – a free lunch (and breakfast and dinner, education, housing, cell phones, etc.), socialized medicine, open borders, sanctuary cities, high taxes, a nanny government, et al. – is even palatable, much less preferable.
Still, President Trump – an ardent citizen his entire life, an incredibly successful businessman, the bestselling author of over a dozen books, a philanthropist, the father of five respectful and loving children, the eldest of whom are also impressively contributory members of society, the representative and now enactor of every value Republicans and conservatives traditionally stand for (low taxes, fewer regulations, secure borders, a strong military, and strict conservative appointments to the Supreme Court) – continues to be the target of a "system" that clearly prefers their longtime habit of cozy corruption.
The fact that he CANNOT. BE. BOUGHT. drives them crazy. And the fact that the entire media establishment, for all their blitz-like attacks, have not dented his energy and resolve, or the respect of our nation's citizens, is clearly too much for them to take...hence the continued onslaught of lies, defamation, and attacks.
This, of course, is where the media whores differ from the more respectable prostitutes in our culture, who simply do their job, collect their fees, and express their personal opinions and biases to their friends, colleagues, and families.
The media whores could learn a lot from them.
Joan Swirsky is a New York-based author and journalist who can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com.
© Joan Swirsky
September 4, 2017
All apologies to the hard-working street-walkers and penthouse prostitutes who, unlike the modern-media harlots and rent-boys, have no illusions and offer no excuses about what they do and why.
For well over 75 years, Americans have naively trusted that the people who bring them the news every night – and today 24/7 – are highly informed, deeply sincere, remarkably unbiased
public servants.After all, why would anyone go into a notoriously low-paying profession if he or she was not at heart an idealist?
Motives, of course, vary. Some are attracted to the "profession" because they are news junkies and want to be where the political action is. Others seek the limelight because the narcissist in them likes to be on camera. Then there are those who genuinely believe that their exposés and hard-hitting reporting can make a helpful difference in people's lives. Finally, we have aspirants with dollar signs in their eyes, hoping that they will be among the few who actually rake in the big bucks.
But for a public who still believe the "news" they read and hear and watch is even remotely related to "the truth," allow me to burst that bubble.
As ace journalist Ashley Lutz scrupulously documented in a Business Insider report last year, in 1983 there were 50 media companies, but today only six organizations are now responsible for 90 percent of all the "news" we read, watch, and listen to! They include:
- GE (Comcast, NBC, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, et al.).
- NewsCorp (Fox, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, et al.).
- Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Miramax, Marvel Studios, et al.)
- Viacom (MTV, Nick Jr., BET, CMT, Paramount Pictures, et al.)
- Time Warner (CNN, HBO, TIME, Warner Bros., et al.)
- CBS (Showtime, Smithsonian Channel, NFL.com, Jeopardy, 60 Minutes, et al.)
Over the years, these globalist business titans have all made massive investments in the global economy, thanks largely to the leftist con men and women – the Clintons and Obamas, the communists, tin-pot dictators, and America-haters of the United Nations, and the leftist billionaires who thrive on and denounce capitalism at the same time – who wined and dined and charmed them into believing that America was on the decline and that the open-borders, one-world-government crowd was in imminent ascendance.
But big ideas, like the notion of a diminishing America, are never successful without the full-time help of a media that is run by – ta-da – the globalists themselves!
THIS IS HOW IT WORKS
Ms. Wide-Eyed idealist and Mr. Upwardly-Mobile go-getter apply for jobs at their local or national radio or TV stations or newspapers. Or they "know someone" who facilitates an interview that leads to their being hired. A good example of the latter is the nice-enough but remarkably untalented Chelsea Clinton, who landed an astronomically high-paying job with NBC that, mercifully for viewers, lasted about a minute.
Once hired, these wannabe journalists are thrilled to be on their way, until it dawns on them that their bosses don't give a damn about anything they think or believe or want to convey to a hungry public.
For most media employees, it soon becomes clear that they are expected – indeed, mandated – to reflect and convey the belief systems of their employers. And unless they do that, they are
completely DISPENSABLE!My favorite example is Alysin Camerota of CNN. When she was at Fox, she was Ms. Reliable Conservative, or at least was fair and balanced. But the very millisecond she moved to CNN, she became as rabidly partisan as any leftwing fanatic has ever been.
Why? Because Ms. Camarota knew immediately that she was dispensable. That's how big business works. Toe the line or you're out! The same can be said of all the self-important newscasters who are literally given their marching orders – or more accurately, their talking orders – by their media bosses.
Not just talking orders, but word-for-word memes, which is why no matter which lefty network or cable show you turn to, they're all using the same vocabulary, expressions, key words. I first noticed this when Dick Cheney was chosen as a VP candidate by George W. Bush. All of a sudden, the media talking heads discovered the word "gravitas"!
Today, vis-à-vis Hurricane Harvey, the buzz word is the "empathy" that President Trump supposedly lacks – this in spite of an entire nation watching the people of Houston embrace and thank him. But objectivity has never been part of the media whores' repertoire, only slavish obeisance to their bosses.
Watch for yourself...in fact, take notes. There is a remarkable absence of originality in today's political reportage; it's all an echo chamber of talking points and leftist propaganda that the anchors and reporters have received beforehand and been literally commanded to utilize at the risk of their job.
And watch these (dispensable) media whores try to impress their bosses by competing in the categories of "best gotcha question," "most (feigned) outrage," "most blank-faced faux objectivity," and "most vilification of President Trump," who these disrespectful (dispensable) employees insist on calling "Trump." Again, watch for yourself.
But the question still remains: Why the ferocity against President Trump? Why the fanatical mission to depose him from office, to bring him down? The answer is quite simple: in every single case of what used to pass for politics as usual, he has single-handedly destroyed and brought down the prevailing powers-that-be: the Democrat Party, the Republican Party, the globalist agenda, treaties that were bad for America, the open-borders fetish, and the monolith known as the American media.
How? By giving voice to what the American people have known and been angry about for decades – i.e., that the powers-that-be are all corrupt, permeated with bribes and payoffs, self- serving, and in too many cases anti-American, anti the U.S. Constitution, and anti the Judeo-Christian ethics upon which our exceptional nation was founded.
PAYING THE WHORES
What we've been witnessing since June of 2015, when billionaire real-estate mogul and TV celebrity Donald Trump announced for the presidency, is a three-part phenomenon.
The first part was based on the arrogance of the establishment media poohbahs – the globalists – who spent over a year believing that the directives they gave to their (dispensable) media whores to deride, insult, sneer at, defame, vilify, and laugh at candidate Trump would destroy him.
But they failed! And as candidate Trump succeeded in vanquishing not five or 10 or 15 but 17 formidable opponents and gaining the nomination, the globalists shifted into second gear.
This second part involved the vast expenditures the globalists were willing to make to stop Mr. Trump's presidential campaign in its tracks, the kind of money – including, I suspect, huge payoffs – to polling firms to literally lie about the reliability of their numbers.
Every poll showed the worst candidate in American history, Hillary Clinton, ahead of the charismatic Mr. Trump. And every poll in states that have historically been a reliable slam-dunk for Democrats
– Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, etc. – showed Hillary far ahead. And let's not forget that every lying poll was reported earnestly as the gospel truth by the globalists' reliable
(but dispensable) media whores.I don't have to guess about the, ahem, contributions made to the poseurs who call themselves Republicans, but who we now know are really in the thrall of anyone who puts money into their bottomless pockets. Those windfalls include – according to opensecrets.org and Matthew Boyle of Breitbart.com – the hefty largesse from hedge-fund billionaire and mega-funder of all things leftist, George Soros, whose name is attached to no fewer than 206 leftwing U.S. organizations, according to Dr. Eowyn. Here is the short list of sell-out Republicans who accepted Mr. Soros's, um, influential money: Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, presidential candidates former governor Jeb Bush and current governor John Kasich; senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Ron Johnson, Chuck Grassley, and senator and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio; the list goes on.
It is noteworthy that, as reported by Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, Mr. Soros has also funded every major protest since the November 2016 election, including the Women's March on Washington (see my article "The March to Nowhere"), the protests in front of Trump Tower in NY City, the thug-fests at Berkeley and elsewhere, and of course the fascists-on-display demonstrations of the anti-American, anti-Semitic Black Lives Matter and Antifa, where bought-and-paid for miscreants – dressed up like and imitating ISIS terrorists and Hitler's Brown Shirts – proceeded to smash windows, light cars on fire, and brutally attack supporters of President Trump.
All the while, the media honchos have kept up the negative drumbeat to defeat the president – to find something criminal to pin on him, to impeach him – even exhorting their (dispensable) media whores to ramp up the attacks.
In fact, a Harvard study released in May by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy revealed that in the president's first 100 days in office, 10 major TV and print outlets reported negatively 98 percent of the time!
The third part is what we've been witnessing since the election on November 8, 2016, when the globalists and moneybags who control both the media and the politicians realized that all of their efforts to stop the Trump Triumph had failed miserably. Every last dollar down the drain. Every "news" report for naught. Every article worthy only of lining a thousand birdcages.
DESPERATE MEASURES
What to do? First, the media whores created the colossal fiction that the Trump camp had colluded with Russia to rig the election. For days and weeks and months on end, these (dispensable) prostitutes studiously eschewed actual news, instead robotically intoning their anesthetizing talking points: Russia-Trump, Trump-Russia, Russia-Trump, Trump-Russia. That was it. No evidence, no first-person testimony, just the feeble attempts by their supposedly intelligent bosses to accomplish what they had failed at in the first place – getting rid of Donald Trump.
After that huge fizzle, the now-desperate get-Trump cabal trotted out the über-corrupt head of the FBI, James Comey, who astonishingly admitted that he used a Columbia professor to plant an article in the New York Times so President Trump would be forced to appoint a Special Counsel. Sure enough, it was Comey's close pal, former FBI director Robert Mueller, who got the job and has now appointed 17 attorneys, seven of them contributors to Hillary's Presidential campaign and/or the Clinton foundation.
But again, this witch hunt went nowhere, and so the (dispensable) media whores launched into their next mantra. While both domestic and international news demanded coverage, the American media's globalist bosses ordered their lackeys to keep up their anti-Trump efforts in the preposterous form of Breaking News: "obstruction of justice," "Jared Kushner's 'illegal' business dealings with Russian companies," the supposedly nefarious goings-on of POTUS advisors Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, Charlottesville with its bogus claims of "racism, racism, racism," and now Melania's stilettos!
THE NET RESULTAdding it all up, we have a president who is zooming along at warp speed, amassing unprecedented accomplishments for the American people (see my articles, "The Juggernaut & the Jerks" and "The Unstoppable Trump Train").
The (dispensable) media whores have had zero effect on President Trump's performance or his continuing popularity with the American public, as attested to by the huge and enthusiastic audiences he attracts wherever he goes. Or, for that matter, his mood, which is clearly and consistently ebullient, upbeat, enthusiastic, and optimistic about America's future.
In addition, the mass gatherings of thugs, malcontents, anarchists, and basement dwellers have had zero effect on convincing our citizens that the left's fairy-tale vision of America – a free lunch (and breakfast and dinner, education, housing, cell phones, etc.), socialized medicine, open borders, sanctuary cities, high taxes, a nanny government, et al. – is even palatable, much less preferable.
Still, President Trump – an ardent citizen his entire life, an incredibly successful businessman, the bestselling author of over a dozen books, a philanthropist, the father of five respectful and loving children, the eldest of whom are also impressively contributory members of society, the representative and now enactor of every value Republicans and conservatives traditionally stand for (low taxes, fewer regulations, secure borders, a strong military, and strict conservative appointments to the Supreme Court) – continues to be the target of a "system" that clearly prefers their longtime habit of cozy corruption.
The fact that he CANNOT. BE. BOUGHT. drives them crazy. And the fact that the entire media establishment, for all their blitz-like attacks, have not dented his energy and resolve, or the respect of our nation's citizens, is clearly too much for them to take...hence the continued onslaught of lies, defamation, and attacks.
This, of course, is where the media whores differ from the more respectable prostitutes in our culture, who simply do their job, collect their fees, and express their personal opinions and biases to their friends, colleagues, and families.
The media whores could learn a lot from them.
Joan Swirsky is a New York-based author and journalist who can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com.
© Joan Swirsky
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
