The liberal media — New York Times and Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, The Daily Beast, Alternet, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and others—has in Chris Hedge’s words, “betrayed the core values they [liberals] use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars.”
On the flip side, the conservative media such Fox, Sinclair and the Christian broadcasting networks, equally forsakes the most basic principles of human decency and compassion.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, these ideals and causes would have been a standard platform that defined the progressive agenda from a liberal and humanist perspective. Modern progressivism’s roots began with La Follette’s Weekly, a publication founded by Senator Robert La Follette in 1909. Still in print, but known as The Progressive, it remains a leading voice against war, militarism, oligarchic rule, and corporate interests that have hijacked and increasingly control Congress and the White House. When we consider the mainstream media networks and publications — left and right — how many have publicly expressed opposition to the escalation of America’s wars and regime changes, greenhouse gas emissions, and the lobbying of Big Pharma, the agro-chemical and fossil fuel industries, and Wall Street? Such corporate media outlets can’t be found because in a full blown oligarchy both the government’s and its private financiers’ partners lay the foundation for a totalitarian nation.
The media is incapable of reporting to Americans the true state of the country’s domestic and cultural affairs and the harsh decline back to a developing nation. Both conservative and liberal media have failed to create a believable story that reflects the actual economic and social conditions of average Americans because it has not been able to move beyond the Red-Blue divide.
All of our institutions today are bereft of ethical and spiritual substance. The right suffers from pre-rational superstition and anti-intellectualism that has turned the US into a laughing stock among developed countries. The left suffers from a highbrow intellect and a poverty of spirit that was once, and could be again, a moral and revolutionary force to relieve suffering and fight on behalf of peace and human and civil rights.
Although most alternative liberal media disagree on particular policies, when election time arrives, all realistic principles are abandoned. Given the ease with which the liberal media betrays its stated ideals, we must call into question the integrity of the entire political establishment altogether and ask whether it is wise to compromise.
If you have bought into the mainstream media and support either of the two parties now dominating Washington, then by extension this is what you have been condoning:
- Across the board the government and corporate America continue to deny the severity of climate change and global warming threats and therefore accept there is no urgency to take drastic measures to curb the rate of greenhouse gas emissions;
- Failure to cover the actual human and environmental risks of hydrofracking, tar sand oil and pipelines and instead only focusing on the spectacle of Standing Rock protests;
- Support the construction of new nuclear power reactors, believing in the myth and propaganda of clean coal, condoning indiscriminate hydrofracking in environmentally sensitive areas and allowing these industries to be subsidized by the taxpayer;
- Has shown to tolerate illegal wiretapping and a systematic surveillance of Americans by government intelligence agencies in allegiance with private cyber-security corporations;
- By ignoring the government’s regressive surveillance efforts it is being complaint with violating privacy laws so that no citizen is protected from monitoring email, mobile phones, the internet, etc, because every citizen in the government’s eyes is a potential threat to the country’s national security
- By completely ignoring the end of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by the Obama administration and now expanded upon by Trump, which forbids the US military from being deployed on domestic soil and acting against American citizens, the media is further advancing the military policing of the populace;
- The media’s silence permits the US to transform into a police state as state, county and township police departments are increasingly militarized by the US armed forces and become extensions of the Department of Defense;
- Rarely does a federal or intelligence whistleblower ever appear on mainstream media. Its negligence in fact supports the silencing and prosecution of whistleblowers in government who come forth publicly to warn about criminal activities and corruption in government agencies;
- As our civil court system is being transformed into a military court model, it erodes the legal rights of citizens against government tyranny upon which our legal system is based;
- Ignoring the corruption and funding behind the entire private prison system that relies upon an infinite growth model of inmates, and the criminalization of poverty;
- Consistently acts against the rights of workers and unions, favoring treaties such as NAFTA, GATT and the forthcoming Trans Pacific and Trans Atlantic partnerships that further sell out American workers in return to greater profits to be overseas for the 1 percent;
- Gives preferential treatment to the medical insurance industry, which contributes nothing to the prevention and treatment of disease, and is silent about the private medical establishment writing the healthcare laws for the country;
- Completely complicit in advancing the pharmaceutical agenda that vaccines are effective and safe and should be mandated nationally;
- Allowing the private agro-chemical industry headed by Monsanto and Dupont to write the agricultural laws in the country so that genetically modified crops and organisms are wrongfully considered safe for human and animal consumption and carry no risk to the environment;
- Denying the Federal Reserve’s role in demolishing America’s middle class and protecting the Wall Street oligarchy’s control over the Fed and US Treasury at the public’s expense;
- Judging Wall Street banks more worthy of forgiveness to receive debt relief and assistance from taxpayers than debt forgiveness to Americans who are underwater in their mortgages, credit, student loans and small business debts;
- Gross failure to independently analyze the adverse effects on the domestic economy and society from trillion dollar bailouts to Wall Street and mega-corporations;
- Increasing America’s military budget at home and abroad rather than feeding the nation’s starving children and dealing with the growing number of homeless who have suffered at the hands of the government’s compliance with Wall Street disaster capitalists;
- Ignoring the need for independent investigations and hearings into the current and past four administrations into the invasions of sovereign countries and covert efforts to fuel regime change;
- Ignoring the thousands of homicides and suicides committed by American soldiers and veterans who have been abused and forgotten by the US government since the launch of the war against terror and failing to make the association that the fundamental problem is war and the US’s imperial ambitions;
- Failure to criticize despotic regimes that the US supports with dismal human rights records such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Israel’s apartheid of Palestine, Brazil, Colombia, India;
- Launching sanctions against Iran that are responsible for untold suffering of Iranian citizens and children without any international proof that Iran poses either a regional or nuclear threat;
From the perspective of universal values and higher spiritual ethics, these are among both Democrats’ and Republicans’ many faults. Many might perceive these charges as indicators of progress. However, since the captured pundits pretend to align themselves with faux and disingenuous progressive values, the media must be held accountable for its blind ignorance in giving voice to the Deep State and thereby undermining Constitutional rights and personal freedoms.
Until Americans summon the courage to stand up and demand an end to the Deep State’s corporate and intelligence stranglehold on our institutions of power, we are almost guaranteed to head further towards a complete cultural and economic collapse.
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