Truth

*Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. John 8:32 KJV (47)

*Don’t lie and you won’t have to remember any. Chinese proverb (2030)

*Truth is. Lies have to be invented. (2239)

Is truth important? Is truth relative? Yes and no. One way to know if truth is important is to see the effect on people when they are lied to. Watch the expression on someone’s face when they discover their life savings has been wiped out because they were seduced by an accomplished liar into investing in a non-existent or collapsing company. Look at the expression on your best friend’s face when he learns you’ve lied to him.

Watch the emotional outbursts of the families of victims whose guilty perpetrators are set free because they were such proficient liars. Exodus 20:16 says, “You must not give false testimony in court.” God knew that when truth becomes irrelevant in the courtroom, anarchy or tyranny will soon rule the streets.

Study the pictures of the starving and destitute German survivors of Hitler’s 3 rd Reich. His motto was, “If you tell a lie long enough and loud enough and often enough, the people will believe it.”

How about something a little closer to home: look what happened to Nixon after he lied to us, and look what happened to the Democrat party after eight years of “ Clinton fatigue.”

Is truth relative, or is it absolute? Truth should be absolute when it deals with important things like God, politics, social issues, science, health, trust, and finances. Unfortunately there are people in the media who should be trusted to tell us the truth, but who believe truth is relative. An example is a quote from Peter Jennings in Reader’s Digest, Oct. 2002, pg. 104, that says, “I have become convinced there is no one truth, nor two; there are often several truths.” How convenient. The next time he tells you the news you might ask yourself if this is the actual truth, or if this is the “My-bread-is-buttered-on- this-side” truth.

However, when it comes to a person’s feelings about an unimportant subject, then I think that person’s feelings should be most important. There’s an old saying that deals with this: “Those people who are brutally honest usually enjoy the brutal part more than the honest part.”

If Aunt Sally’s meat-loaf tastes like old shoe leather, it’s OK to tell her it tastes fine. If your wife asks you if a certain pair of jeans makes her look fat, I think you know the answer.

*Do good wherever you can, love freedom above everything, uphold truth even before the throne. Beethoven (1742)

*There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. G. Orwell 1984 (1842)

*If thy words stray from the truth for the good of God’s own – if thy intent be pure – then thou shalt not be judged sinful. (1738) (Kate Hepburn in the movie Rooster Cogburn)

*I would rather be right than be president. Henry Clay (680)

*Controversy for the sake of controversy is a sin. Controversy for the sake of truth is a command. (729) (paraphrased from the Bible)

*You have the right to speak the truth, and then you have the right to shut up. (1826)

*Education is our total strategy, and truth is our only weapon. (2083) (Robert Welch – founder of the John Birch Society) http://jbs.org/

*The majority of decision makers in the press have their own agenda – a liberal agenda. Michael Reagan, Making Waves (2497) (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1996)

*Spin is to public relations what pornography is to art. (1840) (R. L. Dilenschneider, Forbes Magazine)

An excellent example of desperately needed spin can be found in the April, 2004 edition of Ebony magazine. The magazine cover shouts the headline “Janet [ Jackson] speaks!” Underneath is the question “Why was she singled out?”

The interview with Jackson begins: “demure and fragile” Janet, who spoke with a “barely audible angelic voice...insists that she is ‘okay’”…even though the “hurt and embarrassment [of the condemnation for her Superbowl stunt] are evident on her face.” Shoving her bare breast into America’s face “was not intentional” she claimed. “I put others first and worry about other people’s feelings and their issues before I worry about myself.”

Ebony then described America’s outrage as a “media onslaught that has been called ‘unfair,’ ‘blown out of proportion’ and ‘racist.’”

Hey, if you’ve got the race card up your sleeve, who needs truth and accuracy?

*There is no such thing as an “objective” national news media. (2498)

This quote is from And That’s the Way It Is(n’t) – A reference Guide to Media Bias, edited by L. Brent Bozell III and Brent H. Baker. (1990, Media Research Center)

If anyone looked at most news broadcasts objectively they would find the broadcasts are carefully calculated and constructed to slant the contents in the directions the media moguls wish it to be perceived. Ann Coulter put it this way, “The media determine how the news will be served up, how the players are characterized, what news to report, and what news not to report.”

Bernard Goldberg (worked at CBS News for thirty years) once said that “the networks and other media elites have a liberal bias.” His colleague at CBS, Bob Schieffer, was shocked at Goldberg’s audacity and said, “People are just stunned. It’s such a wacky charge….It just sounds bizarre.” Norman Pearlstine (editor in chief, Time-Warner magazines) said, “There is no active, aggressive, important publication of the left in America,” and “to call the New York Times left-wing is absurd.” Tom Shales (Washington Post TV reporter) called Goldberg a “full-time addlepated windbag,” “a no-talent hack,” “a lousy writer,” “laughably inept,” “disheveled and bleary-eyed on the air,” and “a flop as a network correspondent” because he had “haul[ed] out the old canard about the media being liberal.”

Peter Jennings said, “CNN is mainstream media….ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media.” “[W]e are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage…” Jack White (Time magazine) said, “There is no liberal bias in the press on the whole. It’s hard to find a person of the liberal persuasion who is making any important decisions in any important media institutions in this country now.” Dan Rather said, “I try to blow out lights on both sides of the street.” Peter Arnett (CNN) said, “I voted for Clinton, but, you know, when it gets to the vote, you do it, and then you go on with your journalism. I don’t think the two are really related.” Yeah, probably not. Just because 89% of Washington bureau chiefs and reporters voted for a liberal for president in 1992, it couldn’t possibly mean they would support a liberal slant in their news reporting. (That was the election in which Clinton got a whopping 43% of the popular votes.)

Many media employees got their start by working for well known politicians. Ever heard of George Stephanopoulos? Other people who worked for Democrats and then graduated to a career in the media are: Brian Williams, Lesley Stahl, Jane Pauley, Jeff Greenfield, Tim Russert, Ken Bode, Bill Moyers, Rick Inderfurth, Pierre Salinger, Dee Dee Myers, James Carville, Chris Matthews, Elizabeth Brackett, Ken Auletta, Jeffery Katzenberg, Steven Brill, David Shipley, Leslie Gelb, James Fallows, Tom Johnson, Walter Pincus, Jack Rosenthal, John Seigenthaler, Sidney Blumenthal, Donald Baer, Carolyn Curiel, Thomas Ross, Tara Sonenshine, and Strobe Talbott.

Some media personalities who started out as family members of Democrat politicians are Chris Cuomo, Eleanor Mondale, Cokie Roberts, Maria Shriver, and Evan Thomas. Jesse Jackson got his TV show by running for president. His son, Jesse Jackson, Jr. got his own TV show by being Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Media personalities who got their start working for Republicans are Diane Sawyer, Susan Molinari, and Pete Williams.

Sawyer had a low-level job in the Nixon White House. She said she was looking for any job in politics and “[i]f someone like [Democrat] George McGovern had offered me a job, I’d almost certainly have taken it.” When she was hired by CBS in 1978, Robert Pierpoint (CBS) told one of their vice-presidents, “I don’t like hiring people into news who have been involved in party politics.” Dan Rather (CBS) said Sawyer “had no credibility” and had “been discredited” because she had worked for Nixon.

Moderate and pro-abortion Republican Congresswoman Susan Molinari was hired by CBS in 1997 to co-anchor a show. Her job was to cover cooking, fitness, and movies. When news that a dread Republican was hired, the media freaked. NPR’s Nina Totenberg fumed about Molinari’s hiring, “Well, this really makes me want to puke.” “Mainstream, middle-of-the-road” NPR was then run by Delano Lewis, who was Mayor Marian Berry’s chief fund-raiser. Lewis had replaced NPR’s Douglas Bennet who left to join Clinton & Comrades. Bennet had risen to NPR’s presidency by replacing Frank Mankiewicz who had worked for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.

Over a hundred newspaper articles were written about the disastrous effects of allowing such a narrow-minded right-winger into the all-embracing brother and sisterhood of the tolerant, unbiased, mainstream media. Some of the article’s headlines went: “CBS Adds Molinari, Loses Credibility,” “Hiring Susan Molinari, a Ratings-Hungry CBS Gave TV Journalism a Setback,” “Molinari Move to CBS Blurs Journalistic, Political Lines,” “Government-Media Revolving Door a Threat to Press,” “Is It News or Is It Propaganda?” and “The Faces Are New, the Biases Aren’t.”

Susan Molinari’s career at CBS lasted for only ten months.

Pete Williams worked for President Bush, Sr. His hiring by NBC brought about the same firestorm of liberal invective, so just re-read the last few paragraphs and insert Williams’ name wherever you see “Molinari.”

Since the CNNABCCBSNBC media empire is mainstream and middle-of-the-road, then FOX news has to be “a blatantly biased, conservative news service that is challenging the longtime supremacy of the more balanced news networks.” That’s the unbiased opinion of Joan Konner who’s a professor and dean emerita at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

If you want a book that proves whether the media is slanted to the left or not, read And That’s the Way It Is(n’t). It’s a few years old, but other books take up where this one left off. By using something as simple as the Nexis computer system, the editors were able to prove statistically that the dominant media is overwhelmingly pro-liberal.

Nexis is a way to count the number of times certain words are used in the media (such as “pro” vs. “anti” or “liberal” vs. “conservative”), and the number of times certain words are used in conjunction with other words (such as “ultra-conservative” Jesse Helms vs. “ultra-liberal Ted Kennedy). Nexis is also used to find how many times certain subjects were discussed in the media. Years of surveys were used. Chapter after chapter of direct quotations from speeches and interviews by the highest paid and most well-known reporters backs this up.

The editors of And That’s the Way It Is(‘nt) say that the liberal slant to the news isn’t the fault of the reporters because they just don’t know any better. I disagree. I believe most reporters know the truth but sometimes make a conscious decision to misrepresent it, or totally ignore it. There is more than enough evidence of this, and it isn’t surprising once you learn who owns and controls the very few media empires.

If your boss said, “The Ten Commandments are irrelevant and obsolete,” or “Christianity is a religion for wimps and losers” (tell that to the tens of millions of Christians who were tortured to death because they would not deny their faith), wouldn’t you be more apt to slant your reporting towards an anti-Christian viewpoint? If your boss said this about the Soviet leaders: “I absolutely trust them with my life. They’re not even an enemy anymore,” and this about our military budget, “I think we can get by easily with a $75 billion military budget. Those bombers and all this stuff is an absolute waste of money and a joke,” wouldn’t you be mare apt to slant your reporting to a pro-disarmament viewpoint? Wouldn’t you treat the supporters of a strong military as narrow-minded fearmongers?

You probably would if you worked for CNN because all those quotes were from your boss – Ted Turner.

Thou shalt not steal? Thou shalt not commit adultery? Thou shalt not bear false witness? Thou shalt honor thy father and mother? Thou shalt not commit murder? Irrelevant and obsolete? What an arrogant jerk.

And as far as our military budget – how many billions did we spend in our little skirmish with the dictator of Iraq in 1991, Ted? $51 billion.

(Just to let you know – when Clinton became president we had 85 military divisions that were up and running. When he left office, there were 15. It looks like the liberals did have their way with our military budget. Oh well, that’s OK because the whole world is now governed by a peaceful, loving, tolerant, moral, and generous brotherhood of mankind. Who needs a military in such a perfect world?)

If you worked for a media empire in which your boss made it quite clear that he believed the 2 nd Amendment should be repealed, would you risk your job with a pro-gun editorial? If you worked for NBC you would think twice about that, since it was the belief of a president of your company.

In recent years, many more books have been written to show a liberal bias in the media. NexisLexis is now used to make it easier to prove this point. Conservative Ann Coulter uses it in Slander (2002) to prove her point.

Another way the liberal-controlled media can slant truth is simply by putting certain words within quotation marks. Is America fighting a war on terrorism or a “war on terrorism?” Was Ronald Reagan a great president or a “great” president? Is America the land of the free, or the land of the “free?” Ann Coulter calls this tactic “the highbrow sneer of sarcastic quote marks”

*Just because it’s on the news doesn’t mean it’s the truth. Horowitz (1818) (David Horowitz)

*And just because it’s not on the news doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. (1819) (A lot of what is helping to destroy America is not what the major media is telling us, but what it is not telling us. How can Americans make an informed decision about anything if half of the news is left out? For a more thorough and unbiased look at the news check out http://newsmax.com/ or http://drudgereport.com/ It will open up a whole new world.)

*Our life is a long, arduous quest after truth. Mahatma Gandhi (2238)

*The only thing that can prevent you from learning the truth is the assumption that you already have it. (2861)

*I believe that in the end the truth will conquer. J. Wyclif (675)