Nice Broadcast License You Have There…

Once again the chattering classes (and weak-kneed Republicans) are atwitter that Donald Trump has threatened to do something unseemly. This time to NBC, putatively for peddling some fake news. Basically he paraphrased the old Mafiosi threat, “Nice broadcast license you have there. It would be ashamed if something happened to it.”

The reaction has been essentially that Donald Trump is taking away NBC’s First Amendment rights, blah, blah, blah.

That’s not actually true.

It’s important to understand that NBC owns and operates several (lucrative)stations in the top TV markets (???). Therefore it has to maintain broadcast licenses in its own name.

However, most people watch NBC affiliates, that is, stations owned by others. These other owners are free to drop their affiliation, according to contracts, of course.

The simple fact is that Pres. Trump cannot take away the broadcast licenses of those stations owned by NBC, much less the affiliates.

The removal of those broadcast licenses would require the FCC to take action. Prompting the FCC to take action would not so much be at the behest of the president but rather complaints lodged against those stations by viewers.

Of course removing broadcast licenses en masse would be very unusual. So unusual that it is essentially inconceivable.

Pres. Trump knows this, I think.

I believe what he is up to is that he’s sending a signal.

Look at it another way. The most important and valuable asset NBC’s owned and operated stations have are the public airwaves they use (but don’t own). And as such users they are supposed to serve the public — all the public not just the Democratic Party and coastal elites. This little detail has been long forgotten or taken for granted.

Looking at it from a fresh angle — it’s unlikely that the news operations of those NBC stations have any Trump voters working at them, at least, not in the editorial end. I work in the media industry, though not mainstream news media. I can tell you from experience that the MSM does not hire Republicans or open conservatives. The books written on this phenomenon are now legion.

Considering that at least 1/3 of the country is made up of Trump voters, how is it in the public interest when a user of a public asset leans strongly against at least 1/3 of the country? One-third of the owners of those assets and has done so for decades?

The same is true of the other networks, save Fox.

If NBC were what it has long pretended to be, an unbiased transmitter of information, it would have plenty of Trump voters working at it. The same would be true of the other big networks. But that’s simply not the case. You’d think if they were honest they’d be embarrassed at being so one-sided.

But if they were little (or nothing) more than partisans they’d be satisfied at their domination and seeking to maintain it.

Something needs to be done about the broadcast media being little more than an information transmission belt for the Democratic Party.

It is important to understand that this only affects the publicly-owned airwaves. For cable news operations and newspapers, they are privately-owned, utilizing private networks and should be sheltered from government interference. Ironically, liberals want to bring cable operations under the eye of the FCC. That should be strongly resisted.

One final note, notice that Trump hasn’t threatened to use the government against newspapers — they don’t make use of publicly-owned assets either. His threats against them have been civil (libel) laws.

So What Happened to Scalise?

Here’s a great example how the meme is carefully crafted and nourished.

Tuesday morning WTOP radio had Politico’s Kyle Cheney on for a short interview about Rep. Steve Scalise calling into a Republican conference call. I remind you that Scalise was nearly killed by a crazed leftie several weeks ago. I need to remind you that because Cheney didn’t do that.

He expounded how Scalise’s fellow Republicans were happy to hear him doing so well and how Scalise may need to relearn how to walk. A casual listener might have wondered why Scalise was “recovering” or what from. Maybe it was car accident?

Yet, WTOP can’t mention Charlottesville without repeatedly reminding the listener that “white supremacists” or “white nationalists” or “white racists,” etc., were violent or rioted, leading to the death of Heather Heyer.

WTOP, as the rest of the MSM does, repeats one thing ad nauseum, while carefully skirting the facts in another case. It’s like those cheap TV commercials that repeat the phone number endlessly, “That meme again, Republicans and conservatives bad, Democrats, liberals and their allies pure as the driven snow… Remember, that meme again, Republicans and conservatives bad, Democrats, liberals and their allies pure as the driven snow…”

And, of course, WTOP continuously repeats the DNC talking point that the whole country is outraged at Trump’s response at Charlottesville. With the MSM and its echo chamber and self-reinforcing news filter, there is not the slightest possibility that anyone, anywhere (that’s not a neo-Nazi racist, that is), could possibly think the president was right to cast blame onto both sides. Then they run a clip from Sen. Tim Kaine that runs down Trump. That’s followed by a list of Republicans distancing themselves from Trump.

No story deviates from the meme in the slightest — it’s Trump and the Nazis vs. civilization. Just as the DNC crafted it.

Another Story You Haven’t Heard About

Gotta give the MSM credit, they are consistent – they never do any stories that reflect badly upon the Obama administration or Democrats in general.

Here’s another story you haven’t heard anything about on the MSM, though you know all about that Russian dressing Donald Trump once had at a restaurant in 2007…

Hey, remember when the “unmasking” of CIA employee Valerie Plame was practically a Constitutional crisis during the W. Bush years but somehow massive unmasking of American citizens by Samantha Power, Susan Rice, John Brennan, Ben Rhodes and likely other Obama minions doesn’t seem to be worth reporting?

The Zombie Lives

Like a good zombie, the Russia Collusion zombie narrative refuses to die.

Donald Trump Jr. stories keep popping up on radio, TV, newspapers and websites of the MSM. Remarkably uniform, giddily pronouncing young Trump guilty of most everything short of treason (and even that from some Democrats quoted). Everyone of them is indistinguishable from the DNC home page. Not a single one of these pieces expresses any of that traditional skepticism journalists claim they pride themselves in.

The MSM has settled on the line that the Trumps are guilty and any exculpatory material will be ignored or suppressed and not presented.

Since the weekend we’ve learned a little more about this story. From the released emails we’ve learned that Trump fils is a political campaign naif. But he was also being nice to some foreign acquaintances, who clearly took advantage of him.His interaction in most of the emails is de minimis, obviously waiting to see what the “damaging” info was.

In addition it seems clear that the “meeting” was a bait and switch with the Russian lawyer’s real mission to lobby for modification of the Magnitsky Act – a law curtailing U.S. interaction with Russian human rights advisors.

Trump shut the meeting down when it was obvious he had been misled.

Furthermore, we’ve now learned that the lawyer was in the U.S. illegally, yet unhassled by the U.S. authorities (under Obama’s no-seeum-immigration enforcement).

It’s also been learned that said lawyer was not a “Kremlin lawyer” but had contacts with Fusion GPS, a political intelligence/dirty tricks firm that had been working with anti-Trump Republicans but had also then allied itself with the Clinton campaign. Fusion GPS was also the initiator of the false “dossier” filled with misinformation and disinformation on Trump and some of his campaign advisors.

Hmmmmm, that seems like a number of coincidences. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a news media that might look into this?

Oh, one more coincidence, the first of the Trump surveillance FISA warrant requests began immediately after the meeting.These were based on interactions with Russians. How convenient.

This whole meeting is beginning to smell of a set-up.

Side note. Amusingly CBS Radio led one of their stories with “The spigot” of damaging news “was open” then segued into “The latest drip is.” Open spigots aren’t characterized by “drips.” You’d think a leading news outfit would know that.

They also alluded that “Trump allies” thought the Trump Jr. revelations were “a Category 5 hurricane.” I’d love to know who these (unnamed) “allies” were. The MSM is living in its own fantasy world.

One last thought – they squawk about agents of the Kremlin influencing American politics but these are the same news operations that were not remotely interested in the well-documented Chinese connections to the Clinton administration back in the 1990s. Nor have they been interested in the tens of millions of dollars that the Clinton Foundation received from Russian companies and friends of Putin nor the $500,000 that Bill Clinton received from same for a speech shortly after Sec. of State Hillary Clinton approved the sale of a large portion of America’s uranium resources to a Russian company allied to Putin.

Imagine if that had been Republicans – Pulitzer Prizes all around!

Check out Byron York’s piece on this.

Down the Memory Hole She Went

That was quick. It seems that Sara Leigh “Reality” Winner has had her 15 minutes of fame in the eyes of our MSM news gatekeepers. Her story — leaking classified information to reporters — has been sent down Orwell’s Memory Hole after one day in the limelight because her identity was inconvenient for the Democratic Party/Socialist Media Alliance; much like the recent Bernie Sanders-loving Portland “White Supremacist” killer story was quickly euthenized. It’s so hard to keep memes alive when the facts run contrary to them. But our media is nothing if not diligent in watering the memes and keeping them on the front page and at the top of the hour — “trending” as the hipsters say. Another episode in Fake News.

Of course had this happened during the administration of King Barry I and Winner had leaked something embarrassing to The One, and assuming some MSM outlet had initially gone with it, the story would have quickly turned upon her as the MSM deployed dozens to dig up dirt on her (aided and abetted by the DNC and assorted Dem nonprofit activist groups). Reporters would be looking into her kindergarten records – all to cast aspersion on her. But it was different this time. She avoided becoming infamous but instead becomes a nonperson. It’s all still so Orwellian.

Before I let Winner fade away, I wanted to recommend Monica Showalter’s piece at The American Thinker — “Another Young Lefty Contracter Leaks Top Secrets.” Looking at the disaster train — Edward Snowden, Bradley “Chelsea” Manning, she accurately describes the upcoming egotistically clueless, often disturbed, Millennial generation and the depressing state of security clearance investigations.

Wednesday morning’s anti-Trump news was the “rift” between Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions or the perceived “rift” or the “rift” that was a few weeks old – this courtesy of the NYT, WaPo and AP – so it must be true.

Then came the “breaking announcement” of Trump’s nomination of a new FBI director which was immediately deemed suspicious and a diversion from James Comey’s upcoming testimony. Sen. Mark Warner immediately said that to back up the MSM.
Of course had Trump waited until after the Comey testimony the story would have been deemed suspicious and a diversion from the “historic” testimony of James Comey, blah, blah, blah. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t is how the media spins Trump in every story. The man could cure cancer and the media would whine he’s putting hardworking health care professionals, “historically” minorities, out of work…

That’s how “our” “news” gets made.

 

Funny How These Things Happen

You might have heard, how could you miss it, that “Fox News Host Bob Beckel” or just “Fox News Host” was “Fired Over Racially Insensitive Remarks.”

You couldn’t miss the “Fox News” part.

Of course this could have just as accurately been “Former Mondale Campaign Manager…”

Yeah, Beckel is a Democrat and was Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign manager but somehow that never seems to get mentioned or is buried on paragraph 48. Funny how those things happen in the media…

Scooter Libby Redux

Am I the only person getting a creepy Scooter Libby deja vu on this whole “Trump Campaign Russian Collusion” question?

Look at the similarities.

There’s a whole wildly exaggerated “threat to national security” claim. If you’ll remember select folks (Democrats) were claiming that CIA desk jockey Valerie Plame was practically America’s top spy and now we have folks (Democrats once again) claiming that Russia did something that somehow affected a handful of voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to vote for Trump or not vote for Hillary. Something vague. Yet in reality it’s obviously a nothingburger on the national security front.

Then there’s the seemingly endless promise that there’s more, if only investigators will look deeper they’ll tie the whole administration into the story and a president will need to be impeached.

Meanwhile, one begins to get the funny feeling that everything that is known is all there is and in the end we’ll discover that five minutes after the investigators started working they already knew the answers. Remember how Patrick Fitzgerald knew who leaked Plame’s name, the putative point of the whole investigation, on Day One. It was Colin Powell aide Richard Armitage not Libby yet Fitzgerald, Javert-like, extended his “investigation” endlessly. Ultimately he caught Libby in a perjury so rickety that Fitzgerald should have been the one sent to jail for abuse of office. Armitage never faced any consequences over the leaking of the name of America’s top secret spy…

We already know the extent of the “collusion.” It’s minimal, coincidental and going nowhere. The whole nut revolves around an unpaid bit-campaign advisor whose business posting several years ago was in Moscow. Throw in the Flynn call to the Russian ambassador to lay some groundwork for Flynn’s upcoming job (not that unusual) and that’s it. Oh, yeah, Trump may have once eaten at the Russian Tea Room or attended a performance of Swan Lake or seen a matroshka doll…

Yet we have the FBI tied up in knots over it all and Democrats in unison demanding another Fitzgerald fishing expedition (which will feel compelled to get a scalp, any scalp, to justify their phony-baloney jobs and all the hot air the Democrats and their media parrots have exhaled).

And of course there’s the great unsaid – Obama’s mockery of Mitt Romney’s warnings on the danger of Russia and Obama’s swearing of fealty to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in 2012.

Oh, and there’s this from Investors Business Daily pointing out that there was more actual “Russian Collusion” with the Hillary campaign than the Trump campaign. Yet, somehow, that doesn’t get any attention. I wonder why.

La Media

The indispensable Mollie Hemingway gets straight to the point in yet another ridiculous media-generated fake news story — the Steve Bannon says “Shut Up” to the media.

Hemingway nails the media on its misreporting, blatant deception (Hey, did you know Obama aide Anita Dunn said almost thing to the media at the beginning of the Obama administration? Their was no angry response from the media lapdogs then.) and ultimately takes them to task for massive failure in their duty, noting that they have misinterpreted this large portion of the citizenry and instead of apologizing and trying to correct their error, they’ve redoubled their mistaken efforts.

What’s more infuriating, the media’s purposeful misreporting of the story through clipping the quote to make “Trump advisor” Bannon, and thus Trump, look bad or their puffed up pomposity that they are making some kind of brave stand and striking a great blow for democracy through their unremitting counterrevolution against the fascist Trump junta?

Do they stand in front of a mirror while reciting these lines with trumpet flourishes playing through their earbuds? They often now seem to be modern incarnations of goofy characters from some forgotten opera, La Media.

They are playing a dangerous game increasingly alienating a significant portion of America with their nonstop naked partisanship and ceaseless attacks on anyone who isn’t a fellow traveler. The media comes with a smile but looks to bear a knife.

This odd story makes one wonder, “Insiders Say NBC Is Building ‘the Next Fox News.’” I’m not sure whether NBC understands what made Fox a success. Is this an honest attempt and a realization that maybe they’ve overplayed their hand or is it just a ruse? Do they understand that declaring cultural war on over 30% of the country might not be the greatest business decision — especially when there are several competitors plumbing the increasingly extreme libtard well.

Well, we’ll see. I’ll believe it when I see it.

A Trump Gift

I just came from checking in on my Yahoo! Sports fantasy hockey team. Whenever you log out of your fantasy team you are dumped onto Yahoo!’s news page. It has for months done nothing more on the political front than run anti-Trump stories. I have yet to see a positive story or anything negative on Hillary Clinton.

That’s not an accident.

Sadly, this is typical of every major news outlet (with the exception of Fox News and it has been drifting leftward lately).

If nothing else, Donald Trump needs to be congratulated for wiping away any doubt (if there had remained) that the American news media is nothing more than a propaganda arm and disinformation agent for the Democratic Party.

I’ll not catalog their calumny beyond noting that if a Republican candidate had Hillary Clinton’s record of incompetence and criminality they’d have been destroyed long ago. Clinton makes Nixon and Harding look like choirboys. Her email server and the compromising of American secrets, American institutions and employees under her may be unmatched in history. The failure of the media to even do the basic in reporting is unforgivable.

So what to do?

I doubt the media will reform itself. Liberals do not hire conservatives or anyone that isn’t going to toe the line and swear fealty to gods of liberalism. And increasingly the corporate suites are packed with liberals — many now out of the closet and unafraid to use their companies as weapons of mass destruction against their American enemies and in servitude to international socialism.

One thing that can be done is to boycott what you can. After the hockey season I expect I’ll abandon Yahoo! completely. Does anyone know a good fantasy sports website? I have to admit that Yahoo! did fantasy sports well.

I make it a point to avoid linking to MSM (e.g. major networks, Washington Post, et al) stories in the blog. I encourage other bloggers to do the same. It’ll cut down on the click numbers for them.

Don’t buy their papers. I doubt sending letters to the editors mean anything any longer. I think they just dismiss the writers as racists, Nazis, bigots, etc.

Avoid the big TV networks and their programming.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m now boycotting the NFL, NBA and NCAA. I haven’t slipped yet and supposedly ratings for the NFL are down.

I’m learning and enjoying hockey and catching the last of the baseball season. I’m watching golf more and David Feherty is clearly a conservative but politics are basically left out of these sports and no one seems impelled to let the viewers know how hip, cool or progressive they are.

The liberal media corporations (and their sports allies) need to feel the consequences of their actions.

Our Borg Left

Can there be any doubt that anything that the left touches becomes corrupted.

Here is a story about the nominally nonpartisan Committee to Protect Journalists. Now it has come out with a statement that Donald Trump is an unprecedented threat to press freedom though it insists that it’s not taking sides in the upcoming election. They said that with a straight face.

Seriously.

Admittedly any group of journalists is likely to be left-leaning and it is usually just a matter of time before it removes any pretense and just goes whole-hog into auxiliary service of the Democratic Party.

Interestingly, Hillary Clinton has her own plans to limit press freedoms. She wants to outlaw stories, movies, whatever, that paint politicians in a bad light.

CPJ seems to have missed that. Probably because most of their members decided not to report negative stories about Hillary Clinton.

And then there’s this piece about our wonderful public education system, which was drafted into service of the Democratic Party a long time ago.

I guess the surprising thing about this “letter” drafted by several “Teachers of the Year” is that they hadn’t done this before.

They certainly don’t hold back, pretty much equating Trump with the most heinous villains in history.

They also trot out lots of perfect moppet anecdotes of fear with tots crying on cue, “Mr. Supersmawt teacher, why does that scawwy Donald Twump want to huwt me?”

Our humble teachers are taking this extraordinary step… to save the children (from the Abominable Trumble).

Remember back during the first Clinton interregnum when so much of their calumny (especially at the EPA) was committed “for the children.”

Of course all of this couched in the insufferability that the conceited teaching profession has polished to a high sheen. These people think a lot of themselves and little of anyone who thinks differently (i.e. isn’t a liberal). To think, these people are paid by the taxpayer that these teachers so loathe.

The public education system needs to be torn down, sown with salt and its braying donkey membership put to digging ditches or handing out sippy straws and butt pillows at the old folks home… er… retirement community – actual, productive jobs rather than the well-compensated, publicly-funded liberal propagandameisters that they are now.

I’m not the first to note that the left ruins everything it touches and turns those things into tools of liberal propaganda, coercion, cultural and political warfare. Anything that resists is targeted for destruction.

Like the Borg, you will be assimilated or destroyed. There is no refuge from them.