January 4, 2016- by Steven E. Greer
The American media is becoming as bad as Russian state-sponsored media, literally. The national evening news programs all have close connections in the form of relatives of news executives working at The White House.
The President of CBS news is David Rhodes, the brother of Ben Rhodes, the senior media liaison for President Obama. ABC News Prescient Ben Sherwood has a sister, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, as a special assistant to the president. Former White House press secretary Jay Carney’s wife is Claire Shipman, a reporter for ABC. NBC News’ senior political editor, Mark Murray, is married to an Obama official, Sasha Johnson.
These are just a few of the examples of nepotistic conflicts of interest between The White House and the national press. Knowing this, it is then fairly easy for one to spot how the evening lineup of stories is dictated by The White House.
For example, if the White House wants to embarrass Hillary Clinton about her use of a personal email server for official Secretary of State business, then it has Valerie Jarrett leak stories to the evening news. They ran with it, day after day, for months, until Bernie Sanders said, “I’m tired of hearing about her damn emails.”.
Tonight, it was only after 12-minutes of the NBC Evening News that they finally ran one short story about the biggest news item in years, which is the brewing war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This sectarian Muslim war makes The White House look bad because the chaos is what ISIS wants, and it hurts Obama’s Iranian Nuke Deal. So, The White House is getting the news to bury the story. NBC, led off their program with not one, but four, stories about campaign tabloid crap, which is all just a distraction like a laser pointer to a dog.
Yesterday, the New York Times exposed this White House manipulation of the press with a lengthy story. It stated, “Hours after President Obama announced in a 2014 speech that he was escalating his campaign against Islamic extremists, a number of prominent columnists suggested they knew exactly what he was thinking. What none of the journalists told readers, because they had promised the White House that they would not, was that their attempts to portray the president’s intentions had followed a lengthy and secret meeting with Mr. Obama the day he delivered the speech.”.
Before Jon Stewart signed off of the Daily Show, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News got revenge by exposing the fact that Stewart routinely met with President Obama at The White House to discuss his content on the show.
All of this is not only despicable, but is also a serious threat to our nation as we know it. Congress has long been dysfunctional and unable to serve as a check to the powers of the executive branch. Honest news reporting has been the most effective oversight agency in the land, until recently.
As a result, the last two administrations have gotten away with scandals that would have been impeachable offenses, like Watergate, decades ago. The executive branch has tortured prisoners captured in the Middle East, conducted with impunity drone strikes overseas even on American citizens, maintained the Guantanamo Bay prison, spied on Americans via the NSA metadata collection programs, and many more constitutional violations. Meanwhile, the establishment press has barely made a fuss.
Under President Obama’s watch, the same press that fought so hard to get him elected is now reaping their rewards by getting unprecedented advanced access to White House talking points. But the joke is on them. They are the puppets and The White House is controlling the strings. The “news” is now just propaganda reminiscent of Goebbels’ Nazi Germany or Putin’s Russia.