The vast majority of the media today in the United States are complicit in, or leaders of, the movement to destroy this nation’s sovereignty and integrity. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s a fact.
Critics on the right and left alike agree that the mass media has an unholy agenda of globalization, mass migration, erosion of the middle class, and more.
Conservatives have known and written about this at great length over the past two decades. Examples include CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg’s 2001 book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, Ann Coulter’s 2002 book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, ABC reporter John Stossel’s Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media in 2004, and a 2012 study by UCLA political scientist Dr. Tim Groseclose, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, among others.
Interestingly, liberals are also onto the bias of mainstream media. Though they ignore certain cultural shifts and arrive at different conclusions than the aforementioned conservatives, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, made the argument that the New York Times et al. are purposely driving the United States towards globalist policy goals, such as approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement and a U.S. foreign policy of “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Is this media-sponsored war on America protected under the First Amendment?
Our forefathers included the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution to make sure that an American government could not oppress or censor its citizenry in the same way that its European peers could.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment reflects this anti-establishment, pro-populist impulse throughout its clauses, which each protect the power of the people to criticize and reform its government in order to retain control over its national fate. The amendment’s protections of the freedoms of religion, speech, assembly, petition, and the press all provide for a government and nation, of, by, and for the American people.
The First Amendment was not intended to subject the American people to the overarching, oppressive reach of big business masquerading as journalism.
The media is simply big business manipulating the minds of Americans in order to get the public policies they want. The mass media undermines the will of the American people at every turn. This media is controlled by a few big corporations, which work hand-in-hand with progressive political activists to achieve their policy objectives. They hide it under the banner of ‘journalism,’ ‘free speech,’ ‘the First Amendment,’ and ‘free enterprise,’ but those terms are just fig leaves to conceal the shameful truth.
Our nation’s founding would have been impossible without the willingness of Americans to write, publish, and distribute news and ideas about political events. The classic example is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, of which John Adams said,
Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.
Americans instinctively recoil at the thought of restricting or regulating the media. Ethnonationalists and Christian conservatives ought to remember that whatever regulations the current, friendly government may institute can be used against them when a later, hostile government takes power. That’s one reason why I’ve argued that the Trump Administration needs to make its nationalist revolution permanent. But a glance at current law dispels all fears of a later backlash.
It is possible to reform the media without dictating what Americans must think, say, and do. It’s a simple matter of leveling the playing field between globalists and nationalists by restricting the power of big business.
Our Founding Fathers knew not only about big government, but also about big money and big business. Monied families such as the Rothschilds and corporations that operated out of the control of the citizenry, such as the East India Tea Company, existed in the days of our republic’s infancy. Later American leaders such as Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan were famous for their opposition to big businesses and big governments that pushed down the common man.
The media should be held to the same standard as other businesses. This has been federal policy for a long time.
The U.S. Congress has regulated communications for over a century — through laws such as the Wireless Ship Act of 1910, the Radio Act of 1912, the Radio Act of 1927, and the law that gave birth to the Federal Communications Commission, the Communications Act of 1934. The Congress further reformed its policies with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The framework for regulating mass media has, therefore, been in place since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, and any proposals by the Trump Administration to regulate media ownership would hardly be historic.
Government regulation of mass media has evolved with — and many would say has lagged behind — the evolution of communications technology. So too it has lagged behind changes in the economics of media enterprises.
To put it simply: Economies of scale, and a lack of regulation, have made it more profitable for newspaper chains and mass-manufactured outlets like the Associated Press to exist, and made it incredibly difficult for mom-and-pop local media to survive. Please note that the populist, nationalist principles of localism and decentralization (also called diversity) have been guiding lights during the entire history of federal communications regulations. In fact, they’re among the FCC’s official policy objectives. In today’s economy, where print journalism faces huge costs to simply print fishwrap, and advertisers struggle to find the money to pay for any ads — whether digital or analog — both localism and decentralization (diversity) have taken enormous hits.
My grandmother once showed me a front-page newspaper article from my native city’s morning newspaper. That newspaper competed with another daily newspaper in that city, which printed in the evening. Most major American cities had multiple, daily newspapers that competed with one another. Today, very few metro areas have more than one newspaper.
In 1983, as many as 50 corporations owned a majority of all news media in the United States. That was seen as “alarming” back then when Ben Bagdikian published his 1983 book, The Media Monopoly. The power of the media had become concentrated in far fewer hands that it had been earlier in the twentieth century. When Bagdikian put out an updated version of his book in 1997, the number of corporations that owned 80 percent of all news media in the United States had dropped to 23.
The newspaper my grandmother showed me no longer exists. It merged with its competitor long ago. Years after that, the successful competitor was itself bought out by a New York-based chain. So now not only do the residents of my hometown not have more than one newspaper from which to compare and contrast differing views of the news, but it has to drink down whatever their New York-centric hegemons send their way.
By the time Bagdikian put out The New Media Monopoly in 2004, the number of companies controlling most of America’s daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie companies had dropped to…five. These companies are known today as Comcast, Disney, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, CBS, and Viacom (which broke off from CBS in 2006). The owners of the bulk of the rest of the American media market are smaller, but still enormous, chains such as Gannett Company (owns USA Today and metro dailies from Detroit to Nashville to Phoenix), Tribune Media (owns Chicago Tribune, and the dailies in Baltimore, Orlando, L.A., et al.) and News Corp (owns Wall Street Journal, New York Post, HarperCollins book publishing).
The bottom line is that with the exception of small towns in rural areas, or upstart alternative media in metro areas, there are very few non-Internet based media companies that do not report to someone in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C.
News, both local and national, is controlled by an oligopoly. Entertainment is even more centralized, such as in the film industry, where six companies control nearly everything that makes it to your local movie theaters.
Is the Internet much better? I would say no. The Internet is dominated by several huge companies such as Alphabet (parent company of Google) and Microsoft. There are literally millions of people putting up alternative content (journalistic and entertaining), but do they have access to the number of viewers and readers as these elite-owned companies? No.
Debates over whether or not newspapers and television stations should be owned by the same company are as outdated as flattops and IROC Z Camaros. It’s good that current regulations prohibit one company from owning multiple, major television stations in one area, but why don’t they prohibit one company from owning media outlets nationwide — and thus dominate American politics the way that Gannett Company and Tribune Publishing (aka tronc, Inc.) does? We have to go much further now in regulating media cross-ownership to ensure that the American experiment lasts and does not become a globalist nightmare. The world has radically changed since the late twentieth century, and the Trump Administration should seize its opportunity to improve American telecommunications policy, set the nation up for success in the twenty-first century and beyond, and eviscerate the globalists who have nearly eviscerated our nation.
In 2018, the FCC will undertake a quadrennial review of broadcast ownership rules. This is a great opportunity for the Trump Administration to strike a blow against the enemies of our nation, and to lay the groundwork for a permanent shift in power in the United States.
Proposal One: Break up the chains. Require local media to be owned and operated locally. This is good for the market and it is good for an informed citizenry, which would have increased access to diverse, competing points of view. All that would be needed is a change in the rules governing media ownership. Remember — we have over 100 years of precedent for doing this. It’s just a matter of having the will to Make America Great Again.
Proposal Two: End foreign ownership of national media. Require national media companies, such as CBS, the New York Times, Gannett Company, and so on, to be owned and operated by Americans, in the United States. This would mean Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who is the largest shareholder of New York Times Co., would no longer have the authority to pick up the phone and ask his editor-in-chief to use the power of America’s “Newspaper of Record” to advance globalism and mass immigration.
President Trump, Mr. Bannon: I implore you to consider returning the power of the airwaves and printing presses to the people. We can respect private property, intellectual property, and the free market while ensuring that a globalist media establishment no longer has a stranglehold on citizens from Baltimore to San Diego. Use the 2018 quadrennial review as your chance to reshape the way that the First Amendment — properly understood and applied, as a protection of the people from oppressive government and big money alike — will ensure a future of freedom for Americans for centuries to come.
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