Podcast 573-Fake News

Podcast 573-Fake News. Suddenly everyone is upset about ‘Fake News’. In Podcast 573-Fake News, Fake news and propaganda sites are the latest demon to have spawned the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Well. President-elect. After years of the right blaming ‘the media’ for everything wrong in society, the poles have shifted. Now democrats are blaming their beloved media for electing the antichrist. If it weren’t for all those propaganda sites from Eastern Europe and Russia spewing anti Clinton poison our country would not now be plunged into a cesspool of populism, racism, woman-hating, republicanism. Sigh. Fake News? It’s all fake. It’s all fantasy and it has been for some time. Broadcasters in radio and television, cable news channels and big money backed ‘news’ websites are obsessed with social media and user driven sites like You Tube. Every waking hour for a broadcast executive is spent quaking in fear over the question of relevance. Content is driven by FaceBook and You Tube, Twitter and SnapChat. Historic election? Not bloody likely. No one knows yet because we still have to sift through the voting data. Women putting Trump in office? Isn’t your vote supposed to be anonymous? How do they know? A review of the outcome in a few of the battleground states reveals the one fact we know. In key states the republican vote turn out was better than the democrat vote turn out. If democrats had voted to the margins for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton would be the president-elect right now and we’d be listening to the right whine about the media and demand something be done. What is News? Far from a recitation of the events of the day or new information on a particular subject, ‘News’ has become a roundtable discussion with people who don’t have a clue what’s going on because they sit in air conditioned studios in New York, or a gossip fest between washed up TV stars and entertainment figures, or shouting back and forth at each other through cameras on both coasts. News? People don’t want news. They want to be reassured. They’re pretty. They’re strong. Their guy is gonna win. All is well with the world. News? Here’s something you already know, packaged differently and stated firmly. Passing a law to regulate news outlets? Check the first Amendment. No. What’s the antidote. Turn. It. Off. Read. Be a good citizen, Become the warrior you are. Protect your own media battle space: Your mind. Refuse to accept the storyline they want to upload to your hard drive and create your own story line. There’s a reason for the Trump victory in this election, and it’s not fake news websites. It’s a simple fact that more people voted for Trump in key states than Clinton. They had their reasons. Personally, I am sick and tired of being told what to do, and what to think by thieves in Washington DC who will increase their power and the size of the government whether there is an R or a D in front of their name. Sponsored by X Government Cars.

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Podcast 546

Podcast 546-What Is Next? Almost all media these days is advocacy journalism. It used to be called ‘yellow journalism’. Back in the day yellow journalism was characterized by newspaper publishers like William Randolph Hearst who, when an artist he’d sent to Cuba cabled Hearst the fact that the USS Maine had blown up because of an accident, famously replied, “You supply the pictures, I’ll supply the war!” Everywhere we turn these days we are bombarded with the surface arguments. The personalities, the propaganda, the arguing back and forth. It goes far beyond media bias. It has become media advocacy. Telling you and I who to vote for and why. Telling us what we are to believe in and what our country stands for, and why. It’s a fact of life on both sides of the fence. We end up going back and forth about nonsense, most of the time. For me to add to this noise, seems to be a waste of time. Of course I have my own point of view about politics these days, and I’ll try and save most of those observations for podcasts detailing state by state polls, or addressing specific issues when they need to be addressed. How you vote, who you vote for and why you vote the way you do is your business. The easy thing to do these days is turn on the microphone and bloviate about what happened on the campaign trail today. It is much harder to find something to discuss that goes beyond. Hence Podcast 546-What Is Next? How can we move to the next step in the country and the world. Not what happens after election day 2016, or Inauguration Day 2017. This question deals with what happens down the line. If we spent a fraction of our time actually trying to inform ourselves about issues we can know about, rather than consuming propaganda, we would be better citizens and better stewards of the future for the country. The answers to the things we can know about, aren’t in social media or even necessarily searchable. The answers are in libraries. We can’t be fully informed about an issue if we don’t even know what questions to search. So let’s get started answering the question, What’s Next? Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul and Hydrus Performance.

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