My father, a construction worker, was a very smart man.
He dropped out of high school in the eighth grade in order to support his family during the Great Depression. Later, he was drafted into the Army during World War II. He was seriously injured in a battle protecting the Remagen Bridge for transporting American troops and equipment as the Germans retreated back across the Rhine. What he lacked in book knowledge, he made up in good, old American common sense. I still remember one of the best pieces of advice he ever gave me:
They can put anything on paper.
I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me when I was a kid, but it started to make sense to me when I began studying journalism in college. When I started work as a public relations professional and saw how the news media would often lie or slant the news to sell newspapers, I began to fully comprehend what this man was trying to tell me. My father was letting me know that once something is printed on paper, people tend to believe it, and what is printed may not be true. While watching recent news coverage of Republican nominee Mitt Romney, I began to recall my father's words.
If you have taken the time to read, view and listen to the coverage of Romney published and broadcast by various mainstream news sources as I do every day, you may begin to think that he has lost the race. You watch as liberal commentators and liberal reporters slant the news in a way that makes it appear that President Barack Obama is pulling ahead. You read and watch the coverage of Romney's comment about how 47% of Americans are depending on entitlements, with the pundits predicting that this one comment has killed Romney's chances for a victory. You also watch as these same pundits cite polls showing President Obama leading in the battleground states, almost as if it's a foregone conclusion that he will win this election.
In short, they aren't reporting the news; they are projecting the news through coverage that includes their opinions and biases.
And despite their best efforts, the most respected polls show that this race is a dead heat. The fact is that Republicans are much more likely and motivated to vote than their Democratic counterparts. Although there may be slightly more registered Democrats, Republicans will turn out in record numbers while Democrats will likely stay home in droves. Polls also show Romney winning over independent voters by as much as 14 points.
An astute observer can spot the shenanigans of the mainstream news media very easily. While most of the news media has focused on Romney's comments and polls taken immediately following the Democratic National Convention, we have also seen significant negative coverage that is chipping away at the approval ratings of the President, driving low numbers even lower.
Look at what's happened in the past week.
We've seen embassies all around the world being attacked. We've also learned that our Libyan ambassador was killed, along with three other Americans. For those of us who watch and read more than just NBC News, we've learned that while our ambassador was missing, our President was asleep, and the day after our ambassador was killed, our President attended a fundraiser in Las Vegas. We've seen coverage of a scathing report about serious mistakes at our Justice Department that resulted in a border control agent being killed, and coverage about how our State Department and other agencies received warnings of the impending attacks at our embassies, but apparently did nothing to protect the Americans who were killed by those terrorists. We've also seen coverage of the Administration apologizing for the video that supposedly initiated the violence, before backtracking and admitting that these were planned, coordinated attacks by terrorists. We've seen reports of increased weekly unemployment claims, with nearly 400,000 people applying for benefits for the first time this past week alone. We've also learned that President Obama could not find time to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but found time to meet with JayZ and Beyonce, and also to appear on the David Letterman show, where he couldn't even tell us how much debt this country had incurred when he took office. Just today, we learned that President Obama was grilled on Univision for deporting so many illegal immigrants, but not proposing a comprehensive immigration policy in four years. We learned from the same interview that the President doesn't believe that Washington can be changed from the inside. Think about it. If he doesn't believe it can be changed from the inside, why the heck did America elect him on a platform of Hope and Change and why should they give him a second chance?
And in a development that received sparse national coverage but may hit the pocketbooks of Americans harder than all of the other news put together, the prestigious firm of Egan-Jones downgraded the rating on the world's largest economy to AA-, which is three steps below the coveted AAA rating America once enjoyed.
And the news media report that Romney had a bad week?
Americans aren't stupid. They read their newspapers and watch their evening news. Although the Romney story may have been the lead on the evening news for a couple of days, coverage of the other, more important issues that chip away at the President's approval ratings have also been on the same newscasts. The mainstream news media do their best to avoid linking this negative coverage to the President, but the American people know who is leading this country. They also know that our economy hasn't recovered and our foreign policy is falling apart. All of this has occurred on his watch.
My advice to you is the same as what my father told me years ago: They can put anything on paper. In other words, don't buy what the biased mainstream news media are trying to sell you. The Obama Administration is imploding, even if the news media won't report it.
No comments:
Post a Comment