RobRielleWho & The FAKE nooze

The SAME GUY who followed John Edwards around for a whole year — and never noticed the bottle-blonde with the video camera and the baby bump — can’t understand for the life of him why people are disgusted with the driveby media:

Media bashing has a long history.

The late Sen. Jesse Helms made his political bones attacking what he called the liberal media, using many of his 2,800 commentaries at WRAL-TV from 1960 until 1972 to rake The News and Observer and other news organizations over the coals.

That is what he was hired to do by A.J. Fletcher, WRAL’s conservative owner, who thought the Raleigh newspapers, “owned by the same family, headed by Jonathan Daniels, former assistant to President Truman, have been so far to the left that they barely escaped being behind the Iron or Bamboo curtains.”

Another Fletcher favorite was I. Beverly Lake Sr., who ran in the Democratic primary for governor in 1960 on a segregationist platform against eventual winner Terry Sanford.

*Ah-ha! I knew racism had to fit in here, um, somewhere!*  MORE: 

Gene Roberts, a political writer for The N&O who went on to be editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of The New York Times, remembers covering a Lake rally in Lumberton.

Lake singled out Roberts at the rally. The editor of the Robesonian got wind of trouble, hustled him out of the rally and hid him in his storefront office as a group of seven or eight men with bricks in their hands went looking for Roberts. The local editor later convinced the police chief that it wouldn’t look good for Lumberton to have an N&O reporter killed, so he provided two police cruisers that accompanied Roberts to the Fayetteville city limits.[…]

You know.  When your paper makes it it’s mission — on the editorial pages and the news pages — to TAKE OUT a specific candidate, it’s probably not a wise idea to send your reporters to that candidate’s rallies where they would be surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of that candidate’s irate supporters.

This story probably reignited Rob’s PTSD over being the first and only driveby to be forcibly removed from an NCGOP convention.   MORE: 

[…] While media-bashing, especially among conservatives, has been around for a while, it has clearly entered a new phase.

Gallup polling suggests decreasing trust of the American mass media between 1998 and 2016.

Trust dropped among independents from 53 percent to 30 percent and among Democrats from 59 percent to 51 percent. Republican trust dropped from 52 percent to 32 percent between 1998 and 2015.

What is particularly striking is that Republican trust in the media fell to 14 percent in 2016 – a huge shift in public opinion for one year.

Media critic Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, argues that there is a deliberate, structured effort to undermine journalists. He likens it to a pyramid.

At the base of the pyramid is the army of trolls and activists who shout down any story to which they object. Sometimes there are personal threats – particularly if the journalist is Jewish, Hispanic or female.

Trolls who shout people down?  Kinda like those folks DEMOCRAT Brad Woodhouse (brother of Dallas) hired to go to Trump rallies?

*Yeah, all of those driveby-hating racist right-wingers tearing down statues, setting fires and rioting in the streets are something.*

By the way, Rob.  You’re not Jewish, female or Hispanic.  And there is a hell of a lot of contempt out here for you and the evil you’ve perpetrated in newsprint over the last forty years.

 MORE: 

[…]In the middle of the pyramid are such figures or institutions as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Breitbart, and Fox News, Rosen said at a recent talk I attended at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.

At the top, there is President Donald Trump, who has declared the media “the enemy of the people.”

There is a broad decline in trust in many of our institutions – not just the media.

Rosen argues that “the attacks on the journalists are actually part of a larger problem in which academics, civil servants, cosmopolitans, experts, globalists, and professionals of different kinds are all slowly being brought under this category.”

The news has clearly changed – as was discussed at a community forum Wednesday night sponsored by The N&O and WTVD.

Because of the power of the Internet and cable TV, people now can watch presidential news conferences themselves, examine original source documents and compare information from multiple news sources.

They can watch as news unfolds, 24/7, rather than waiting for the 6 p.m. news or the morning newspaper.

But the Internet is also like the old supermarket tabloids on steroids – filled with quackery, malicious gossip, invention and lies.[…]

And most of it can be found behind the paywall on various McClatchy “News” websites.  Duke lacrosse?  The complete lie-brary of coverage of Senator Jesse Helms? The complete lie-brary of coverage of Jim Hunt and John Edwards? 

It’s amazing.  These people beg you to pay for their content.  And then produce content that declares you a bigot for going to church and objecting to teaching kids that trannies in the girls bathroom is as fine and natural as breathing oxygen.  That declares you selfish if you dare to work hard and make a lot of money to provide for yourself and your family.

The media is going down because we, the people, have plenty of alternative resources to fact-check them. We can find the truth on our own — without the “help” of the dwindling population of the N&O newsroom.  

We’re outraged that these people in the driveby media — hiding under the aegis of the amazing gifts of the First Amendment — use their power to lie to our faces and tear apart our society and all of those things we hold dear.

Our Founding Fathers granted them some amazing powers to help defend us from the evils of statism.  Yet, most of them have decided to stand with The State against US.

If you spend your life spitting in people’s faces and showing contempt for their very existence, you shouldn’t be surprised when they lash back at you.