“The Most Trusted Name in News”; “We Report, You Decide”; “Fair and Balanced”; “The Most Important News Program…Ever.”

     (BTW…guess which tagline belongs to a certain fake news program…just for fun)

     Yawn and grimace.

     I’m afraid that this, like most of the things I’ve written in this blog is going to generate more heat than light.  It appears to be my particular specialty.

    Is it any wonder that our current administration has taken to plastering catchy taglines all over the place whenever one of their boys comes out to talk to us?

     It works so well for our news programs.  It’s almost like if the graphic representing their integrity is shiny enough, they don’t actually have to go about getting any…what do you call it?  Integrity.

     I recently read an article that got me thinking about the role of political blogging in this country, and I’ve heard a lot of wild talk about how blogging is going to replace the news, or that bloggers are tougher nuts to crack than your average reporter, or even that blogging is the unfiltered voice of the common man, and that provides a sort of safety valve…a sense that your voice can be heard.

     Maybe…maybe.  I’m not much for predicting the future, and generally I have to say that I am much more comfortable reading blogs than I am listing to some nut ball yelling from an apple crate on the streetcorner.  Plus, blogs are available 24/7…so I can get my common man commentary when I have one of my insomnia attacks… even guys with apple crates have to sleep sometime.

     However, I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that blogging has provided one very serious benefit that I never expected, and haven’t really encountered a specific treatment of:  it lets us share our discoveries.  It kind of reminds me of the Student Union in college.  I had come to miss that marketplace of ideas, and am delighted to have found a surrogate that doesn't involve me having to try to pass for a twenty-something and get “hip to the youngsters“  (which is what the creepy old people who tried to hang out with us when I was 20-something said about themselves).

     True, you’ve got the ideological troll gangs that roam from cyber village to cyber village burning the buildings and salting the earth as they go…but the inhabitants pick up their meager belongings, and like the nomad nations of old, find somewhere more friendly to set up camp and go about their business.

     But part of the rough-and-tumble give-and-take is the fact that any nut-job can leave a message for you and chances are, you will see it.  And some of those nut jobs are pretty smart and articulate…and if you talk to them, you might not change your mind…but you might learn something that suddenly makes the world make a lot more sense than it did before.  You might even find that what you thought was a nut-job actually turns out to be someone with experiences and information that inform his position.

     I recently made a remark about how I had seen a NOW with Bill Moyers where they interviewed four of the third-party candidates for president, and I was going to show the episode to my kid.

     Long story short, I encountered someone in another forum who made a comment about how it wasn’t a very “objective” thing to do…and made some allusions to a lack of journalistic integrity on the part of Mr. Moyers…but neglected to say anything further.

     Well, being naturally curious, I asked why he would say something like that…and he gave me several links to articles that made connections between Mr. Moyers and various anti-corporate organizations and the claim he uses his weekly news magazine as a shill for a hidden anti-corporate agenda.

     Interesting.

     The first one  goes to the Center For Consumer Freedom and talks about how Mr. Moyers is a journalist by day, and a president of a clearinghouse for radical environmentalist funding by night, and that he uses his show to showcase the anti-corporate material developed by the organizations that he helps fund.

     They also talk about how ridiculous it was for one of the groups funded by Moyer’s Foundation to talk about the dangers of chemicals used on fruits and vegetables, and how as a responsible journalist, he should reveal his connections to the “sources” that he uses to produce his reports.

     The second one also goes to the Center For Consumer Freedom web page, and talks about how it is wrong for tax dollars to support a program that furthers a political agenda.

     All good points.

     The audience of a journalist should be able to expect that any conflict of interest or any situations or relationships that might reasonably give the appearance of a conflict of interest will be revealed to them by the journalist, so that they can make and informed decision about whether or not they trust the journalist’s conclusions --sort of a consumer lable of contents for ideas, if you will.

     Following the third link, I found an article that I didn’t find nearly as revealing as another link embedded in the article itself.  It was a link to the full text of a speech given by Mr. Moyers to the “Take Back America” conference.

     There, he makes a pretty good case for himself and his ideas and goals, building on a heartland tradition of populism and good old fashioned agrarian progressivism that can trace it’s roots all the way back to Jefferson in the early 1800s.

     Well, having now found a connection between my political philosophy and Mr. Moyers, I now realize why his reports seemed so uncannily linear and complete…he is pretty much coming from the same place, but he has money, training in journalism, decades of experience, a budget, and a staff.

     I on the other hand have a Compaq lap-top, and a roughly 20-minute window between when I finish folding a load of laundry and the next one gets dry…

     At any rate…I agree that it appears that Mr. Moyers is passionately pursuing an agrarian populist, progressive, anti-corporate agenda.  It is clear that his news magazine has close ties with other organizations with similar goals, and that those organizations have a synergistic and symbiotic relationship.

     Together, they create a mutually supportive network of media and social action organizations that create momentum for that agenda…

     But wait.  What about the Center For Consumer Freedom?  Shouldn’t I look into them a little bit?

          Here’s what one website has to say about them.

     I scanned a number of other articles, and found that they are opposed to food labeling, and banning the sale of soft drinks in schools.  They mock and deride M.A.D.D. (yes, mothers against drunk driving!)

     I find it interesting that they claim to be advocates for consumers choice…they say that they think the consumers have a right to make their own choices, and know what’s good for them, and yet are opposed to food labeling.  What’s up with that?  Sure, I agree I should get to decide what I want to eat, but I also happen to think I have a right to the information I need to make an informed choice.

     A quick look at their website “About us page” pretty much tells me what I need to know “A nonprofit coalition supported by restaurants, food companies and consumers…”

     They certainly do practice what they preach.  Although they do not name their members/contributors specifically, I can pretty much guess that the heavy criticism for Mr. Moyers anti-corporate, environmentalist agenda is not without it’s self-serving side…and they don’t claim otherwise, which is to their credit…I mean, Mr. Moyers and his allied organizations have pretty much been after them non-stop.  Factory farms, fast-food restaurants, agricultural chemical manufacturers who’s products are sometimes said to cause cancer in laboratory rats.  They are defending their businesses.  Their multi, multi billion dollar businesses.  Oh, and by the way, they have a media tie-in as well:  Fox News.

     I find that I have become much more interested and passionate about this subject than I was before.  I’ve learned a LOT of specific information that contributes to my world view.  It hasn’t really changed the way I see it, but its added richness and intensity and a lot more data to the mix.

     It hasn’t changed my mind at all about Mr. Moyers, and I wasn’t surprised to find out that Lobbyist Rick Berman has an organization funded by Coca Cola, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Monsanto that is heavily connected to Fox News and is dedicated to attacking and discrediting people who say eating food covered in agricultural chemical residue is bad for you, you shouldn’t drink a lot of sugary soft-drinks, and maybe we should be a little careful about introducing genetically modified crops into the out-doors where they can cross-pollinate with our food crops.

     While the whole picture hasn’t changed…some new pixels have been added, and over all, I would say it has been a profitable experience.

     And now, if any of you are interested, you can look into any of these some more, and share with us what you know, and where you are coming from…and we will all be smarter than we were before.

     Or you can call on the seething hordes of your troll army and burn the rest of us to the ground…either way, it beats doing the ironing.