We discussed how many career journalists have forsaken their careers in journalism to take high ranking positions int he Federal government and how all of these former journalists came from news organizations that were almost always easy on and sympathetic to the Obama administration's many failures and shortcomings. In both areas. we raised the question of whether conflict of interest was becoming more important in today's press than integrity of reporting.
Today we will continue that loss of integrity question, starting with the old cover photo switcheroo tactics of Time magazine:
3) The September 16, 2013 issue of Time magazine in the United States had a picture of a football player and the question: “Is it time to pay college athletes?” Nothing suspicious there unless you find out what Time put on the cover of its non-United States covers for their September 16th edition:

Yes, the rest of the world got a feature article and cover that focused on the rise of Vladimir Putin and how he had rescued President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the rest of the world from a potential military fiasco if the U.S. had attacked Syria. We have already discussed what a mess the President had made of the Syria crisis in a series of posts starting with:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/09/political-class-insanity-special.html
We will not go into those Syrian details here. The real story is how the left leaning news organization, Time magazine, has protected the President’s foreign policy bungling by not carrying the same article about Putin’s rise to prominence at the expense of the United States in its U.S. edition.
The foreign covers acknowledge Putin’s triumph over Obama, telling foreigners that Putin “doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.” Another example of certain news outlets protecting “their” guys rather than being true journalists and reporting facts and realities.
Oh, by the way, Time editor Rick Stengel was a managing editor of Time magazine over the summer but recently fulfilled his decision to leave Time magazine for a position …wait for it…of running the State Department’s public diplomacy mission. He will be working for none other than John Kerry, one of the Obama administration bumblers who totally mismanaged the Syria situation. He apparently received the offer early this summer and immediately accepted but not leaving Time until very recently.
Makes you wonder if journalistic integrity took a back seat to a new job in the State Department when Mr. Stengel got around to putting the latest Time magazine covers together, both domestic and foreign.
4) But apparently, this is not the first time that Time magazine has protected their guy on the left by having a different cover in the U.S. edition of Time magazine from the covers shown across the world. On July 2, 2012, the overseas covers featured China’s fast-growing manufacturing sector, while the U.S. cover was about “The History of the American Dream.” Wouldn’t America have been better served if we had a better understanding of how well China was doing vs. our shrinking manufacturing base?
The Dec. 5, 2011 cover featured an alarming picture of Egyptian street protests, while the U.S. cover told increasingly worried U.S. readers that “Anxiety is Good for You.” Wouldn’t America have been better served to learn all it could about the dynamics and forces going on in Egypt, a situation that the administration never saw coming, than worrying about how good anxiety was for us?
Yes, in both cases it would have been more beneficial and better journalism if these real world problems were presented to the American public. However, it would not have put the Obama administration in the best light so just like with the Putin/Syira cover switcheroo, Time magazine took the political way rather than the integrity way.
5) One last example of potential journalistic conflicts of interest. This one had baffled me for a while until I understood the underlying dynamics. To me, for the last five years, MSNBC has been nothing more than an extension of the Obama administration’s public relations arm.
Everything Obama did, no matter how much it blew up and failed, was either a success or the result of Republican or conservative sabotage. If you did not agree with the President’s policies, according to MSNBC you were a racist. Facts, realities, respect for a difference of opinion did not matter, you were a racist or an idiot. Hardly the stuff of unbiased news reporting.
The nadir of MSNBC’s reporting occurred during the run up to the 2012 Presidential election. At that time, MSNBC put together a montage of movie scenes where buses exploded into a fiery death scenes. They billed the video as a wish that this would happen to the Mitt Romney Presidential touring bus.
At that moment it became abundantly clear to me that MSNBC, more than any other news source in this country, had lost all journalistic and human integrity when it wished a fiery death on a political opponent. The details of this disgrace and our contempt and disgust for their behavior can be accessed at:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/06/hated-and-vile-polticial-dialog.html
But I still wondered what would make a so-called news organization behave so disgracefully. And then it hit me. Up until relatively recently, MSNBC and its sister news properties had been owned by General Electric.
General Electric received hundreds of millions of dollars from Obama’s economic stimulus program. General Electric does a nice chunk of business with the U.S. government and the U.S. Military. The General Electric chairman sat on Obama’s economic development council. A council that accomplished nothing. But most importantly, General Electric generally makes billions and billions of profit dollars every year and usually gets a tax refund, rarely paying anything in U.S. business income tax. Details at:
http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2011/06/relationship-between-president-obama.html
Thus, there has been a very cozy relationship between General Electric and the Obama administration, one that likely extended into the world of journalism, given how rabidly MSNBC protects Obama’s image and interests, and how much, until recently, General Electric benefited from Obama’s policies and lack of any tax reform strategy.
As I said before, I am not making any accusations of conflict of interest, quid pro quo, etc. But I believe that we no longer have a free press in this country, we have a press that takes sides, distorts facts, ignores facts, and denies the American public the ability to make decisions based on the realities and facts of our issues.
And maybe that is one of the reasons why major issues of our times never get resolved. We are still losing the war on drugs after decades of failure. We are still under educating our kids relative to the rest of the world, a situation that Reagan identified as a problem thirty years ago. We still do not have a coherent national energy strategy, almost forty years after the Arab oil shocks.
Quite possibly, as the examples over the past two days have shown, our press has been too busy concealing and spending much less time help us correct: “No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.” Tom Stoppard
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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