As we look back at the last 14 years of this mess rule, as we look back at this gaggle of
obdurate, arrogant, stubborn, unrepentant, heartless, self-serving bunch of assholes
who have spent the last 14 years trying to keep their useless megalomaniacal political
party together while sleepwalking the country into a kitchen blender.
Hey everybody, I have a question for you.
What makes something true?
So for this, let's go to the 1894 Webster's International Dictionary, Unabridged.
Just huge and very heavy.
Truth.
The quality or state of being true.
True.
So what's true?
Let's go back a page and figure out what true is.
Conformable to fact in accordance with the actual state of things, correct, not false, erroneous, inaccurate, or the like,
as a true relation or narration, a true history, a declaration is true when it states the facts.
When we first started this channel, I was just making a joke, a snarky play on words.
What would the mainstream media be called if the entire purpose of its existence was hinged upon
telling people the truth about what's happening, or at least aiming for the truth as a goal
without some other agenda getting in the way and twisting the narratives?
The Fourth Estate has claimed that they stand ready, twixed America and peril a bulwark to creeping fascism, our media.
Because mainstream is a pretty interesting word.
As an adjective, it apparently didn't even exist until 1955.
Our subject, new marketing patterns, which have arisen in these United States over a surprisingly short span of years.
The wonder which has made it all possible, of course, is the Cyclops we have come to know as television.
Did you know that?
I didn't know that.
I was actually looking that up.
I looked it up randomly for a totally different video, and now here I am making this one.
Because I just found this very fascinating, the definition of mainstream, which has definitely been evolving over the years.
I appreciate this opportunity to stress the vital place of television in our national life.
So we keep a bunch of dictionaries here.
We try to keep one from every decade of the 20th century.
And I couldn't find the word mainstream.
The first dictionary I had that I could find it in was actually this one here, which I think is from 1967.
Yeah, 1967.
For the word mainstream.
Let's see.
Where'd you go?
And all it meant was a prevailing current or direction of activity or influence.
Sabotage as a business.
So now they're influencing.
Then you have this one, which is from 1991, but it also says 1988, 1989.
So the late 80s, early 90s.
It says, the middle of a stream where the current is strongest, the part of something considered to be the most active, productive, lively, busy, etc.
A major or prevailing trend as of thought, action, literature, music, etc.
A prevailing trend.
Nothing in this definition, either one of these definitions has anything to do with truth, just by the way, or informing people of what's true.
This definition is the greatest power yet created for cultural and educational development.
The first time I saw mainstream media as a phrase get used in the newspaper archive was actually 1973.
Oddly enough, in reference to a court case that ended up going all the way to the Supreme Court, where a theater manager in Georgia was convicted of the crime of, quote, distributing obscene material for showing the 1971 American comedy drama film,
Carnal Knowledge, starring Jack Nicholson and Anne Margaret.
And his conviction went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court, which upheld it, and then ultimately all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned it on First Amendment grounds.
But now when you consult the Miriam Webster dictionary online, it says mainstream means, quote,
having, reflecting, or being compatible with the prevailing attitudes and values of a society or group.
The advertiser, who was fortunate enough to tie in with this home and family acceptance of television, gains the advantage no other medium can offer.
But the Cambridge dictionary takes it a step further and defines mainstream as, quote, considered normal and having or using ideas, beliefs, etc. that are accepted by most people.
So what do we actually have here? We have an entity that has risen in a post World War II Cold War era that exists to reflect and be compatible with what are claimed to be the prevailing attitudes and values of our society.
But as many of us have since figured out, it never really did work that way, did it?
The mainstream media wasn't reflecting ideas back to society about what was going on in reality. The mainstream media was creating ideas for society to have about that reality.
It was giving people a lot of their ideas, ideas they wouldn't have if they weren't told them under the guise of it being, quote, news coming from the mainstream media.
So it was giving people their ideas, cultivated, implanted, force-fed, whatever, choose your word there, but...
So roll up your sleeve.
Was there ever a time since television was created where it was simply unbiased reporting of what was happening in the world around us without an agenda of any kind?
Was there ever a time where that was the case?
Personally, I think there are some people in the older generations who would really like to believe there was a time like that.
But after spending a decade up to my elbows in archive footage and with the magical superpower that is hindsight, I'm just a tad more cynical than that.
It has become increasingly obvious in the 21st century and more so by the day that we have a mainstream media that not only is incredibly biased one way or the other...
Everybody in the mainstream press is calling all of Bill Clinton's crimes infidelities.
Rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are not infidelities.
But will ignore stories together? Like they will all get together and ignore something completely?
I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIAs or mention any of the arrests.
The administration was trying to convince the public there was no threat at the border.
Public health officials were intellectually dishonest. They lied to the American people.
And not talk about it? Even though everyone else on social media is talking about it?
We're all seeing the same thing in public. And the White House has been trying to say, oh, don't worry in private.
He's this very sharp, robust leader, even if you don't see it in public.
So the Wall Street Journal was deeply reported. But the only ones who would go on record were Republicans, even though a lot of Democrats were saying the same thing.
This is North Korea level style propaganda.
Anybody with a minimal amount of shame would refuse to do. But these partisan outlets have none of that shame.
I mean, they're counting on trying to tell American people, the American people, that what they're seeing, they should not believe.
They will all get together and pair at the exact same talking points.
Bombshell from Robert Mueller.
Bombshell after bombshell, latest bombshell in an arsenal of bombshells.
Robert Mueller's twin bombshells.
Bombshell, bombshell, bombshell.
I mean, somewhere in those cases there's a memo that obviously gets sent out and those people stick to it.
The final days of the campaign can get a little salty.
I mean, it could be that just six major corporations own 90 plus percent of the world's media.
I mean, we're living in a time where the same media is constantly reminding us how important
diversity is, but you pull the curtain back and go into the back room of this media.
It's not really all that important.
But that concentration of media into a very small amount of companies, all of that has
an effect of reducing the appearance of different points of view about what's going on out
there.
It makes it seem like everybody's thinking this one way or these two ways.
Is that really a true reflection of society, or is that what's being imposed on society
by this media?
You've got to be especially wary of journalists when they're all saying the same thing.
Hi, I'm Fox San Antonio's Jessica Headley.
And I'm Ryan Wolfe.
Our greatest responsibility is to serve our Treasure Valley communities.
The El Paso Las Cruces communities.
Eastern Iowa communities.
Mid-Michigan communities.
We are extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that CBS4 News produces.
But we are concerned about the trouble we're trying to get responsible for one-sided news
stories playing in our country.
And so it's not really a surprise at all, especially with the rise of social media
where people can actually talk to each other about what's going on out there.
And it's not all concentrated in just the hands of the official media that the
trust overall in the mainstream media has been plummeting year after year.
I mean, there are many polls that show that this trust in the media is tanking, Gallup
does polls on this all the time, and it's near record lows right now.
In fact, just 7% of Americans who have participated in this Gallup poll of 2022 have a, quote,
great deal of trust and confidence in the media.
I did find it interesting that 70% of Democrats trust the media while only 14% of Republicans
and 27% of independents do.
But young Democrats also don't trust the media, so it's actually just older Democrats
that are mostly trusting the media.
This is a historic low that's going on, and it has just been dropping and dropping
and dropping since 1972.
To the point that in May, the Christian Science Monitor put out this article,
trust in the media has taint, are we entering a post-news era?
And I read through this, just wanted to show you something I thought was kind of interesting.
Way down here, where'd it go?
It says, cable news, the original disruptor for TV network news in its day,
now serves a largely baby boomer audience.
The median ages of viewers of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are between 67 and 71 years old.
That's a very small window of ages.
So this mainstream media knows that it is becoming irrelevant
and that the majority of people aren't watching it,
and the majority of its audience is a very small window of people
in their late 60s and early 70s.
In fact, according to Pew Research Center, adults under 30 now trust information
from social media almost as much as from news outlets,
and especially young adults are getting their news from places like TikTok,
which kind of makes it interesting that TikTok underwent that whole thing
where they were trying to ban it not that long ago.
Gee, I can't imagine why.
The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.
More alarmingly, some media has been published,
and some have said policies and practices are true
without checking facts first.
Unfortunately, some members of media use their platforms
to push their own first line.