To Tell the Truth About Objective Journalism!

Welcome back to Rockwater Reports,

The story of the century has broken.

On April 24th, the Justice Department released documents clearly revealing that, indeed, there was collusion at the highest levels of our government.

Not collusion by President Trump’s administration, but instead collusion against Trump’s administration.

As many of us suspected, and now evidence shows it is blatantly true, Russia, Russia, Russia! collusion was nothing but a coup, coup, coup! attempt. The full, evidence-based explanation for what motivated this has yet to unfold. However, I suspect that, in part, it was probably to help enforce the (now verified) fairy tale about how those lost emails were somehow due to the DNC being hacked. Breaking news: released documentation shows that, under oath, Crowdstrike denied there was any evidence that Russia was involved in such a scheme.

So what was the thrilling coverage that we got out of most Main Stream Media outlets?

Crickets.

The documents released on April 24, 2020 was to be the first wave of many subsequent releases of documents, coming out over the next weeks. We were told – and so far we have seen it to be true – that it will get more salacious as we go along. The material being released is substantiating our fears that our government, at the highest levels of authority, has been used to destroy innocent people. Whatever other objectives and motivations will be revealed, what has been released so far is proof that the previous administration worked to saddle an incoming elected U.S. President and his administration with scandal after scandal in order to bring it to dysfunction. 

There came some honest reporting over all this here and there, but the prevailing noise was… crickets.

O Where, O Where Have All the Scoop-hungry Journalists Gone?

After the first documents were made public, the next morning I turn on CSPAN to see how Washington Journal covers this story. Their coverage? A brief mention reviewing a headline from (as I recall) the Washington Times, read by Jesse J. Holland.  In the first 24 hours, most major cable news coverage is provided by Fox News reporters. I see not much on the other major cable news networks.

The Hill runs a story, but it is short and ends with the deflating prognosis that it won’t really help Flynn. It performs this task by accentuating Judge Sullivan’s 2019 declaration that, “Mr. Flynn bears the burden of showing a reasonable probability of a different outcome…Mr. Flynn cannot overcome this hurdle.”

CNN runs a story. It was ‘fair,’ as far as ‘fair’ means ho-hum. They also mention Sullivan’s 2019 ruling comment, but this story also makes the effort to observe, “The declarations are ‘detailed’ and ‘span numerous topics that arose during Covington’s 30-month representation of Mr. Flynn,’ prosecutors wrote Friday, adding that they have shared them with Flynn’s new defense team.”

So this article grazes the fringe about the exculpatory evidence that was withheld, but it uses rather soft and vague language to make the point.

The New York Post and the Washington Examiner also run stories. Of the Main Stream Media establishment, that’s about it.

At least, that is all that pops up when you do a Google news search for the time span I specified. For issues regarding Google search suppression I will have to write another article on another day.

So for the days following April 24th, there are only mumbles of it, here and there, about the shocking release of documents that prove our government has been weaponized against innocent citizens. Save for Fox News. Fox News is all over this story.

This past week a new bombshell revealed even more salacious facts about Obama’s top officials. The then-VP and current Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is named. Biden signed off on January 12, 2017 a request for the unmasking of General Flynn. After denial upon denial, Biden is on record as having his hand in the General Flynn frameup cookie jar. Even now, with the evidence in the public domain, he is still denying it.

Sure, George Stephanopoulos pressed the point a little in his May 12th interview with Biden. But these efforts are meant more to posture that they have not ignored the news completely. They are careful to not press their political friendlies too hard, and if it has bad optics, they will be only giving it a cursory coverage. We can be sure that Stephanopoulos will not be overplaying the botched Biden interview – It will be relegated to the dark corner of their news cycle. The news outlets actually covering this scandal to a substantial degree are Fox News, OANN, and other outlets labeled “conservative” or “right-leaning” news networks, which are a minority of all the news networks available.

Meanwhile, CNN is working overtime trying to pivot the narrative. There they present unholy alliances trying to “undo the Mueller investigation.” They suggest strange bedfellows are pairing up, with story subheadings like AG Barr is “Allied with Richard Grenell.” And, whatever else you draw from this news story, you should not give AG Barr’s investigation any credibility. These new “facts,” they explain, “to others familiar with the case and law enforcement, it was a Rorschach test.” In other words, CNN suggests that there are reliable authorities that feel this breaking evidence of a setup is much ado about nothing. When reporting a story that might shine a disparaging light in an inconvenient direction, it is possible to monkey with the optics to make the situation look more appealing, or less damning, which is what they did in this article. By the way, who are these “others familiar with the case?” Who these experts may be is not defined. At all.

Never the less, both CNN and Good Morning America are equally aware that to manage messaging, optics are everything.

It gives me visions of a dumbstruck Dorothy and Toto. Don’t look at that man behind the curtain, said the MSM anchor bobblehead. Keep your eyes on the Great and Powerful Don Lemon. Believe the talking head and not your lying eyes.

What? Am I suggesting that seasoned news reporters don’t care about accurate reporting? You bet I am. It’s not just me saying so, either. On May 14th, Constitutional and legal scholar Jonathan Turley (an avowed Democrat who simply fails to tow the party line when it comes to political posturing) wrote this in The Hill :

A Democratic administration using a secret court to investigate the opposing political campaign does not matter to many in Congress or in the media anyway. An investigation continuing despite the lack of credible information supporting collusion does not matter to them either. A president and a vice president who take personal interest in the surveillance of their political opponents also does not matter. (Emphasis added.)

This has me quite alarmed, and if you are not already, you should be alarmed, too.

I am alarmed because a news media silent in the face of a great tyranny – or worse, a news media that is complicit in the tyranny – is one huge reason why Nazi Germany became Nazi Germany. This is not a hyperbolic statement, either. This is exactly how it happened a little over 80 years ago.

Have we learned nothing from history?

An 84 Year Old Lesson

As I have mentioned a time or two here and there, my father (now deceased) was a German. He was born on May 11, 1936 in a small town not too terribly far from Salzburg, Austria and at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. He would have turned 84 this past week.

He was born just shy of two years after Adolf Hitler abolished the office of President of Germany and assumed power as Der Fuehrer/Reich Chancellor and took totalitarian control over Germany. To provide you with a point of reference, my father was three months old when Jesse Owens challenged the German propaganda ideology at the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympic Games.

Therefore, my father was born during the period when Germany was enjoying a relative honeymoon with its leadership. Hitler was bringing the country to a return to productivity, and a value to their currency, and perhaps more important than anything else, a sense of dignity, unhealthy as it was. Keep in mind that Germany had worn the albatross of shame after the soul-crushing World War I defeat. As a a proud and historically strong people, they were extremely vulnerable to the song of any siren that might call them to a return to glory after a decade of shame and disenfranchisement. Hitler was that siren, and the “The Third Reich” (both a spiritual concept and a physical concept of greatness) was that deceptively glorious song. 

Harnessing Journalism for Population Control

At the center of Hitler’s campaigns to restore the personal integrity to the people of Germany – and to establish their allegiance to him – was a campaign of perfect precision, pushing specific messaging of a kind and a frequency that would sustain every German. It facilitated their ability to “fake it ‘til they make it” out of the pit of inflation and humiliation. The Aryan image was meant to encourage Germans to believe they were born for greatness. The future was meant for their hands. In Nazi Germany, every news story reflected this imagery. Every story was given a positive spin on the outlook of the Germanic people, and a negative spin on anyone considered infidel to the Aryan standard. Whatever the topic, the story was crafted to reflect the strength, ingenuity, and exceptionalism that defines Germans, and diminish anyone or anything else that might stand in the way.

The person at the helm of this journalistic marketing campaign was Joseph Goebbels.

His campaigns worked like magic.

As a result, Germany picked itself up by its bootstraps. Out of the insane inflation of the 1920’s Weimar Republic (when conditions were like what you see in Venezuela today), Germany in the mid-1930’s began to experience improved fiscal stability. The general lack of self-confidence and self-respect that the nation bore as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded Germany with all fault of WWI, dissipated as the country began rebuilding and reinventing itself into the imagery of a chosen race. Even the architecture reflected the narrative Hitler and Goebbels created, high on identification with the power and the glory of the Germanic peoples. It swiftly led to the nation having the capacity to rebuild an army, a nation that would buy into Hitler’s dream of taking over the world, and a population that by and large was willing to enthusiastically help make all this happen.

In fact, it proved the short-term success that can come from fomenting a collective narcissism. It led to the collective efforts of its citizens to pursue great evils, and at the time they were doing it, the population thought that what they were doing was awesome.

Present-Day American Propaganda: Same Vehicle, Just Moving in a Different Direction with a Different Driver

The narrative-setting of today in America is naturally very different from what went on in Nazi Germany, but the similarities far outweigh the differences.

Nazi Germany Then: The government in power weaponized the press to mislead the people. A mythology-infused false narrative of a super race captured the imagination of Germanic peoples to make them do the bidding of corrupt leaders.
American MSM Now: The press, in allegiance with certain government officials, are weaponized against the administration in power. They generate stories  seeking to destroy the administration by broadcasting false allegations that encourage citizens to not support their elected leaders.

Nazi Germany Then: Goebbels sought to unite the people with media manipulation. Manipulation tactics included Aryan ideologies and promoted hatred for Jews, and discriminate against anyone not ethnically German. The goal: a united Germany under a leader that wants to take over the world.
American MSM Now: Divide the people with media manipulation. Manipulation includes race-baiting and gender-baiting. The goal: a divided population will be easier to conquer at the ballot box. I cover this to some extent in my article The Truth About Tribalism, Part Two. Class warfare has been a tool since the Bolsheviks.

Nazi Germany Then: Jew! Jew! Jew!
American MSM Now: Russia! Russia! Russia!

Nazi Germany Then: There was one head of messaging, Joseph Goebbels. His programmed messaging came directly from an ideological source that was evil, self-serving, and destructive. That source was Hitler, a national socialist, head of the totalitarian regime.
American MSM Now: A multitude of heads, all springing from one body, all with programmed messaging that comes from an ideological source that is evil, self-serving, and destructive. The ideological source that demands compliance is Progressive Socialism, a governmental construct that survives only as a tyrannical regime. Note the current police states being exercised, by certain liberal authoritarians here and there across the country right now. Their excuse is the pretense of COVID-19. Just like that, corralling and punishing upstanding and productive citizens is their joy to perform. Another amusing twist from it’s original propaganda intent in Nazi Germany, Arbeit does not macht frei in the USA under the present-day propaganda push. In fact, just the opposite: Stay home from work or else go to jail! This is but a taste of the control and power-mongering they wish to exercise. Notice how the MSM is enthusiastically supporting it.

Whether we are talking about Flynn’s failing to fly free of a frameup, or barbers being barred from going back to work or else face jail time, lives are being destroyed or people are being oppressed, and the MSM either justifies bad things as good or ignores inconvenient truths altogether. Another case in point: Who killed Jeffery Epstein? Are we really supposed to believe he “suicided” himself in a room with no video cameras working?

Give. Me. A. Break.

Obviously, there were a slew of politicians and powerful people who did not want him telling tales. <cough-cough-Clinton!>

Who does the MSM think they’re fooling? They are perpetually failing to investigate and bring the truth to light on all these situations. Do they think we do not know what their jobs are supposed to be?

If the Emperor is Naked, Say So!

Which makes me wonder, why this reticence to call out naked propaganda and media mismanagement for what it is? There are more of us than there are of them. We can take them on. And it will take all of our voices to do it. This beast, the MSM, is a hydra with many heads. For example, although Andrew Lack has resigned, we can be assured that two more progressive heads of NBC will want to grow in his place.

It is true that many propagandists in media present a more passive posture: Instead of proactively presenting a false narrative, they find it best to avoid any coverage at all, and not give the story any oxygen. That seems to be a popular attitude. It’s harder to pin them down as biased when they stay mute.

I understand that people in positions that require careful jurisprudence may need to avoid judgmental language. I understand that when Attorney General Barr, when referencing the misconduct of the press, only takes his commentary to the level of ‘recklessness’. “I think our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press,” he said.

However, surely we would all be naive, more likely in extreme denial, to not understand that this attempt by Main Stream Media to misrepresent the truth and push false narratives is a habit that is hostile to the very public that it is supposed to be keeping well-informed. This orchestration of misinformation, in an attempt to secure power and give advantage to a select few, involves a thorough, damning, deliberate attempt to emasculate our First Amendment and our right to have reliable information.

Our Founding Fathers Warned Us: Keep the Free Press Truly Free.
But We Haven’t.

The 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights states, “The freedom of the Press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic Governments.”

James Madison later got his wording for the Bill of Rights from this Virginia Declaration.

Over the period of decades, corrupt government entities have been leveraging control over our free press. Through a web of departments and special interests, and a Hapsburg-like tactic of gaining power through marriage and shared offspring, politicians have worked to place political personalities in prominent positions at news media centers. They share policy territories to ensure mutual benefit, and our mainstream media has now become a tyrannical power in its own right. Bias is their stock in trade.

For example:

BIAS BY MARRIAGE: Chuck Todd (NBC Meet the Press anchor ) is married to Kristian Todd, Democrat strategist.

Meet the Press? More like, Meet the DNC Shill. Because, of course, there is going to be liberal-flavored bias oozing out of anything this show produces.

BIAS BY BIRTH: She has passed away now, but Cokie Roberts spent decades as a celebrated journalist, employed by PBS, NPR, ABC…and she was the daughter of two Democrats who both served in the Louisiana House of Representatives. Her sister Barbara Sigmund was once a letter writer for President John F Kennedy. Sigmund also served many years as a Democrat mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. Her brother Thomas was not a successful politician, but he made his attempts and ended up serving the liberal cause as a lobbyist in DC.

And then lately in the news are the fratelli italiani Cuomo brothers: one a Democrat governor, the other a CNN anchor (and both sons of former governor Mario Cuomo). They have recently been seen using news media airwaves to indulge in brotherly banter as they basically fawn over each other and publicly consult each other on workout techniques.

So charming. So endearing. So not impartial news conveyance. It looks more like a cheesy version of a Joseph Goebbels marketing campaign. It is certainly not objective journalism.

BIAS BY PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT: This list could go on forever. So let’s focus on just one: George Stephanopoulos. He used to be Bill Clinton’s senior advisor and Communications Director. He has remained with ABC News all these years since 2002 – many years alongside Cokie Roberts, I might add. Just one example of a news stage set for liberal-leaning bias.

Of course, we must mention the few Republican-politician-types that now run major network news shows. There’s MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. He was once considered a Republican; in fact, a US representative from Florida, from 1994 to 2001. Of course, he left the US congress at the beginning of his 4th term because he suddenly had a calling to prioritize fatherhood. We are sure it had nothing to do with the intern found dead in his office, her skull crushed on July 19, 2001.  There was remarkably little news coverage of this event. So little coverage, you might think that the guilty party might be obliging to the controlling news media narrative as payback for hushing it up.

Then Scarborough left the Republican Party to become an Independent in 2017, ostensibly because Trump offends him. That is his prerogative, of course. Real Republicans responded by celebrating the departure of a RINO. Scarborough declared his somber change of heart on an episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert while throwing some verbal incendiaries at Trump’s policies. At the time, Trump was banning flights from terrorist countries. Scarborough was shocked at this, and opined what a terrible president Trump will be. Such a xenophobic ogre! Orange man bad!

I am sure Scarborough’s change of heart about his political affiliation has nothing to do with those pesky intern rumors that continue to plague him. I am sure his reevaluation is borne out of a sincere disagreement with Trump’s policies. Whatever. The Colbert audience is about as anti-Trump as Scarborough and Colbert are themselves, so he certainly played to a supportive audience. A perfect stage for a perfect demonstration of proud political bias by a journalist.

Then there’s Judge Jeanine. She is unashamedly pro-Trump and possesses pro-conservative values. Her show is branded as a conservative show – upfront and honest. She also has an impressive lack of scandals. No skeletons in her closet. She doesn’t even drink. She loves her dogs.

There you have it: the list of Republican anchors who previously held an office. If there are more than that, you could probably still count them all on one hand. There are a bunch of former administration officials and congressmen like Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Trey Gowdy that contribute here and there, mostly on Fox News. But they are all clear about their conservative points of view. There is no need to guess their political leanings on any topic any more than you need to guess Donna Brazille’s, who is also a contributor and a barefaced liberal in all her opinions.

I have no beef with bias by well-labeled contributors. All good news outlets should have contributors that fairly and equitably represent all sorts of political points of view. But the audience should always be aware of the political leanings of opinion-givers. Those entrusted to convey general news, however, should have no personal ties to political parties. Either that, or they should be completely open about their political bent every single day they are on he air. Without full disclosure, their choice of words and their questions to correspondents and contributors will be laced with assumptive language that people may not know to look for.

This requirement would, of course, put the likes of Chris Cuomo and Chuck Todd out of a job.

So what do we do about it? A press that fails to report the unvarnished truth, without deceit, of government corruption and excesses is not merely in error. It is acting as a traitor to the country. “In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech; a thing terrible to public traytors (sic),” Said Benjamin Franklin at the tender age of sixteen. At that age, I am sure he was just meditating on this thought from the standpoint of suppression of the tongues of individual citizens. Little must he have imagined that the press would actively subdue fair and accurate reporting, and render a whole nation vulnerable with misinformation and disinformation, and as we saw in 1930’s Germany, leaving us vulnerable to follow bad men.

So let’s call the Main Stream Media for what it is, a propaganda machine. It certainly makes no attempt at objective journalism. This is exactly why Trump unashamedly calls them for what they are: Fake News. Unlike the Goebbels version, the American propaganda machine runs on fuel fed by a Deep State, as we have seen nonstop for three years or more. And, as stated, the MSM has a host of demagogues at the top of many hydra-like heads, race-baiting and gender-baiting and pandemic fear mongering and orange-man-bad reinforcing. This construct won’t be dismantled simply by taking out one or two of its leadership.

Can We Have Objective Journalism in the Main Stream Media?

In just the past week, those networks previously reticent to give respectable coverage to the General Flynn documents and the overwhelming evidence of FISA abuse are finally beginning to come around. Sort of.

On May 13th, CSPAN’s Washington Journal with host Pedro Echevarria provided an excellent segment about FISA reform, related to the General Flynn surveillance issues, with guest Jeff Mordock from the Washington Times.

The day before, Catherine Herridge of CBS News did a very fair interview with Attorney General Bill Barr. It gave us information straight from the AG’s mouth:

“I was concerned that people were feeling there were two standards of justice in this country, and that the political and the justice…or the law enforcement process…was being used to play political games. And I want to make sure that we restore confidence in this system. There is only one standard of justice and I believe that this case – that justice in this case – requires dismissing charges against General Flynn.”

It took less than 24 hours for NBC to take this interview and edit a piece out of context in order to run a segment that entirely misrepresented Barr’s statement.

Sadly, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo and many other once-respected news sources have conditioned us to expect information manipulation from them. Thank heavens for news outlets like Fox News/Breitbart/Epoch Times/Washington Times/The Hill/OANN/The Gateway Pundit/National Review/Project Veritas who do their best to prevent all these other news outlets from pulling fast ones on us. One of the tactics the biased media uses is to overwhelm us by sprinkling misinformation within correct information. Although we know they’re doing it, that does not mean that we automatically know exactly what truth they are leaving out and what lie was created whole-cloth. If not for the few truth-teller news outlets left to us, putting cross hairs on the prevarications of greatest import, and CSPAN quietly recording everything that is actually said and done on the floor of congress and in the halls of government so that we can be our own news-gatherers, we would be in real trouble.

Thank you to all these organizations and honest reporters willing to keep it real. I am sure it costs them to do so, and probably makes them unpopular in certain social circles where they would otherwise want to engage. You are heroes.

Also thankfully, we are in the age of Social Media. If not for private citizens who are political wonks, getting and distributing the truth about what’s going on in government, there is much news that might have never reached a high level of public consumption. Armchair political wonks are hugely responsible for holding the media’s feet to the fire, and keeping the good ones good.

But we still need honest, objective journalism to become popular again. Now, there are plenty of quippy quotes out there that lament how finding objective journalists is about as achievable as finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Arguing that they don’t really exist, not in the perfect sense, is a cop-out argument, isn’t it? We better find a few that will at least make the effort. We cannot hold the powerful to honest account, or prevent them from turning tyrannical, if we do not have a highly-regarded, responsible Free Press able to hold them to account. For decades we have not demanded the expectation of fair and balanced reporting. If we had, Chris Cuomo and Joe Scarborough and George Stephanopoulos would never have gotten to where they are. None of them can be counted on to be impartial to get to the truth.  There is no reason why we should have faith that they will prioritize the best interest of the public before considering personal self-interest. And if you haven’t noticed: none of them even give the pretense of trying. When are we going to demand it of our news outlets to give us trustworthy news personalities? Tucker Carlson is making an effort. His sizeable audience proves that there is a market for rigorous and honest journalism, too. There should be more like him. There must be more like him.

You might consider also that honest journalists would refuse to have personal ties and gratuitous connections to politicians and people in positions of power in the first place. Why in the world no one has drawn significant attention to this problem so far I cannot fathom. I would propose that media outlets refuse to hire individuals with known ties to politicians and lobbying organizations to key reporting positions, and uphold other similar measures in an effort to protect fair and unbiased news coverage.

But hell is not going to freeze over anytime soon, and there is no Patton about to roll in and kill this propaganda machine, unless Trump really does work a miracle and end up draining the swamp like he proposed to do. Between Barr and Durham, that miracle may still be in the works. Otherwise, the only way to kill the MSM hydra is a death of ten thousand cuts. Those cuts will be executed by vigilant American citizens remaining sharp on current events and wielding the blades of truth across Social Media.

My father had very few recollections of the Nazi world order when everything seemed so promising – those days had quickly passed before he was old enough to have any memories of them. The recollections of his youth were filled with the starvation, devastation, demoralization, and disillusionment of a war-torn country that had come to realize it had embraced a murderous lie, a lie promoted by a malicious and misleading press.

I pray our country restores objective journalism and our mainstream news media’s integrity. May the disillusionment experienced by post-WWII Germany be something we never endure as a country. May our press soon be free from corruption again.

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Thank you.

In pursuit of truth, and truly yours,

Best Regards,

Katherine Parker