Stop the presses! The mainstream media are acknowledging that they are biased! As Captain Renault would no doubt observe, “I’m shocked–shocked!–to find bias going on in these establishments!”

OK, alright, all kidding aside this will come as no surprise to my regular readers. In fact, as you’ll remember it was just a couple of months ago that I wrote about how all journalists and all news outlets are fundamentally biased. But in the past the MSM has always pretended to be telling you “the way it is.”

Well, not anymore. On at least three separate occasions this month alone major mainstream outlets have openly admitted their political bias.







First there was New York Times’ Public Editor Liz Spayd’s column “The Clinton Story You Didn’t Read Here” where she criticized the paper for not covering the story of Hillary Clinton’s pants-on-fire interview with Fox where she lied about her lies about the email scandal (talk about meta!).

Then there was CNN’s Chris Cuomo making the off-the-cuff admission that “We couldn’t help [Clinton] any more than we have. She’s gotten a free ride so far from the media. We’re the biggest ones promoting her campaign!”

Now the New York Times has published another astonishing column, this time by media columnist Jim Rutenberg. In his August 7th column, titled “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism,” Rutenberg asks:

“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

He goes on to say:

“Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”







Now here’s the funniest part of all of this: he’s not wrong. Journalists who believe Trump is a threat to America (and the world) are being oppositional in their coverage of him. And what’s wrong with that? Better to have an openly biased reporter trying to argue for their viewpoint through their journalism in a way that everyone can see than a secretly biased editor using an “objective” style and tone to portray their nemesis as crazy and their favored candidate as a saint.

Also, Rutenberg is very right to point out that being oppositional with politicians is “uncomfortable and uncharted territory” for mainstream journalists. They certainly haven’t done any of that in the last few decades.

But as I say we’ve known all of this for a long, long time. Here’s the real question: why now? Why is it suddenly OK for mainstream outlets to start coming out right in the middle of a (s)election cycle openly trumpeting their bias for one or the other of the pre-selected puppets?

The answer is obvious: The perfectly predictable response to this admitted bias is rage from the public. As Spayd points out in her latest column, it isn’t just the Trump supporters who are outraged by this display of bias; dyed-in-the-wool Democrats and self-described Liberals are furious at the Times for failing to cover the election from both sides.

And the summer of rage continues to rage on, exactly as it’s supposed to, so that no matter who “wins” on (s)election day, America remains deeply and bitterly divided. Why hate the system when you can hate your neighbor?

So that leaves us pretty much where we started: aware that the media is biased and aware that this is leading to an escalating cycle of hatred that is conveniently directed away from the powers-that-shouldn’t-be. So what do we do about this?







There are going to be many different answers to this question, obviously, but one of them is coming from Newsbud, who you’ll remember from a previous column were recently in New York to confront NBC over their Pentagon propaganda during the Turkish coup. Well they’re not just stopping there. In a must-see video posted earlier this week, Sibel Edmonds and Spiro Skouras excoriate the so-called media watchdogs who are in bed with the same corporate/foundation paymasters they are supposedly “keeping in check.” The point of this isn’t to reform the media watchdogs, of course, it’s to show the general public how the entire system has been rigged against them.

Say what you will about this 2016 Oval Office puppet (s)election cycle, it is accelerating the breakdown of the old media dinosaurs and their establishment journalism system. And it’s going to be up to the people to choose whether they’re going to turn to the establishment-approved replacements (not just the Buzzfeeds and their ilk, but the new culture war paradigm that is replacing the old left/right paradigm) or to the true grassroots people-powered alternative media who are pointing at the real problem, and the real solutions.

I know what side I’m on. Now who’s with me?