When Did the NEWS Stop Being the NEWS, and WHY?

President Trump and his supporters have created a new name for the Main Stream Media (MSM) and made it very popular in recent months. It is “fake: news”! I have personally been trying for years to understand what happened to the “MSM” in America, so this “fake news” description suddenly made sense to me. That happened as I tried to organize my thoughts about the NEDIA in America today, versus what we had when I was a child living in rural America. When I made that mental analogy, and thought about everything that has happened in the decades between then and now it was easier for me to understand how the” MSM” got to be what it is today.

In the early 1950s it was “normal” for my family and all our neighbors to live in a three room, tin roofed house on a dirt road. We had “outdoor plumbing”, our meals were cooked on a wood stove and the other two rooms were heated by a “:pot-bellied stove”.

During the 1950’s three things happened that changed our lives forever (and ultimately the world).

The first thing was when we got an electric stove to cook our meals!

The second thing was when we got our first TV! We had to have an antenna mounted on a long water pipe so someone could go outside periodically and manually turn it until someone inside yelled that we could see something on the screen. There were only a very limited number of channels and they only had programs broadcast from the late afternoon until later at night when the programing ended with the late night “NEWS”, except on weekends when there was a “late show” after the “NEWS”. And YES, we called it “THE NEWS” and the people delivering it “Reporters”. We never had any doubt that it was really the “NEWS”, and that it was being accurately “Reported”.

The third thing was when we got a working telephone. The phone company strung a line down our dirt road and hooked up all the houses on the road to that line. It was known as a “party line” since everyone on the line shared the line. Each house had its own different ring pattern so you knew if the call was for someone in your house.

Why did I say these three things changed our lives, and ultimately the world forever? Because they were the first steps in fifty years of rapid technological development that for all practical purposes shrank America and the world. Suddenly more people had access to information every day that they never had before. And more importantly, the people providing the information began to realize that they were in a position that no one had ever been in before! They began to realize how much opportunity they had to influence the world. And then for some of these people “greed” kicked in and they began to be obsessed with feeding their egos and amassing “power and money”.

Fast forward for fifty years and look at the previously unimaginable technological advances we experienced. Computers, the internet, car phones, cable TV, satellite TV, cell phones, social media, iPhones, and iPads. Now practically everyone has access to “News” 24/7 and almost anyone can create “News” and share it. With every new media innovation the “News” became less reliable and the liberals and “MSM” became more obsessed with feeding their egos and amassing “power and money”!

In addition to the unimaginable technological advances something else happened during those fifty years. Liberals began to aggressively advance their liberal/progressive agenda in a number of ways. They began to slowly but steadily take control of the “MSM’ and many of our colleges and universities. When Obama stepped onto the national stage the timing was right for them to strike! He was the perfect “tool” for the liberals and “MSM” to take the final steps to “fundamentally change America” (and the world).

Fast forward another ten years and the “MSM” has become so dishonest that it is becoming increasingly difficult to know what is true and what is not. All you have to do to see this is watch FOX News where the liberals like Bob Beckel, Julie Roginsky, Mary Anne Marsh, or any of the other dozens of hard left liberals who are on FOX regularly, when they “debate” the conservatives on FOX about various current events. When you do this you will have to wonder how two people’s views on the same subject could be so extraordinarily different that it is not possible for them to be on the same planet! Their differences are not simply a different interpretation of facts. Somebody is staring into the camera and deliberately delivering “fake news”! Every one of us has the right, and an obligation to choose our news sources carefully, to listen to both sides of an issue, and make a rational decision as to what is right for America, and then to insist that our elected officials “do the right thing”.