Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series about media bias and internet censorship, based on an exclusive interview on Liberty Nation Radio with Brent Bozell, Founder and President of the famed Media Research Center.
Armageddon, or much ado about nothing. Those have been the back-to-back self-contradictory mantras of the establishment media these days.
As the now-infamous memos on FISA abuse by Obama officials were set to be released, the anti-Trump press chanted the Democrat/leftist talking points as if by rote, claiming the release of information about the FBI and intelligence operations embedded in the House and Senate memos would present a grave danger to the nation. But then, when the memos revealed information damaging only to Barack Obama and his Department of Justice but not to national security, the media did a 180 and minimized the damning contents of the memos, dismissing them with the tiresome and well-worn phrase: nothing burger.
And they did so with no sense of irony. Self-awareness is not a quality associated with the swamp media.
In an exclusive interview on Liberty Nation Radio, Brent Bozell, Founder and President of the famed Media Research Center, spoke of how recent history demonstrates that, in addition to the media’s long-standing protection of Democrats from the Clintons to Barack Obama, their willingness to use all means available, including blatantly fake news, to advance their transparent effort to take down President Trump has taken their bias to a whole new level:
Tim: So, Brent, the Washington Post and their brethren in the establishment media who pride themselves on their investigative prowess have all but ignored the scandalous revelations about the Obama justice department and the FBI. Carl Bernstein himself, of Woodward and Bernstein fame, has been one of the loudest voices decrying the release of the memos describing abuse of the FISA Court. Now, how can it be that a media, that’s been obsessed with digging deeper and deeper into Trump and Russia, has been entirely incurious about the scandal right before their eyes?
Brent: You know, I should tell you something Tim, when the news media that are the paragon of honor and protecting the decency and the honor of the FBI. I mean, I just love it.
But think about what’s happened where the media are concerned for the last, this goes back really to the 1990s. Throughout the Clinton administration, there was one scandal after another. Some many of these scandals preceded his election to the presidency but were hugely important, i.e. Whitewater. And then, once he became president, the Monica Lewinsky affair and others, and the FBI scandal, which was a huge scandal. Well, what did we hear from the media? We heard from the media that we needed to get to more important things. We need to move on, move on, move on. That’s when we got moveon.org.
They ignored all of the Clinton scandals. If you think I’m not telling the truth, you don’t get to the bottom of a single one. You can’t drill down to the bottom of a single one of those scandals. They abandoned every single one. Okay, so along comes Bush 43. Well, darn it, if we’re not going to get to the bottom of what happened when he was in the National Guard in 1971. For two weeks, they would not leave that story alone. They spend eight years investigating anything they possibly could on him. Okay. So now, comes Obama. Obama has got an alphabet soup of scandals. The IRS scandal, the fast and furious, Solyndra, Benghazi, it goes on and on and on. Can you name one where we got to the bottom of them? No. They ignored every single one.
Now, you get to Trump. They can’t just leave him alone. They’ve done nothing but investigate him since before he became president. There’s not one scintilla of evidence yet that has come up out of over a hundred hours of footage on the network nightly news. A hundred hours of coverage on this. They haven’t come up with one thing worth five seconds. Now, there’s emerging evidence that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign that was paying for this fake stuff to be used, and they were using the Obama administration to do this with the FISA Court. There’s huge evidence of this and they’re right back to where they were where they started with Clinton. They’re ignoring it.
Tim: So, we’ve now seen something else that’s both, at once, shocking and unsurprising. The leftist media glamorizing the sister of the ruthless totalitarian dictator Kim Jong Un at the Olympics, and almost basking in her embarrassing Vice President Mike Pence. Do you think the American people are buying what the media is selling on this?
Brent: Well, they haven’t to date on so much on Trump. During the campaign, you saw that surveys had it up to nine out of ten Americans believed the media were out to get Donald Trump. Now, those who hated him liked it, and those who like him don’t like it. They split society. That’s where we stand. My fear on this North Korea thing is that there is such a wide swath of Americans who are just ignorant. And I mean that word advisedly. They don’t follow the news. They don’t know what’s happening.
This is the sister of a killer. She should be glad that she’s alive because this guy has a bad habit of killing family members.
Tim: Now, President Trump has taken on the leftist media in a way that many conservatives have only dreamed about for years. Calling them out repeatedly on their transparent bias. Has this just been white noise to the public or has it made a real impact on people’s skepticism about the media?
Brent: I think it’s had a huge impact. You know Tim, for years and years, I would have Republicans call me and say, what can we do about the fact that the media are so vicious. We try to cut taxes for the American people and they say we’re pawns of the greedy rich. We try to cut government and they say we’re going to starve people. What is it that can be done to help us?
To which my answer was always the same thing. When are you going to stand up to them? When are you going to go toe to toe with them on national television, on live national television and call them out for what it is they’re doing? Well, the problem with most Republicans is they’re afraid of their own shadows. They read the Washington Post. They listen to the CBS Evening News. And they determine two things. One is, I want to be liked by them, and the second one is, I don’t want to be disliked by them because it’s out of fear. So, they do nothing but kvetch about.
What did Donald Trump do? Donald Trump realized a couple of things. One is, what a problem they are. Two, the opportunity he had given in that the public can’t stand the media either. You could say that it was very calculated politically, but he has had great grounds to do this. He has called them out. Let me tell you, I’ve done this for 30 years, I’ve monitored the media. You’ve not seen what you’ve seen in the last two years where they are actually inventing stories. This Russian dossier story, they come out on a regular basis.
All they need is for somebody in the White House to say, you know, today Donald Trump said he was going to fire Jeff Sessions. Boom, story in The New York Times. Donald Trump is going to fire Jeff Sessions. You don’t know if there’s a lick of truth to that. You don’t know if this person was even there or if Donald Trump just said, I oughta fire this guy, as an aside comment. But anything that could be used against him as, quote-unquote, news, appears in The Washington Post. That’s fake news. When you do that kind of reporting, that’s fake news. You know it’s not news. You know that you grasp at a straw to go with the only purpose being to attack the president. You’re not in the news business. You’re an appendage of the Democratic Party.
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In part two of this series tomorrow, Brent Bozell discusses a rapidly growing threat: internet censorship of free-market voices.