Americans can only come to one conclusion when they are bombarded with this stuff day after day, week after week, month after month without any attempt to examine the actual facts and evidence on the table: The nation’s press is controlled. The only “conspiracy” here is the conspiracy of silence and gratuitous, ad hominem attacks and unfairness.
Most people really don’t understand how journalism works in America.
I do, because I have been an active professional in the industry for more than 35 years – as a reporter, editor, top news executive at daily newspapers, publisher, radio talk-show host, an instructor of journalism at a major university and the founder of the first independent news source on the Internet. In short, I have done everything one can do in the world of American journalism.
That’s why I thought it might be time for a lesson in how mass communication in America has transformed into mass deception.
On March 4, the Associated Press, the largest news-gathering organization in the world, distributed a propaganda screed thinly veiled as a news story by AP staff writer Jacques Billeaud about Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigation of Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president. You can read the entire story here, just one of more than 100 outlets that carried the piece with virtually no editing.
Here is an excerpt of that report:
“America’s self-proclaimed toughest sheriff finds himself entangled these days in his own thorny legal troubles: a federal grand jury probe over alleged abuse of power, Justice Department accusations of racial profiling and revelations that his department didn’t adequately investigate hundreds of Arizona sex-crime cases.
“Rather than seek cover, though, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is seeking to grab the spotlight in the same unorthodox fashion that has helped boost his career as a nationally known lawman.
