Dakota Beacon

To paraphrase an old saying: News is News is News. But most of us know that “News” is managed: it’s manipulated, dressed up, revealed in part, or delayed in reporting, or not reported at all. Depends upon the news source doesn’t it? We have learned that the old and trusted sources of news are no longer trustworthy; we refer to them as the Main Stream Media, MSM for short. The short list of MSM’s would be: Television networks ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS (Public Broadcasting); Cable networks CNN, MSNBC; radio network NPR. On the print side of news is the Associated Press, called the AP--the giant of the news industry who supplies (sells) prepared copy of the news to perhaps 90% of our nations newspapers; exceptions may be large daily papers who have their own reporters and writers such as the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and perhaps a few others. Many of these papers will include stories from AP in their daily press; the exception may be the Wall Street Journal with a rare printing of an AP story when it is germane to their article.

The American public is learning more and more about the managed news that we Americans are fed day after day by the Main Stream Media (MSM). If an incident on the national scene happens and it is not reported on TV or the press--did it really happen? An example to make this point. A couple of weeks ago Mr. Bob Scheiffer of CBS News was interviewing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for some 15 minutes on his one hour Sunday morning program. During this interview Scheiffer did not ask Holder one question about the voter intimidation incident in Philadelphia on election day 2008 when two (or was it three?) Black Panther men threatened and intimidated voters at a polling place, a federal crime. The G. W. Bush administration

Department of Justice (DOJ) brought legal proceedings against the men and had a case prepared for trial. However, in early 2009 President Obama took office and appointed Eric Holder as the new Attorney General. The Holder DOJ took no action on this case and after a few months the case disappeared from the DOJ agenda and disappeared from public view. A whistle-blower in the Department of Justice revealed to the public that the case was well founded and was ready for prosecution, and then it was dropped.. What happened?

When Scheiffer was asked why he did not delve into this during the interview with Holder he said that he was unaware of the entire incident--he did not know anything about it. How could that be? This story was covered numerous times on FOX television news, talk shows, and BLOG sites. It had frequent news coverage in the wall Street Journal plus editorials and Op Ed pieces. Does this veteran newsman not know what is happening? How could Scheiffer not know? This is a man highly placed in CBS News--a man who tells us what the news is! Does he know only what is on CBS News? If it is not covered there it did not happen? Now the question must be asked: what else has been omitted in the daily news that is broadcast to Americans each day? Is that why the American public knew so little about candidate Obama leading up to the 2008 election?

How about the friends of candidate Obama? To name a few: William Ayers the alleged (admitted) 1960’s domestic terrorist/bomber; The Reverend Jeremiah Wright who said, “God damn America”, pastor of the church in Chicago that the Obama‘s attended for years; the ACORN association with Obama: the money man Tony Rezko of Chicago who ‘helped‘ the Obama‘s buy their house (Rezko was convicted of federal offenses). These are things that were missing from the MSM and much of the news press as Obama was running against a half-dozen Democrat candidates in 2007 and early 2008. And they did not become news items on the MSM when Barack Obama became the Democrat Party nominee for President. If anything, the Barack Obama image and past life was scrubbed clean by a well documented life story of his struggle to overcome obstacles and attain prominence and success. The MSM loved the “story” and printed and aired it as one of the great American success stories that had many similarities to that of Abraham Lincoln. No one in the MSM bothered to dig into the image, or to look into the many people that Obama was associated with over the years in his rise to prominence.

A few weeks ago Americans learned of the online site JournoList which was created prior to the 2008 election as an electronic meeting place for journalists to talk (their own BLOG site). A place for Left-leaning and like minded journalists bent upon aiding the election of a Democrat, and not just any Democrat, but the first African American who should become the President of the United States. It is no surprise to hear that the news press and news media are biased to the Democrat Party and to the ideas of the Left--we’ve known this for quite some time. What has come into the open is the way it was done.

The online site JournoList became an electronic meeting place for hundreds of reporters and journalists to share news items and to analyze the impact of news items on the candidates and campaigns. Keep in mind who these journalists are: they are the persons who gather and report and write news stories for their media--AP and newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio. The JournoList site was exposed by a group named Daily Caller, who suggest that the JournoList subscribers and contributors were in close contact with national campaigns of candidates, and they specifically seemed to promote the fortunes of candidate Obama for president. Journalistic ethics and rules were grossly violated; the journalists were in the pocket of the Obama campaign. One incident that the MSM failed to cover was the embarrassing relationship of Reverend Wright and Barack Obama; a relationship extremely toxic to the Obama campaign. A virtual news blackout. Was it deliberate? Was it collusion?

Is this is where our “free press” has taken us? A press that has been given specific freedom by The U.S. Constitution as stated in Amendment I: there will be no abridgement of a free press by government. The writers of the Constitution in 1787 so valued a free press and public information that they wrote this protection into the very first Amendment of our Constitution. And now we find that this trust has been betrayed! Sold out by the very people and industry who are protected?


Hal is a ND native who grew up near McClusky. A Korean war veteran who served in the U.S. Navy from 1951 to 1955. Hal and his wife Lois have four children and eight grand children. Hal volunteers at the Bismarck Public Library doing book repair and restoration.