Smear and Narrative Industries    

   How sure are we that the news we receive is truth? Trustworthy? Honest? 

   Can we depend on people in high places for information needed to cope with COVID-19, to make decisions best for our families, to vote on solid grounds?

   Last week, we focused on the shiny object - equality - socialists/communists use to draw uninformed people into their hellhole. This week, we summarize an interview with award-winning journalist Sharyl Attkisson, author of Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.  

   We haven't read her new book. She has a TV show, "Full Measure."

   Attkisson last week told interviewer Virginia Allen, "Over time, I saw what I call the smear industry and the narrative industry. I'm talking about corporations, PR firms, crisis management firms, nonprofits and political people." 

   "And not just to get us (journalists) on their talking points and uncritically report what they want us to report, the way they want us to report it, but I saw them  become part of the newsroom." 

   "There's a trend now," she said, "that I saw, as I left CBS, to try to make stories come out a certain way regardless of the facts. ...the networks and other places were making it impossible to do accurate, fair, honest journalism."  

   She knows executives and journalists in news organizations who are equally as critical about what she calls "the death of the news." They work for ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and "all kinds of other places." 

Tomorrow: Half truths and lies 

       Jimmy