MSNBC features town halls with Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, perhaps to provide a much needed respite from the all-Trump-all-the-time news. Bernie delved into the heart of the matter, by simply asking host Chris Hayes who employs him.
SANDERS: The corporate media very much determines the kind of conversation we have. Your particular station is owned by whom?
HAYES: Comcast. NBC Universal
SANDERS: There we go. One of the more popular corporations in America. Laughter.
Sanders spoke this uncomfortable truth roughly 11 minutes into the Town Hall last night on the allegedly 'Left Leaning' network. Showing a journalistic absence of integrity, MSNBC interrupted the Town Hall at about the 28:00 mark of the 46:00 minute-long Q and A session, to cover 'breaking news.' Wouldn't you know it, the network's obsession with Donald Trump made an uninterrupted Sanders Town Hall impossible. Did Bernie hit a nerve by simply asking about the corporate owners of MSNBC?
What MSNBC felt the need to discuss was not breaking news. Trump has been calling for Cruz and Kasich to drop out of the race. The Republican front runner is calling for his remaining opponents to quit because he is afraid that they will team up and steal the nomination away from him.
MSNBC is so obsessed with Trump that they could not go one hour without talking about him. The dysfunction and lack of leadership in the Republican Party are why Trump was able to survive the primary, but the media’s never ending free publicity for Trump is why he is leading the Republican race.
The lack of objective news options is terribly distressing for those of us who see through this nauseating attempt by the networks to legitimize the Talking Yam as a viable, qualified candidate. Pretending that the advent and rise of Donald Trump is not at all the fault of the Republican Party only appeals to the delusional sycophants who live in the Beltway Media reality-free zone.
The practice of Strategic Forgettery™ has been universally adopted by what was once considered legitimate news. Strategic Forgettery is exactly how propagandists like Stuart Taylor, David Brooks, David Frum, or Ron Fournier (and many more), can live high on the hog by redefining reality using the lies of CORPORATE media. Good catch, Bernie. We hope your honesty isn't eternally preempted by fake Trump 'news.'
For well over a decade, Professional Left podcaster and blogger, driftglass, has recognized this unpleasant actuality, and he adeptly elucidates the truth about corporate-owned media. The excerpt below has a noticeable absence of the both-siderist pretense that the Trump-eteers have embraced.
The real story is that the GOP has spent 30 years building a mighty media and electoral machine that depends entirely on its capacity to constantly reprogram the memory of its millions of rank-and-file members to conform to the needs of Conservative ideologues and power brokers on any given day,
And the notion that this machine is going to suddenly stop tweaking the memories of its base and begin exhorting them to spontaneously embrace the act of honestly remembering a whole lot of brutally uncomfortable and embarrassing truths is as ludicrous as tossing a carp out of an airplane and exhorting it to spontaneously learn how to breathe and fly as it plummets to the ground below.
