mainstream media is irrelevant

            When I heard that Charlie Gibson had not heard of the ACORN sting team of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, that would make Woodward and Bernstein proud, I didn’t know who they were talking about. Now, the liberal response to this disconnect would be that I am out of touch and Charlie is somehow enlightened. The only problem is, he gets the big bucks to be enlightened. No one pays me to know who he is.

            Let’s turn the tables. This young sting team uncovers the conservative group called WALNUTS, a “non-profit” organization, receiving millions of tax dollars, but acts as a political front group for the Republicans, running voter fraud schemes and dubious other activities. Now, let’s ask Charlie Gibson (oh, I since discovered he works for one of those cute little, antiquated things called TV networks). Not only would he be all over it, he would have crowned Hannah the Queen of the Universe and James the new Bob Woodward.

            But alas . . . that is not quite the outcome they want because it casts yet one more pall over their anointed one. This is why citizens . . . like us . . . are becoming our own network. We took our cameras and covered one of the largest gatherings on the mall in Washington, DC to report what is happening in the country. You can see it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2aPvF6cgRU It was pretty amazing to see all those cameras set up in front of the stage that anticipated about 50,000 but got 20 times that, but then see no report from any of them. OK, CSPAN was fair and balanced, but they always are because they leave the reporters, editors, and producers in the office and just send a cameraman to report just the facts ma’am. How quaint.

            Let’s do some math. On the night that Obama gave his health care shell game speech, so full of inaccuracies that it frustrated sweet, kind, Joe Wilson to express the views that millions were thinking, only 32.1 million watched the speech. There were 10 broadcast and cable networks covering it, which means it averaged  3 million per network with Fox News getting one of the highest ratings at about 6 million. The polls show that the speech gave him a temporary bump in the polls, but Joe Wilson stole his thunder and has become the new focus on the hill, instead of the paying attention to what we pay them to do.

          If you look at the numbers comparatively . . . even from a conservative perspective it proves that the old way of reporting the news is quickly fading away, being replaced by each citizen being a reporter. We have relied on a handful of people, for decades, and trusted that they were telling us the truth about what was happening in the world. But when these dinosaurs walked off the anchor desk into the real world, they quickly shed that aura of perceived neutrality. Walter Cronkite wasted no time in telling everyone how liberal he was. Dan Rather totally sunk his own legacy and pulled the curtain back on his liberalism when he supported the idea of doctoring documents to play “gottcha” with George W. Bush.

            Now, there is zero civility between the network anchors and all the colors on both sides are flying freely. That is why it is very difficult to find a public store, restaurant, hotel, etc. having their public TVs tuned to FOX. And if you ask them to change, they say they can’t . . . but won’t explain why. Try it some time. Lloyd Marcus and his wife Mary were staying at a Marriott in Washington, DC and asked someone behind the desk if they could turn the channel from CNN to a sports channel, and they apologized and said they weren’t allowed to change the channel from CNN.

            Test the theory and the next time the channel is on CNN in a public place, ask if you can change the channel. Remember that old TV show in 1987 called Max Headroom where everyone was supposed to keep their TVs on at all times, and if they turned it off, the authorities would know? The motto was that the show was “twenty minutes into the future.” Forcing TVs to be tuned to one channel all day, impacts the ratings and numbers of daily viewership. So if all these networks each have an average of about two million daily viewers, and every public TV is always tuned to CNN, does this count for or against their tally? Does that mean if 1000 people pass through an airport where CNN is the only channel tuned, that 1000 people are watching CNN? Or would it be counted like a household, and even if no one is watching, if it is tuned to CNN, for the purposes of Nielson ratings, that represents one household that only watches CNN? See how distorted these numbers become? But, if no other network is selected to be shown in public, then it becomes very distorted.

            Well here’s some numbers you can get your hands around. There were conservatively, 500,000 people on the mall on Saturday* . . . many reports, including the UK news outlets had it as high as two million. But for argument’s sake, let’s say it was only 500,000. Now, think about your own social networking abilities, your e-mail address book, your FaceBook, YouTube address, My Space page, or even a personal website that you have created for your family and friends. I think it is fair to say that everyone with all or any of these informational outlets, they would have at least 100 people on their mailing lists. These are people they know, who trust them, who read what they send, or watch what they produce. So add up the zeroes . . . if all 500,000, just sent an e-mail to their list, with a few photos and a brief overview of what they saw on the mall . . . that would be 50,000,000 people hearing the truth.

            If you do a google string search of “March on Washington 9/12 Rally in DC  9/12” (etc.), there are over 1000 postings on YouTube by people who were there, and reported what they saw. On just the first page of 20 of the highest it cites, yesterday, there were 1.5 million views collectively. We counted all the hits of the rest of the sites and the numbers were over 2.5 million views in just three days. That is more than many of the major networks get in one day watching their news shows. MSNBC has a good day if they can break a million viewers.

            So, when the old fashioned, mainstream media, refuses to cover an event of that magnitude, assuming they know who all those people were, they actually help prove the point that they have made themselves irrelevant, outdated, unnecessary and certainly, and the very least, untrustworthy. Every citizen is now their own reporter. Every citizen has the ability to find and expose the truth and share that information virally with the world, and we don’t have to wade through hours of commercials and stories that are of no interest to us. We can google search the subjects we are interested in, read or watch You Tube reports, and then reply to what we have seen, and each forward it to dozens of others.

            So Charlie, don’t feel badly that you are clueless as to what one of the biggest breaking stories is. We know you live in an ivory tower, and like a pampered Pomeranian are spoon fed only the diet your producers want you to report. They know you are a loyalist and would never think of turning the channel and seeing what the other channels are reporting, so it is not a surprise that you did not hear of the ACORN scandal. It can’t possibly be that you did hear of it but wanted to use your great and powerful reputation to undermine the significance of it. That would be dishonest, and we know the mainstream media anchors are anything but that.

*This is solely for people who really care about statistics. For anyone else, who has already decided, for themselves even if the weren’t there, how many were at the rally, skip this part and get a latte. Thirty minutes before the MARCH was to begin, we get a call from one of the listed speakers who is not only a dear friend, but spent the night at our home for two nights before the rally. He was at the Hyatt on Capitol Hill and they told him to leave ASAP because the crowds were so big the had to start the rally early. Basically, if he didn’t leave then . . .three blocks from the Capitol, on New Jersey Avenue, he might not be able to get through the crowds to get to the stage to speak. They told him they had already counted 400,000 people and saw that many behind those. The British press reported two million people. The Metro is being criticized (on Sept. 17) for not being able to anticipate the crowd that they were not able to handle . . . check the web. And, last, but not least, the photos speak for themselves. For those who still want an explanation as to why the crowd was wider than deeper, contact the National Park Service and talk to them about the permits issued that day.

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