Why is NBC faking it? Because it works!
Goebbels would be proud.
And no, I’m not calling our liberal/left press Nazis. But they have become brazen and shameless in their lies, particularly of the edited video/photo/audio variety. As John Nolte points out (hat tip: Ed Driscoll), this is the fifth time in the last couple of years that NBC or MSNBC has been caught purposely and deceptively editing some sort of documentary evidence in order to further the liberal and/or leftist agenda.
Remember that we’re not talking about simple mistakes here. We’re not even talking about things that could be argued to have been mistakes, nor even negligence. No, these are deliberate falsifications designed to mislead, by a news organization whose entire raison d’éªtre is, supposedly (accent on that “supposedly”), to bring us the truth.
So why, in this digital and internet day and age, when it’s so much easier than it used to be to expose this sort of thing as a lie, is it still done? Because—silly billy—it works, that’s why.
You might ask how it works, if we know it’s a lie. Doesn’t knowing that discredit the source? I think that most of the people who would be inclined to pay attention and come to that conclusion have already done so, and the rest either don’t follow it, or see it and don’t care (cynicism? boredom? lack of values?), or justify it as the usual serving of “a higher truth.” In other words, the ends justify the means, and the ends are the usual noble ones of the left, so the means are the usual nefarious ones. Isn’t it funny how that tends to work out?
As Churchill so famously said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Indeed. Hear hear, as they say in Britain. That is something our MSM has deeply and truly learned.
The proof is that this latest deceptive videotape—you know, the one about the gun-loving hecklers being so mean to the bereaved Newtown father—has gotten more than halfway around the internet, and still has a very active life there. You have only to look at articles such as this and this and this to learn how many of the original articles with the original assertions and the original (fake) video are still out there, even now. And how slow the disclaimers are coming, complete with excuses and explanations and accusations that justify the point of the original fake (see this, for example, as well as this).
Expect more of this sort of thing. A lot more.
“And no, I’m not calling our liberal/left press Nazis”
Really? Why would you let these ideological fascists off the hook?
Nothing new here. They have just become more brazen and blatant in their lies and don’t even pretend honesty or objectivity anymore. They think like Hiillary Clinton, what does it matter if we lie? Who cares? Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a little essay on lying and the bad effects on society.
We’re a lot closer to living in Venezuela than many realize. Remember Obama diversity czar Mark Lloyd praising Chavez’s control of the media?
And how about that Anti-Abortion rally that didn’t draw anyone on the anniversary of Roe? (It was a Pro-Life Rally of about half a million people.)
Remember that NBC Universal is not a stand-alone entity owned by Comcast (51%) and GE (49%).
Shareholders and customers of both of these parent companies should be expressing disapproval at the behavior of their irresponsible corporate child.
“Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop… You see the rift? ‘Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.’ That’s the game.”
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“He [God] has a bourgeois mind. he has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least – sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is natural on our side”
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“All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy [God], are to be encouraged”
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Distract men’s minds from who He [Christ] is, and what He did. We first make Him solely a teacher, and then conceal the very substantial agreement between His teachings and those of all other great moral teachers. For humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them”
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“The grand problem is that of ‘Unselfishness’… Teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them”
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“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury”
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“We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice”
“This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world-a world in which moral issues really come to the point. he sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality… It is therefore possible to lose as much as we gain by making your man a coward; he may learn too much about himself!”
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“The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting ‘to eat the cake and have it’; but thanks to our labours they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it”
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Screwtape Proposes a Toast
“Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose… You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you life, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected witht he political ideal that men should be equally treated. you then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal… As a result you can use the word Democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic of the word, would be universally derided. The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you” (197-198).
“Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic” (199-200).
“What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual… Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals”
At least screwtape makes a distinction between the puppet and the puppet masters!!! so far i have not noticed anything else but a unworkable, unreal, not salient, monolithic view… which is pc, but gets you no where.
I think I should point out that the biggest reason they make stuff up is because their viewers don’t care; not enough to change the channel anyway.
MSNBC is a low rated niche network for progressives. They preach to the choir, so they can say whatever they want. A lot of their viewers probably like the creatively edited tapes.
NBC news is also a niche product of sorts. Most of their viewers are old people who aren’t that interested in the news and/or don’t have cable. They aren’t going anywhere, so NBC news can also say whatever it wants; at least until their viewers die.
I am not recommending this and would not do it but the only thing that will stop this is violence.
Conservative Hedge Fund/Institutional Investor. There’s all of this movement toward “socially responsible” investing, which generally means “supports liberal causes.” A conservative investment fund would be “societally responsible.” A key distinction. If such an investment fund existed, I would certainly move my 401(k) to it. And that might get the attention of the companies behind the News Corporations. Conservatives will never get ownership any other way. Al Gore preferred to sell to Islamists than to Conservatives.
Baltimoron: I agree about MSNBC and its audience. But that is hardly the point. Not only does NBC do it too, but these days, to a great extent, the initial airing is just the beginning. These things are pushed and disseminated wildly by a combination of the liberal/left blogosphere and social media (twitter being a big one) as well as other shows. They become HUGE memes that reach many many many more people than MSNBC viewers.
I don’t watch TV, and never took the trouble to hook up the HDTV converter I purchased several years ago. I should take the time to find get the TV connections fixed – lot of fiddling w the remotes- so I can watch TV. Watch NBC News, and send off letters to its advertisers informing them of my boycotting their products.
“Shareholders and customers of both of these parent companies should be expressing disapproval at the behavior of their irresponsible corporate child.”
I understand your sentiment, but IMO its futile. The big corporations (GE is a perfect example) and the big banks do not care what we think or care about our investment in their shares. As an individual, if you are worth less than $5 million, you are spare change to these people; although they are happy to take your change.
Parker…disagree. Large corporations spend very considerable amounts of money, via advertising, PR, etc, in attempting to create a positive public image of themselves.
A problem we have here is that people tend to think of NBC as a self-standing entity; few realize that it is now a joint enterprise of Comcast and GE (although GE has stated its intention to reduce, and I believe eventually eliminate, its ownership stake)
If polls showed that, say, 30% of Americans “strongly believed” that Comcast and GE were engaging in unethical media manipulation, it would surely be of concern to the CEOs and Boards of those two companies.
neo,
First off, ignore NBC news. They tend to get between nine and nine and a half million viewers per night, of whom only 2.2 – 2.5 million are between the ages of 25 and 54. On any given night, people middle aged and younger are more likely to watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory than NBC Nightly news.
As far as the internet rumors are concerned, you have a point but your exaggerating the effect NBC has. NBC isn’t starting these rumors, they’re just building on whats already out there. And while a big name network might lend some credibility to a story, you hardly need them to spread false stories on the internet.
For example, I remember after the Trevon Martin shooting a number of my friends telling me he had been shot in the back while running away from his attacker. I don’t think any reputable news source published that. It got started on a blog somewhere and people passed it around. The faked 911 call didn’t fool anyone. It just confirmed what a lot of people already wanted to believe.
One last thing:
Another good answer to your title question is: because they’re desperate. As I said above, NBC’s audience is literally dying. They might be moving to tabloid journalism to try and attract more viewers.
Can’t NBC be sued for libel? The parent company has deep pockets. Go for it! Team up with George Zimmerman and make it a class action lawsuit.
Batlimoron: in this case I believe NBC created the rumor, and it certainly created the means to disseminate it (the deceptively edited video) and give it credence. So I believe it had a huge influence, amplified by other sites online such as Twitter and Facebook.
The press, whether they know it or not, are very vulnerable to kidnappings, especially ones that can be pinned on islamic causes. They even have personal bodyguards outside their houses a lot of the times.
Those that are very good at propaganda, concurrently suffer from a severe weakness against physical violence.
neo,
The story actually came from a local newspaper in Connecticut; another organization that’s probably desperate for attention and has nothing to lose from publishing BS. I believe (but can’t say for sure) that it went national when Slate republished the story. MSNBC wasn’t even the first news organization to try some clever editing with the video. That honor goes to the Huffington Post. Although, their’s wasn’t nearly as bad.
The knobslobberers in the Fellatio Media are pushing the far left radical agenda of Owebama, even if they have to lie to do it? And this is surprising? To whom?