There is no shame in artists receiving monetary compensation to sell ideas, products or a presidential agenda. When everything is transparent and contracted aboveboard, this is called advertising. When this process is whispered into being, strategized and set into motion from the shadows of government and from behind closed doors, it is propaganda.

From Sun Tzu to Psy Ops, propaganda has won wars, toppled cultures and changed civilizations. As a self-identified enlightened and educated culture, we  thought ourselves beyond such base manipulation. We were wrong.

Where were the voices of dissent on the NEA conference call when so called “artists” were asked to further the President’s agenda?

I have danced ballets and I have done commercials; one side art, the other side business. What side were the NEA recipients on?

Art for propaganda was an essential tool of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung. What the heck is it doing in the White House? This should outrage freethinkers, citizens and artists from every corner of America.

The National Endowment of the Arts strategy has been traced straight to Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s policy facilitator and Grande Dame of his inner circle. As disturbing and possibly illegal as this is, it becomes truly frightening when you connect the rest of the dots:

1)      The Democrats repeated commitment to implement the Fairness Doctrine and destroy conservative talk radio.

2)      S.733: The bill that would give the President control over the internet in the event of an “emergency.”

3)      On Sept. 20, 2009, President Obama stated that he would look into bailouts for print newspapers because he is concerned that blogs will take over the world and be a threat to democracy.

Imagine that: the President of the United States is concerned free speech may be a threat to democracy. Is anybody paying attention?

Thomas Jefferson knew that a free press is essential to a free republic. Control the flow of information and you control the people. This hasn’t changed much since 1933.

Perhaps this is not as visually arresting as book burning, but the results are the same. Joseph Goebbels needed to ensure that the views of the Nazis were put forward in the most persuasive manner possible and make certain that no one in Germany could read or see anything that was damaging to the Nazi Party.

Is this that far removed from the news coverage of Honduras or the under-reporting of turnout for the 9/12 DC rally?

But I submit to you that these propaganda assaults will fail because they are lacking the one element critical to mission implementation: fear.

President Obama and his team are convinced that they are smarter than the average American citizen.  They don’t just say Middle Americans “cling to their Bibles and guns out of fear,” they truly believe it. This administration has banked on using fear to push stimulus packages, carbon taxes, bailouts and health care reform. That is their Waterloo.

Fear is not at the core of the American psyche; independence and patriotism are. And when enough Americans step back, take a breath and realize the extent of this manipulation, they awaken with a determination and that is truly frightening to those that would attempt to govern from the shadows.

The fear is now on the other foot.

The Muslim Brotherhood has long taught their operatives in the USA to attack their opponents with charges of “hate speech” and “racism” whenever they were called out to defend their positions in public. The Democrats have called out their big guns: congressmen, congresswomen and even an ex-President to do the same. Why would anyone do this if they were not “afraid” of an informed public debate?

It will not work this time. The sleeper has awakened and she sees the man behind the curtain.

Apathy can no longer be counted on as a tool for those who would seek to control the populace and erode the Constitution.

In this “Constitution Revolution,” the American people are not coming after you with guns or explosives; they are armed with truth, a desire for transparency, a desire for enlightened and informed public discourse, a demand for civic responsibility and a call to politicians to honor their oaths to the US Constitution.

One of the little secrets in ObamaWorld is that, while the President made good on his promise not to raise salaries, he quietly added more high paid staff. Lots more. Hence, an army of image makers are paid by taxpayers to ensure the president’s message saturates the daytime airwaves, grocery aisle rags, demographically desirable blogs and that twitters are at full tilt.  Or, is that twit?

The world hasn’t seen this much obsessive compulsive message control since the days of Joseph Goebbels. The verdict is out whether all this taxpayer expense is working.  After all, the president still enjoys an extended honeymoon with the media, and this kind of infrastructure would suggest he is not living in a fool’s paradise.  Let’s face it, right now the media sees a superstar who can fill a prime time special, sell magazines or drive web traffic — but that will change as his approval numbers continue to slide.  Certainly, many have suggested President Bush would have benefited from some juiced up spin control — but how much is too much?  Will ObamaWorld’s propaganda machine work when the honeymoon is over?

The report reveals that Obama has created a campaign-style war room to spin everything from health care to women’s basketball.  In campaigns, war rooms are funded by donors — in this case the donors are American taxpayers.

Coming soon from ObamaWorld — a carefully orchestrated series of health care town halls where questions will be filtered, camera angles will be directed and theatrical lighting carefully staged.  If all this sounds to you like an infomercial, that’s because it is!  Calling all celebrities — ObamaWorld wants you! They’ve already enlisted Ashton Kutcher to pitch HIV outreach (link http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24344.html). Who might be enlisted to help pitch health care — is the ShamWow guy available? (After all, government run health care might prove to be a Sham-Wow of epic proportions).

Of course, we need a good, honest health care debate; not policy infotainment. And we already fund a ‘town hall’ forum for discussion and debate — it’s called Congress.  In the end, is all this expensive message craft really necessary, especially at a time of economic recession?  The answer is up to us – after all, we will foot the multi-million dollar production bill.

Feeling rich?

I know this to be true. Being a news junkie myself, I have found time after time as I was reading about a supposedly breaking subject, like ABC’s recent coverage of the targeted LGBT murders in Iraq, that it had already been on display for all to see in Big Hollywood posts for months.

Not to toot my own horn, but…well, okay, I’m tooting my own horn. And those of Andy Breitbart and John Nolte, who have given I, and so many other wonderful and insightful Hollywood right-wing fringe types, a magnificent bullhorn we otherwise would not have. We appear to be doing the dirty jobs our media just refuses to do. It’s a labor Hercules would completely sympathize with.

Here are some prime examples.

THE OBAMAMEDIA: The British press, the UK Telegraph in particular, are VERY unhappy with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today. Seems Mr. Gibbs offended them beyond belief with this statement, in response to the British tabloids hammering the Obama Administration over the suppression of torture photos, a la the reviled BusHitler:

“Let’s just say if I wanted to look up, if I wanted to read a write-up of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I’d might open up a British newspaper,” (Gibbs) continued. “If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I’m not entirely sure it’d be the first pack of clips I’d pick up.”

The UK Telegraph found the irony of that statement delicious:

Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington.

Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.

Mates, you’re not telling Big Hollywood anything new. We reported that our Fourth Estate was now a Fourth Branch of Government a month ago. Of course, these UK complaints of Obamamedia malfeasance would hardly have been necessary were President Obama a Republican, which we here at BH also hypothesized in Alice In Wonderland fashion. Fact is, if Obama were a Michael Steele-like Republican POTUS, the US press would be all over him like white on rice. Can I say that?

Who’d a-thunk we and the British tabloids would ever be banding together and staging a revolt against the American government and its PRAVDA-like propaganda wing, the VSM? Strange days, indeed. I also find it incredibly ironic that, as President Obama goes out of his way to appease the Hilterite Islamist extremist regime in Iran, his administration lackeys, through pure idiocy, are marching us down the path to yet another war with the British. Not only that, just how bad is it when the British revolt against OUR tax policies? Sorry, but I’m with the Redcoats this time around.

OBAMA AND THE LEFT: On May 26th, US News and World Report opined on the dissatisfaction of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party with Obama’s Bush Lite policies. On May 24th, Gary LaMarche tried to quell the Leftie uprising against Obama with this HuffPo piece. However, if you read the comments, many Lefties aren’t biting. Sorry, Gary, the Kumbaya routine doesn’t work with tinfoils. Same at KOS, which is telling their readers to quit with the ‘Obama is a War Criminal’ crap.

Again, Big Hollywood beat all to the punch on May 23rd. We knew how much of a disappointment Obama was to the Left. It is, in fact, a complete train wreck of liberal politics, naive idealism and harsh realities. And we’re lovin’ it! Again, Big Hollywood is ahead of the curve.

OBAMA AND GAY RIGHTS: On May 23rd, the New York Times published Frank Rich’s OpEd ‘La Cage au Democrats’ in which he commiserated with gay rights advocates of how little support LGBTs were getting from the Obama White House. He closed it out with this stinging rebuke:

The gay civil rights movement has fewer obstacles in its path than did Dr. King’s Herculean mission to overthrow the singular legacy of slavery. That makes it all the more shameful that it has fewer courageous allies in Washington than King did. If “American Idol” can sing out for change on Fox in prime time, it ill becomes Obama, of all presidents, to remain mute in the White House.

Ouch! Dead Bullseye, Frank! Sorry to tell you, Mr. Rich, but you’re only splitting Big Hollywood’s arrow. BH contributor Charlie Winecoff covered this issue in-depth at Big Hollywood way back on March 19th in his ‘Love, War and Gay Marriage’ OpEd. He saw what was coming based on Obama’s own statements, positions and even associations with gay-haters like Farrakhan. On May 8th, we illustrated how even Ronald Reagan was a better friend to gays than Obama probably ever will be.

Double Ouch! Sorry, Frank. You guys at the Times have to keep pace better than that, or you just might find yourselves relegated to dinosaur status. Wait a minute…Oh, never mind.

LGBT MURDERS IN IRAQ: Yet another issue that is beginning to inflame American gay advocates, who are fast becoming infuriated at the brutal and systematic extermination of LGBTs in Iraq on our dime, sanctioned by both Supreme Leader Ali al-Sistani in his fatwa of death against Iraqi LGBTs and by the Iraqi government itself. Not only are LGBTs being slated for execution by al-Maliki’s government, the Interior Ministry police are raiding gay parties, hunting gays online, and either arresting them or killing them on the spot. Shiite gay death squads are now common in Baghdad.

News outlets such as ABC are finally beginning to cover this issue in-depth. Gay rights advocate Michael Petrelis of the Petrelis Files blog has long been on point on this issue, holding demonstrations and raising money for Iraqi gays. Though encouraged by the media attention this horrific plight of gays in Iraq is finally getting, he could not be more outraged by the willful ignorance of this issue by the White House, the State Department and his Congressional representative, none other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Though Mr. Petrelis was not entirely enamored of my Reagan/Obama piece on gay rights here at Big Hollywood (he called me a right wing blowhard on his blog), he does credit BH for addressing the issue as he wished so many others in the gay community and politics would, and praises our calling it for what it is: a gay holocaust. What else do you call a targeted extermination program?

That said, the Reagan piece was not the first BH OpEd to address the burgeoning problem of targeted gay murders in Iraq. That was highlighted in my very first piece for Big Hollywood, entitled ‘One Critic’s Review of Mr. Ganis Goes to Tehran’ way back on March 9th. It was, in fact, Team Oscar’s trip to gay-butchering Iran at that time, not five days after the gay-infomercial Oscars, that sent me into fireball mode and led me directly to BH in the first place.

Not only did that piece describe the longstanding gay holocaust in Iran, a de facto genocide of Iranian LGBTs, it exposed for all the world to see what a human rights sham AMPAS and so-called Hollywood gay rights champs like Sean Penn and Dustin Lance Black really are. Team Oscar member Annette Bening went so far as to praise women’s rights in Iran (an oxymoron if ever there was one), even as fellow American Roxana Saberi was being held hostage as a political pawn right across town in Evin prison. Need more be said?

Again, Big Hollywood was way ahead of the curve.

Speaking of which, the targeted killings of Iraqi LGBTs poses a very curious question. If Prop 8 opponents are so infuriated and outraged at the perceived abysmal gay rights situation in California, as these Tweeting celebrities at afterellen.com seem to be, and in which model/actress Adrianne Curry sarcastically retorted, “treating gays like they aren’t human is wonderful!” then where is the outrage over the hunting, torturing and extermination of gays in Iran and Iraq?

Where is the fury over gay men in Iraq having their anuses glued shut, and being forced to drink diarrhea cocktails that induce horrible suffering before death? Sounds like way less than human treatment to me, Adrianne. Where, oh where, is the outrage?

Just goes to show. Hollywood celebrities may not be gays rights advocates, but they play them on TV. And where else, but for a few lone gay blogs like the Petrelis Files, will you find this pressing issue covered in as much depth as here at Big Hollywood? Hmm. Curious.

TEAM OSCAR IN IRAN: Who else was covering Team Oscar in Iran like Big Hollywood? No one in the entertainment industry I could find. A few outraged conservatives, that’s about it. And it looked like AMPAS shut down all PR coverage of Team Oscar after the punking episode (a story lead I broke to Drudge and Nikki Finke, hee hee!), I had to get all my scoops from the Tehran Times and the Middle East press! This, for the most historic mission in Academy history! How sad is that?

Do any of you remember their grand Red Carpet heroes’ welcome at LAX? Me neither. Hell, they were so quiet about the trip, I though the Iranians were holding them hostage! I thought maybe they had taken me up on my offer to trade the Nine Stooges for Roxana Saberi. No such luck.

And show me anyone else in the media or entertainment rags who was pointing out that Iran’s film industry, which Academy prez Sid Ganis is still praising, spits out the worst anti-Semitic propaganda since Goebbels’ Reichministry. They’re marketing and exporting child martrdom cartoons like Hollywood does SpongeBob! Doing a bang-up business too, if you’ll pardon the pun.

THAT’S A WRAP! As a contributor I will do my best, as many other fine folks here at BH are doing, to keep you all up to date on the goings-on in Hollywood and elsewhere,  that you just won’t see covered in all too many other so-called media outlets. Considering how many pressing subjects the Obamamedia is dodging to keep Dear Leader spotlessly clean, that won’t be hard to do. The real problem will be deciding on which subjects the media isn’t covering to choose from.

As a BH fan and reader, I look very much forward to reading more of the great Greg G. spilling his guts, Charlie Winecoff’s unique perspectives on the issues of our day, John Nolte’s insightful and unbiased reviews of Hollywood films and TV shows past, present and future (as well as his calling the biased reviewers out for their politically-motivated hit pieces), interviews with outstanding Hollywood filmmakers you just won’t see in HR and Variety, and many other great contributors like Robert Davi, Bert Prelutsky, Andy Breitbart too numerous to mention here.

You want the real Hollywood scoop? You know where to come! Peace, all. I hope

From that point on, I was addicted. I couldn’t get enough of Peter Maas, Robin Moore, Woodward and Bernstein, Nick Pileggi, Ovid Demaris, James Bamford, James Michener, Cornelius Ryan, anything from the Ballantine Espionage/Intelligence Library, and too many others to list here.

I only recently read Michener’s The Bridge at Andau, an account of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising based on hundreds of eyewitness accounts, written in novelized form to protect identities at the time. It takes you right into the chaotic and revolutionary Bupapest of the day as though you were there.

Mr. Michener, who was living in Austria at the time, went to the nearby Hungarian border to conduct interviews among the hundreds of thousands fleeing the brutal Soviet backlash, which claimed the lives of 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops. The Bridge at Andau is a must-read that clearly illustrates the contrast and conflict between an oppressive Communist regime and its freedom-seeking people.

Many of the above authors’ works were serialized in the press, and stand as testaments to pure investigative journalism that always followed hot on the trail, no matter where that trail led. Stalwarts such as Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow risked life and limb to give Americans the real skinny on World War II, be it reporting from rooftops during the London Blitz, or from the beaches of the Pacific.

If you wanted to go all the way, you might even call Albert Speer’s Inside The Third Reich, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize-winning Gulag Archipelago masterpieces of eyewitness investigative journalism, though they are far more than that. These profound words from Mr. Solzhenitsyn, from his address to Harvard’s graduating Class of 1978, really jump out at me:

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit.

Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Those words could not sum up more my attitude to and perceptions of today’s Fourth Estate in America, and even the entire democratic Western press. It is like I married young and totally in love, only to watch as the years passed as my betrothed became bitter, polarized, angry and even a mortal enemy. I still remember the reasons I fell in love, but am now filing for divorce out of my own bitterness and remorse at how far a once-great love has descended into madness.

And it has been a long downward slide. I certainly know how John Nash’s wife felt now.

Pyle’s and Murrow’s war reporting was intelligent, gritty, unfiltered and unadulterated with propaganda. Unlike, say, Geraldo Rivera giving away our troops’ positions to the Iraqi army. Or TNR knowingly fabricating Nazi-like tales of American soldiers in the Iraq War.

Or anything on the Iraq War from Pinchy’s New York Times. This Times article is eerily reminiscent of DHS’ implication of veterans as prone to violence, though the numbers in fact prove the homicide rate is far lower for returning veterans than the general population. And they always throw in alcoholism on vet stories. It’s like there’s a left wing playbook somewhere. Hmm. Curious.

Even worse, I had to kick all their asses to start reporting on Roxana Saberi when everyone, and I mean everyone, the White House, State, Congress, the press, EVERYONE, pulled a major disappearing act on Roxana in early March. It’s like they were all trying to sweep the Obama bad press on Roxana under the rug.

By the way, my best piece on that subject is approaching 4000 hits. You tell ME who’s doing the reporting as a public service here! In fact, the only subject the MSM is even more silent on is Iran’s egregious human rights abuses. Bunch of hopeless dupes is what they are on Iran, just like Team Oscar and Sean Penn. I ask you. What good are they?

In short, ‘excellence in journalism’ today is less reflective of Murrow and Pyle than Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Frederick Foer. And why? Because like Fox Mulder in the X Files, all their editors Wanted To Believe, because those frauds and plagiarists wrote all the News To Print That Fits. When editors like the NYT’s Howell Raines get stories that line up neatly with their own left-wing tinfoil worldviews, who needs editorial oversight? Doesn’t exactly give me a tingle up my leg.

One could go back as far as the Vietnam War and the Big Three’s incessant campaign to ensure America’s loss in that war, turning even major battlefield victories into ignoble defeats. The Big Three are still at it even today, only now turning their cameras into swords to hack their fellow citizens, who peacefully protest against government policies with which the Big Three’s PRAVDA-like bureaucracies happen to vehemently agree. By the way, pravda in Russian means truth.

I don’t believe it necessary to rehash every propaganda lie spewing forth from today’s ‘Main Stream Media’. We are awash in them. Perhaps the seminal moment in American media today, in which the Fourth Estate shed all vestiges of objectivity and aligned itself ideologically to the Democratic Party lock, stock and barrel, occurred in 1998. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff was denied the scoop of a lifetime, because Newsweek’s propaganda chiefs buried his expose on President Clinton’s sordid affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Even today, Newsweek is still burying Isikoff’s scoops, as they did with this piece outlining senior Obama advisor David Axelrod’s extensive lobbyist connections, even as candidate Obama vowed that “lobbyists won’t work in my White House!” They also had no issue with David Axelrod, still an Obama kingpin, suggesting Tea Party protests could ‘mutate into something that’s unhealthy’ and are ‘peaceful so far,’ implying an underlying proclivity toward violence that has no basis in fact.

Even worse, Mr. Axelrod’s own left wing extremist viewpoint is now official government policy based on equating all conservatives, and even veterans returning from war, with Timothy McVeigh, much in the same manner Lefties condemn furiously when all Muslims are equated with Osama bin Laden. It is in fact blatant propaganda aimed at alienating and intimidating the minority party of dissent. Nothing less. And our so-called Mainstream Media is right there with him one hundred percent.

But what else would you expect from a de facto fourth branch of government? Or ‘news giants’ that even hold meetings to pressure their networks to lay off the President? Or fails to condemn Janeane Garofalo’s slandering of Tea Partiers as ‘racist teabagging rednecks’ based on journalistic standards? How sick and twisted a policy is THAT?

The really sad part is, that ideological rigidity is only the publicly visible tip of a very large iceberg into which MSM Titanic is sailing with reckless abandon. Actually, perhaps the Bismarck is a better analogy. That terror of the seas was once all powerful as well. It, too, was also sunk by its own crews on captain’s orders. And I couldn’t be happier to see all the MSM lifeboats being hoisted today, just as the Allies took a great deal of pleasure in watching the Bismarck fanatics take a dunk.

Since I was very young, I have been both fan and student of the methods and processes of intelligence gathering, propaganda, psy-ops and counter-intelligence, i.e. the Spy Game. Blame Ian Fleming. Even scored a 3.8 on the very tough officer-level Fundamentals of Naval Intelligence course, which the Navy graciously allowed me to take as an enlisted man.

I also spent a few years of my naval service during the Cold War listening to Radio Moscow, which often interrupted VOA broadcasts through jamming, which the USSR spent more money on at the time than we did on the entire VOA program. Even caught Radio Moscow’s coverage, if it can be called such, of the KAL 007 passenger airliner shootdown in 1983, which consisted of jamming VOA broadcasts for three days straight with silence, then spewing a series of heated accusations that KAL 007 was actually on a spy mission. They even pointed to the KAL flight number, 007, as proof.

The main point of my listing all my bona fides here is that I know propaganda when I see it. And boy, do I see it today. Too much of it! I believe today’s MSM would not look so much at that Soviet ‘reporting’, or even Orwell’s ‘1984′, less as examples of the worst form of propaganda and more as instruction guides. And they have learned well from their Soviet-era progenitors. Too well.

In fact, I really can’t tell which is the bigger lie from the infamous Olbermann-Garofalo hatefest: Garofalo’s rant that Tea Partiers are all ‘racist teabagging rednecks’, or Olbermann’s opening claim that Garofalo is ‘an actor and an activist’. Where is the evidence for any of those claims?

The big difference here, of course, it that Radio Moscow and PRAVDA were organs and extensions of the Soviet-era government masquerading itself as a free press. Actually, I take that back. No difference. But that is what happens when our so-called Fourth Estate abrogates its duty as an impartial, objective and investigative free press and becomes a fourth branch of government, slandering opposition candidates, even turning on its own citizens with unbridled contempt and sinister intent, in order to demonize huge swaths of the American electorate for political purposes.

We even have names now for these types of political manipulations by the press, so common are they. RatherGate, a blatant and clumsy attempt to influence an American presidential election with fake documents. Fauxtography, primarily used by the worldwide press to demonize Israel during their war with Hezbollah in 2006. When the press starts piling up colloquialisms for their blatantly fraudulent attempts to manipulate the news, you know we’re in trouble.

And now the four branches of government, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seek total and absolute media dominance with the Fairness Doctrine. Which of course, only would mean less Fairness and more Doctrine, and could even regulate web content. Just like Iran and China do.

What else can you call it but a Goebbels-like left wing power grab, when Rush and conservative talk radio is specifically targeted, yet NPR and Far Left TV news ‘reporting’ is considered so honest and grand it doesn’t require any intervention? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.

But all is not lost. It was the ‘pajamas media’ that ran Howell Raines out the Times’ door on a rail. Otherwise, he and Blair would probably still be there. And even though Newsweek buried the Isikoff scoop on Lewinsky, Matt Drudge picked up on it and set the bar for online journalism.

I remember reading somewhere, I believe either in Matt Drudge’s Drudge Manifesto or Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors, that White House operatives were refreshing the Drudge Report screen 3500 times an hour during the Lewinsky scandal. If our press functioned today as it should, the White House would have full-time crews doing the same for dozens of media outlets. Not really necessary when those same media outlets ARE your full-time crews.

Yet Americans are not as stupid as those in the MSM, America’s left-wing extremist Reichministry, would have you believe. In fact, it is the MSM’s own stupidity and unabashed bias which is now leading these media behemoths straight into the tarpits of history, not unlike those in La Brea which devoured the mammoths of old. And like those towering monstrosities, today’s versions stagger likewise into those tarpits, totally oblivious and self-blinded to the dangers their own clumsy and misdirected footsteps bring.

The Dead Tree Press is in fact today’s Petrified Forest. Though many claim the explosion in online journalism and fall in ad revenues is to blame, even the New York Times’ online version is as biased and partisan as the fishwrap edition, which explains their demise. Yet the New York Post and Daily News have actually seen increases in circulation, and USA Today is holding relatively steady.

The same is true for television. Though FOX News is roundly condemned as right wing by those who proselytize a left wing agenda, FOX is at least willing to brook opposing opinions. The puerile jolly teabag frat house jokesters of the MSM brook none. And that is why FOX is blowing them all out of the water. Who wants to watch a ‘news’ program when you already know what their ‘news’ is going to be, or whose ‘reporters’ insult the very viewers they seek to attract?

Predictably, members of Congress, spearheaded by Senator John Kerry, are even now looking at ways to bail out left wing propaganda organs like the Boston Globe, aka the New York Times Jr, and which may close its doors soon if a contract with union workers falls through. Celebs like Alec Baldwin are pleading to save the New York Times, which may bring added weight in Congress to that facetious argument.

Yet in reality, the only real political difference between a privately or publicly financed Globe or Times would be their source of income. In fact, government paychecks to the press would actually be more honestly reflective of their current ‘journalism’ status.

I say let them die. Pull the plug, even. They are dying for a reason. Put them, and all of us, out of our misery. And I’ll be damned if my tax dollars go to Pinchy so he can remain President Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s PRAVDA on my dime! On that note, here’s Congress. Let your representatives know how you feel about the government subsidizing their own private Reichministries with our tax dollars. And let then hear it on the Unfairness Doctrine, too.

I hope someday we see a real press that not only doesn’t serve as a fourth branch of government, but engages in the same old-school investigative journalism that should keep our government officials sitting on pins and needles. THAT is the function of a truly free, objective and impartial press, regardless of the ideological positions of the government in power.

Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath on that one. But I am withholding my dollars and viewership on the most egregious offenders. And I hope you do, too. Let the free market decide these modern-day dodo birds’ fates, and not our government and tax dollars. All bad things should come to an end.

Good Night and Good Luck.

AFTERWORD: One very pleasant surprise in modern-day reporting, and I never thought the day would come I would say this, is today’s Huffington Post. Granted, many of their pundits are as brain-dead as KOS, but their Iran coverage is phenomenal, perhaps the best out there. As a bonus, even many of their naively idealistic pundits are starting to realize Iran isn’t the Garden of Paradise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, AMPAS and Sean Penn would have us believe.

And I seriously doubt in HuffPo’s early days that you would have seen Op-eds like this one by Daniel Sinker: “When The Left Went Teabagging: As You Chuckle At The Right’s Newfound Activism, Don’t Forget That The Left Sucked Balls For Years.” Some are even criticizing President Obama!

Hope Springs Eternal.