Dateline – Pittsburgh, Oct. 13, 2016: President Barack Obama denounces America's "wild, wild west" media environment for allowing conspiracy theorists a broad platform and destroying a common basis for debate.
Recalling past days when three television channels delivered fact-based news that most people trusted, Obama said democracy requires citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions.
"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.
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"There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world," Obama added.
TRENDING: Raison d'être
Are you having an unpleasant flashback yet?
It was a presidential election year, and Obama was not happy with what was happening. Perhaps he sensed, before many of his allies, that the 2016 campaign was not going quite like he expected.
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By the way, if the Russians were turning the tide in this election, who was in charge? That's right. Barack Obama was in charge. Obama wasn't blaming the Russians for anything. He was blaming the independent media. Something had to be done about the fact that more than one "reality" was getting out there. The media were no longer in lockstep as they were when he was a child – with three news presentations to choose from.
If you doubt what I am saying, consider the way Agence France Presse explained the backdrop for what Obama was saying: "His remarks came amid an election campaign that has seen Republican candidate Donald Trump repeat ideas and take on key staff from right-wing media outlets."
What Obama was calling for, and what even I couldn't have imagined in my worst nightmare, would be the case 16 months later; he got his way. He had given the cue to his friends in the Digital Cabal: It's time to unlevel the playing field.
That's what we saw happen in the aftermath of the swearing in of Donald Trump as president. In the euphoria of that victory, we in the independent media could not perceived what was underway – a kind of media coup was taking place. The Googles and the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world took control of the digital domain. They began throwing their monetary and corporate power around to deliver Obama's legacy – the end of the free press in America.
These powerful, all-knowing, all-powerful ideological thugs began a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners war on the independent media.
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Perhaps the most important way they did that was by embedding left-wing extremists as rule-makers and gatekeepers, the speech-code cops of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to determine what is real news and what is fake news. It is nothing short of political censorship come to America.
I have been quite open about the development's impact on WND over the last several months. It has been hell. We played by the rules set by our opponents, and we won. But, when we won, the rules began changing. As soon as we figured out the new rules, they changed again – and again, and again, and again.
The goal is nothing short of driving the independent media into extinction. This was what Obama was talking about. As we laughed about the kind of tyranny he disguised in the name of "democracy," he was serious. And those who had the power to institute this diabolical plan to end freedom of the press in America without a constitutional amendment – the Digital Cabal – went about the business of doing so.
I won't go into all the ways they have done it. But they did it. And all of my colleagues in the independent media know this, though they are not yet all admitting it. They are certainly not taking the sage advice of Benjamin Franklin who said famously: "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
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Is it too late to save free speech and the free press in America?
No, it is not. But the hour is late. Time is short.
But, if this silent coup is not challenged by the people in power today – the people whom we elected in a free, fair and open election – the results of the 2018 election will be a disaster for America. And then, it may be too late to preserve free, fair and open debate in America.
If what I am telling you here resonates, here's what you can do:
- Support the independent media with your financial contributions as we face perhaps the biggest challenge we have endured in more than 20 years.
- Alert those you elected to control the White House and the Congress in 2016 to the war declared by these monopoly corporations on the independent media and free speech in general.
Those are the stakes. Don't you understand?
For further reading on this subject, I recommend the following:
