Is the Mainstream Media a Propaganda Machine?

“IDEAS OR STATEMENTS THAT ARE OFTEN FALSE OR EXAGGERATED AND THAT ARE SPREAD IN ORDER TO HELP A CAUSE, A POLITICAL LEADER, OR GOVERNMENT”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Sep. 8, 2016) — Early on Thursday afternoon, the Yahoo! News home page was replete with articles, many of which are editorials, consistently criticizing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, while Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s questionable association with the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State, use of a private email server over which she sent and received classified information about which she has issued contradictory statements, and the ongoing probe by Judicial Watch and the U.S. Department of Justice of relevant Foundation emails received no mention.

On Tuesday, fresh allegations arose, based on newly-released emails, that Clinton’s staff “stage-managed” the questions he would be presented at a Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on the Benghazi, Libya terrorist attack. That revelation appears to have drawn little attention from the mainstream media, which supplies its articles to Yahoo!.

In contrast, an article written by Jonathan Allen at left-leaning Vox contends on Thursday that Clinton is being persecuted by the press and a “vast, right-wing conspiracy,” using a phrase which Clinton herself made famous when her husband was president, particularly during his second term when he was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives.

As of 1:10 PM EDT on Thursday, Yahoo’s top story in its revolving window was titled, “Trump’s actions after briefing ‘concerning,'” a claim that was not a news report but rather, an opinion emanating from Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, in an interview with former Clinton White House aide and current “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos.

ABC News similarly reported independently that “Donald Trump hinted about what he learned in a classified intelligence briefing during a televised forum with members of the military and veterans Wednesday night.”  While not discussing the “information that he learned in the briefing,” as Mook had claimed, Trump had said that the briefings revealed that Obama had not followed the advice of his military commanders in regard to the threat and growth of ISIS, a barbaric Islamic terrorist group which began gaining momentum early in 2014.

The deduction that Obama did not follow his generals’ advice could reasonably have been made following  reports a year ago stating that the Pentagon “cooked the books” on ISIS intelligence so as to present a more positive impression to the American people than that which was actually transpiring in the Middle East.

A year prior, CBS News had quoted Obama as having said that he “acknowledged that the U.S. underestimated the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also called ISIL) and overestimated the ability of the Iraqi military to fend off the militant group.”

As an ancillary story to the first two at ABC, a local North Carolina ABC News correspondent reported that Trump “openly discussed the classified briefing” without mentioning that members of Congress have called for an investigation into whether or not Clinton committed perjury when she told Congress that she did not send or receive classified information over her private email server and that she had turned over all relevant emails. FBI Director James Comey subsequently testified differently.

Obama’s most recent claim made from overseas that Trump is unqualified to serve as president and commander-in-chief was a featured story at Yahoo! on Thursday.  In an ironic twist from the past in what was largely ridiculed by the mainstream media, Trump had questioned Obama’s qualifications based on his failure to release a “long-form” birth certificate proving that he was born in the United States, as he claimed.

Stephanopoulos’s interview with Mook yielded a continuously-playing video in the lower-right corner of the ABC News page about Trump featuring his foray into “birtherism,” the fact that he has been married three times, and that he owns a hotel in close proximity to the White House.  In an interview reprised on Wednesday between Trump and ABC’s Jonathan Karl from an unidentified time but perhaps prior to the 2016 presidential primaries, Trump is heard to say that he “didn’t know” where Obama was born.  Karl had challenged Trump whether or not he could be “taken seriously” for having doubted the authenticity of the birth certificate image.

A criminal investigation had, in fact, revealed in March 2012 that the long-form birth certificate image posted on the White House website on April 27, 2011 purported to be Obama’s is a “computer-generated forgery.”  While the media reported the conclusions of the Maricopa County, AZ Cold Case Posse online, it was not broadcast on television, nor were independent investigations launched.

Under the “Politics” heading at Yahoo!, the first article at one point appeared as “Trump’s Shrinking Swing State Map.” Farther down the page was an article by The Washington Post titled “Trump Voters Should Be Held Accountable” which opens with “Donald Trump for more than a year has pitched his loathsome message to the voters’ worst instincts (bigotry, resentment) in the most vulgar terms we have witnessed in a presidential election in at least a century. He mocks the disabled. He ridicules women’s physical appearance. (First, he insulted Carly Fiorina’s face, now he says Hillary Clinton does not “look” presidential. Someone should ask what he means.) He threatens and extols violence…”

As of 1:40 p.m. EDT, a refreshing of the Yahoo! News page revealed a new article titled, “Vladimir Putin may not want Donald Trump in White House, professor says” by CNBC, a subsidiary of NBC News.

In contrast, a title appearing lower on the page read, “Rep. Louie Gohmert: Clinton’s ‘Brain in a Blender’ on Iran, Emails” properly attributing the quote to its source.

However, an inset between the two appeared as: