It's very definitely been a bit of an ugly few days in the media.
For us, we began to notice something was wrong as we came back from a great weekend filled with great performances and great friends. First, light snow began to fall in both the midwest and DC regions - rarely a good sign in March.
Then we noticed a story from well-known author and generally respected journalist Greg Mitchell, originally commissioned by the Washington Post. Mitchell's piece of commentary was ultimately not printed by the Post, yet that omission by The Post's editors is actually a tacit example of what's wrong in our American media today.
Judged by their actions, most corporate media organizations don't really want to feed you the truth anymore. They'd rather toss out the truth in the trash, while feeding Americans fast food for the mind.
As Mitchell recounts on his own blog post, he was hired to write a story last week for The Washington Post, covering the failures of the media surrounding Iraq. When Mitchell submitted his piece, it was rejected, and in it's place, the Post used a piece that effectively absolved them of any role in advocating for the war in Iraq a decade ago.
Last week, none of the major media organizations solidly covered their own failures ten years ago in the run-up to the failure in Iraq. A few touched on it, at least one strongly - but almost no one seriously addressed their own failures - and why should they?
After all, so many are still getting away with misreporting or omitting the facts.
Just look at the dreck we gathered up from this weekend's headlines. One headline over the weekend in The Hill - supposedly the media organization of note on on Capitol Hill - - read "NRA gains upper hand on Obama." It didn't seem to matter to the writers at The Hill that everyone from CNN, to the New York Times, to Mother Jones (who broke the story on Romney's 47% comments last year) were carrying stories detailing how multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg is, in fact, committing millions to push gun safety legislation through Congress over the wishes of the NRA, as we detailed last week. Further, Bloomberg appears to be actually targeting pro-NRA politicians in swing states for the elections in 2014.
In what way does that give the NRA the upper hand over President Obama? It doesn't, except for - apparently - in the minds of the writers on-duty over the weekend at The Hill.
We're not even going to go into how many organizations jumped the gun Sunday night saying that Syrian President Assad had been killed.
With headlines and stories offering misleading and sometimes outright fictitious perspectives on national and world events from so many so-called "news" agencies, it's no wonder so many Americans are confused, angry, and turning away from news.
It doesn't help that even the annual "State of the Media" report from the supposedly unbiased Pew Center presented a completely biased falsehood as truth right at the top of this year's report - namely that opinionated news media isn't honest, and can’t be supported by facts.
We understand that being a part of the corporate-owned news-based media today involves selling catchy ideas to advertisers, which often aren’t bland, boring, pure facts. We just didn't think the corporate media had completely sold out the truth.
Obviously, in far too many cases today, we’re wrong, and the truth is ending up in the trash.
