Victor Sharpe
America's Fourth Estate has become America's Fifth Column
By Victor Sharpe
At one time, perhaps before the Vietnam War, the media was considered a respectable and trusted purveyor of objective news. But for too long much of the mainstream media in America has shed that belief and become instead organs of state propaganda.
The dread examples of such disinformation as was seen in the Fascist, Nazi, and Communist authoritarian regimes has, it now seems, increasingly polluted our own mainstream media (MSM).
The general election has exposed the alphabet houses – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN as no better than unapologetic shills for the Democrat party and for the Clinton machine. Newspapers share the same guilt with the New York Times and the Washington Post leading the baleful and deplorable charge.
It was President Thomas Jefferson who presciently saw the peril a future America might face in what has now become its present demise of a free and vital press when he said: "If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter."
We have seen the dismal and bleak spectacle of an endless procession of print and broadcasting reporters, journalists and talking heads taking unabashed leftwing, pro-Obama and pro-Clinton positions to the point of dropping all pretense at objectivity or impartiality.
In that same 18th century, when Jefferson uttered his warning about the press, Edmund Burke in England looked at what he called the three estates within the British political system. He saw the King, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. However pre-eminent above them all was the press, which he called the Fourth Estate.
As for the term, Fifth Column, it of course refers to the time of the Spanish Civil War when Franco's four military columns were approaching besieged Madrid. But there was a fifth column secretly ensconced within the city itself.
On October 14th, 1936, the Fitchburg Sentinel newspaper reported that:
"Out of hiding came a few of the phantom fifth column, which was the Fascist auxiliary force so dreaded by the Spanish loyalists."
Indeed, Ernest Hemingway in 1937 wrote a play called "The Fifth Column." The term is now used to mean traitor or spy. Cicero, the Roman senator and famous orator, also warned against the traitor within the gate who is more dangerous than a foreign enemy – http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/33210-a-nation-can-survive-its-fools-and-even-the-ambitious.
Briefly I see three triggers that has led us to the present untenable predicament. The first was during the Vietnam War when the Vietnamese Communist General Giap masterfully manipulated the American press to act against its own country during a time of war thus breaking a long standing taboo, turning much of the media into a veritable fifth column and opening a ghastly Pandora's box.
The second trigger was Watergate when the press began to operate against the establishment in ways which harmed the very nation state.
Third trigger was the election in 2,000 when liberals and the Left erupted over what they considered a stolen election and defeat of Al Gore by the hated President Bush. Remember the Democrat frenzy and the hanging chads?
This perhaps more than anything else drove the Democrat Party and its allies in the media to do all in their power to attack and demonize any Republican and Conservative president and administration, even to the extent of lurching so far left that they are now willing to appoint as head of the Democrat Party a known rabid Islamist and hater of the United States – Keith Ellison.
Whilst still a law student in 1989, Ellison allegedly penned two columns for the Minnesota Daily under the name, Keith Hakim, in which he defended the anti-American Nation of Islam and its spokesman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad. He also called for reparations for slavery and demanded a separate homeland for American blacks. He has more recently allegedly called for the elimination of the Second Amendment.
The last eight malevolent years of the Obama administration – during which Mr. Obama reduced our military, our intelligence capabilities and our influence abroad to such a degree that we are no longer able to influence the world's important events – also revealed how his willing and captive media became a menacing device of government manipulation and indoctrination.
If a government co-opts the press to do its bidding and that same press becomes a propaganda organ for the regime, we are in desperate danger.
People now find it harder and harder to obtain unfiltered news that is not editorialized by political partisan mandarins posturing on TV screens or in the pages of once respectable newspapers? Perhaps Jefferson and Burke knew that once upon that slippery slope it led to the abyss into which nation states fall, embrace tyranny and ultimately perish.
The hope remains that the Far Left Democrat party with its willing executioners in the MSM and its insane alliance with anti-American Islamists such as Keith Ellison will, by their very own hateful acts, self-destruct by alienating an increasing majority of Americans.
The hope also remains that a President Trump will indeed "drain the swamp," end the rampant corruption that assails the nation state, and allow truly principled journalists and reporters to rebuild the shattered fourth estate free of government manipulation and indoctrination so that it no longer acts as a fifth column.
© Victor Sharpe
November 22, 2016
At one time, perhaps before the Vietnam War, the media was considered a respectable and trusted purveyor of objective news. But for too long much of the mainstream media in America has shed that belief and become instead organs of state propaganda.
The dread examples of such disinformation as was seen in the Fascist, Nazi, and Communist authoritarian regimes has, it now seems, increasingly polluted our own mainstream media (MSM).
The general election has exposed the alphabet houses – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN as no better than unapologetic shills for the Democrat party and for the Clinton machine. Newspapers share the same guilt with the New York Times and the Washington Post leading the baleful and deplorable charge.
It was President Thomas Jefferson who presciently saw the peril a future America might face in what has now become its present demise of a free and vital press when he said: "If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter."
We have seen the dismal and bleak spectacle of an endless procession of print and broadcasting reporters, journalists and talking heads taking unabashed leftwing, pro-Obama and pro-Clinton positions to the point of dropping all pretense at objectivity or impartiality.
In that same 18th century, when Jefferson uttered his warning about the press, Edmund Burke in England looked at what he called the three estates within the British political system. He saw the King, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. However pre-eminent above them all was the press, which he called the Fourth Estate.
As for the term, Fifth Column, it of course refers to the time of the Spanish Civil War when Franco's four military columns were approaching besieged Madrid. But there was a fifth column secretly ensconced within the city itself.
On October 14th, 1936, the Fitchburg Sentinel newspaper reported that:
"Out of hiding came a few of the phantom fifth column, which was the Fascist auxiliary force so dreaded by the Spanish loyalists."
Indeed, Ernest Hemingway in 1937 wrote a play called "The Fifth Column." The term is now used to mean traitor or spy. Cicero, the Roman senator and famous orator, also warned against the traitor within the gate who is more dangerous than a foreign enemy – http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/33210-a-nation-can-survive-its-fools-and-even-the-ambitious.
Briefly I see three triggers that has led us to the present untenable predicament. The first was during the Vietnam War when the Vietnamese Communist General Giap masterfully manipulated the American press to act against its own country during a time of war thus breaking a long standing taboo, turning much of the media into a veritable fifth column and opening a ghastly Pandora's box.
The second trigger was Watergate when the press began to operate against the establishment in ways which harmed the very nation state.
Third trigger was the election in 2,000 when liberals and the Left erupted over what they considered a stolen election and defeat of Al Gore by the hated President Bush. Remember the Democrat frenzy and the hanging chads?
This perhaps more than anything else drove the Democrat Party and its allies in the media to do all in their power to attack and demonize any Republican and Conservative president and administration, even to the extent of lurching so far left that they are now willing to appoint as head of the Democrat Party a known rabid Islamist and hater of the United States – Keith Ellison.
Whilst still a law student in 1989, Ellison allegedly penned two columns for the Minnesota Daily under the name, Keith Hakim, in which he defended the anti-American Nation of Islam and its spokesman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad. He also called for reparations for slavery and demanded a separate homeland for American blacks. He has more recently allegedly called for the elimination of the Second Amendment.
The last eight malevolent years of the Obama administration – during which Mr. Obama reduced our military, our intelligence capabilities and our influence abroad to such a degree that we are no longer able to influence the world's important events – also revealed how his willing and captive media became a menacing device of government manipulation and indoctrination.
If a government co-opts the press to do its bidding and that same press becomes a propaganda organ for the regime, we are in desperate danger.
People now find it harder and harder to obtain unfiltered news that is not editorialized by political partisan mandarins posturing on TV screens or in the pages of once respectable newspapers? Perhaps Jefferson and Burke knew that once upon that slippery slope it led to the abyss into which nation states fall, embrace tyranny and ultimately perish.
The hope remains that the Far Left Democrat party with its willing executioners in the MSM and its insane alliance with anti-American Islamists such as Keith Ellison will, by their very own hateful acts, self-destruct by alienating an increasing majority of Americans.
The hope also remains that a President Trump will indeed "drain the swamp," end the rampant corruption that assails the nation state, and allow truly principled journalists and reporters to rebuild the shattered fourth estate free of government manipulation and indoctrination so that it no longer acts as a fifth column.
© Victor Sharpe
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