US News and World Report published an article today with this headline: Fred Barnes Wants Conservatives to Infiltrate Left Wing Media.
Barnes is the executive editor of the conservative Weekly Standard. He is also a featured pundit on Fox News. The surprising thing about the headline above is not what Barnes is proposing. That has been going on for decades. The surprising thing is that he is admitting it in public. The occasion was a swanky dinner in his honor hosted by the uber-rightist American Spectator Magazine. Barnes delivered an address that was remarkably candid with regard to his aspirations for spreading conservative dogma. There is already ample evidence of the right’s efforts to “infiltrate” the press, and Barnes helpfully makes that very point in his speech:
“Conservatives dominate talk radio; we do awfully well in magazines, with the American Spectator, Weekly Standard, National Review, and many others, and actually there is probably room for a lot more. With Fox News we do pretty well on television. Fox News really has a tremendous influence.”
So why is Barnes complaining when he already knows how much conservatives have come to monopolize the media? What more does he want? I’ll let him tell you:
“What we need to do right now is dedicate ourselves to expanding our influence and not just sitting back and complaining about the mainstream media, but infiltrating them, overtaking them and changing the American media.”
Barnes goes on to note that there is a lot of money available to right-wingers to start more magazines, buy TV networks, etc. Apparently controlling the bulk of the print, radio and TV news business isn’t enough. He wants all of it.
But the worst part of this is that he is advocating the formation of an army of young reporters to surreptitiously sneak into legitimate news enterprises and misrepresent themselves in order to plant their disinformation from within. It is a strikingly unethical proposal whose only purpose is to taint the practice of journalism and advance his own weaselly agenda. And the fact that he is comfortable announcing such a scheme in public says a lot about the shamelessness of the rightist movement.
where do you people come from? i think there must be an unwritten
rule that states if its not based on truth and there is no logic or reason to it a bunch of people will rise to support it.
what ever happened to the concept that individual americans will actually think and research for themselves instead of being the willing parrots of whatever is happening. the american people
are doomed by their own incesant desire to prove they have no intelligence. — manipulated by the media.— not doing their own thinking. — not looking over the tops of their safe little walls.
better dead than stupid
If you have to lie to advance your agenda…
Haven’t they already infiltrated the legitimate(mainstream)media? Fox”News” already passes itself off as a legitimate “News” outlet, and the actual legitimate News organizations didn’t confront that false narrative, and as a result there are a vast number of Americans who think they are a ligitimate “News” organization.
They’ve already infiltrated ABC, NBC, CBS, the wire services, NYTimes, WashPost, LATimes, Chicago Trib, etc…
Just because Bill O’Reilly pretends like he doesn’t know the difference between “News” and “partisan commentary” doesn’t mean that we should be forced to pretend we don’t know the difference.
This is the exact reason why media should not make money or be run like a business, it’s corrupting. Bigger problem is what takes the place of that model.
The problem isn’t that media makes money. It’s when the money means more than the mission. That’s why commercial media should have vibrant public media competition to keep them honest.