Bottom Liners by Eric and Bill Teitelbaum for November 17, 2023

The so-called ‘Main Stream Media’ is a myth fabricated by the conservative right-wing. The truth is that they compete with each other for the story, try to get the scoop before the others, and have for well over 150 years. Newspapers, radio, TV and now Social media, they do not cooperate with each other but do compete. You can bet that if there was a hole in a New York Times story, the Washington Post would be leading the pack to break that story. Is the media perfect? No. They make mistakes just as any human endeavor does. But the “MSM” does make every effort to get it right, to verify the facts, to be accurate. And if a mistake is made they issue a retraction. MSNBC gives breaking news, sites it’s sources and qualifies the source as verified yet or not, and by who, whether it is NBC, ABC, CBS, NY Times, WP or any of the foreign media. I like to verify their reporting using Reuters, the BBC and other foreign news sources.

FOX ‘news’ does not compete. They are incapable of competing, and chose to take the ‘sensational’ reporting route. FOX ‘news’ targeted the National Enquirer crowd, the grocery store tabloid junkies. Conspiracy theories are not new with social media, those super market rags have done it for decades. Those who grew up reading mommy’s Enquirer were all too primed and ready for FOX ‘news’. FOX ‘news’ has no journalists on staff, the last having left over a year ago. Their talking heads are commentators, and call themselves “entertainers” when pressed and under oath in court. And keep in mind that FOX ‘news’ used the 1st Amendment in a court of law as their defense of lying to the public, and they won. Our 1st Amendment right does indeed protect the right to lie. So when they trot out that old and fabricated tale of their birth and beginnings, about offering an alternative the ‘left wing MSM’, it’s just another lie. All they really did was to take Rupert Murdoch’s grocery store sensation tabloid to TV.