Hey, you know who really likes communist dictators like Hugo Chavez?
Hey man, race you down the road to serfdom!
Remember, Obama had nothing helpful to say about pro-democracy protestors in Iran and Honduras. He seems to get along well with communists, theocrats, and fascists.
Police and supporters of President Hugo Chavez clashed with students in cities across the country Monday during protests over the government forcing an opposition channel off cable TV. Two youths were reported killed and 16 people suffered injuries.
[…]The biggest confrontation occured in Caracas, where police fired tear gas and plastic bullets to scatter thousands of students who tried to march on the headquarters of Venezuela’s state-run telecommunications agency. At least six demonstrators and a journalist were treated for injuries.
Diaz told the state-run ABN news agency that the shooting victim was a high school student named Jossimir Carrillo Torres. Nine police officers were injured in the melee, El Aissami said.
Demonstrations erupted over the government ordering cable companies to drop Radio Caracas Television Internacional early Sunday. RCTV had defied new rules requiring local cable channels to carry mandatory programming, including some of Chavez’s speeches.
Police fired tear gas as protesting students tried to approach the headquarters of the state telecommunications agency, where several hud minor injures or breathing problems from tear gas during Monday protest in the capital, said Enrique Montbrun, director of health services in the capital’s Baruta district. Caracas Police Chief Carlos Meza said a government supporter was hurt when hit in the face with a bottle or rock. A journalist working for AP Television News suffered minor head injuries from a hurled object.
Press freedom organizations and Roman Catholic leaders condemned RCTV’s removal from cable, calling it part of a broader effort to mute government critics.
It’s the standard development of communism, right before your eyes. This is how it happened in Cuba, North Korea, and everywhere else where a charismatic leader tricked the people into thinking that stolen bread from their neighbor tastes sweeter than bread bought with money earned from the sweat of their own brow. This is the way communism has always worked. Educate the masses into imbecility with slogans like “no blood for oil” and “tax cuts for the rich” and “save the planet”, then step in and take control of private industry. Thus, the free market dies, and freedom of choice dies with it.
Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez
Hey, you know who really likes communist dictators like Hugo Chavez?
Hey man, race you down the road to serfdom!
Remember, Obama had nothing helpful to say about pro-democracy protestors in Iran and Honduras. He seems to get along well with communists, theocrats, and fascists.
First, he talks about different journalists are from the rest of America:
The modern secular newsroom lacks the ideological know-how to truly understand religion. Perhaps Terry Mattingly best exlplained the media’s “diversity problem”. According to Mattingly, “While there’s been heavy gender and racial diversity … there’s a lack of cultural diversity in journalism…” It is this lack of diversity that leads to major misconceptions and the media’s inability to adequately tell stories that are rooted, themselves, in religious themes.
The lack of diversity may lie in the journalists themselves, as personal faith plays a role in the ability to understand and thus illustrate religious themes. Just how religious are journalists? According to USA Today, “the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported in 2007 that 8% of journalists surveyed at national media outlets said they attended church or synagogue weekly.” Additionally, 29% reported never attending church services, with an additional 39% stating that they go a few times each year. In sum: Not very religious – especially when compared to America as a whole.
Later on, he talks about how rigid conformity to secular presuppositions creates bias:
In covering the American Religious Identification Survey that was conducted in March 2009, the Pew Research Center wrote,
“A comment on the blog Matters of Faith declared, “The media’s tendency to give inordinate attention to religious dimwits and crackpots has seriously damaged the credibility of religious leaders. You rarely read or hear of the miraculously generous work of faith communities in caring for the poor and infirm around the globe. But let someone suggest that the Virgin Mary has appeared in a plate of refried beans and the bulletins circle the globe in minutes.”
This commentary targets one of the media’s main malfunctions when it comes to covering religion in general and Christianity in particular. As is the case with most stories covered by the mainstream media, the more outlandish, the more the story is pursued. In practice, this creates a climate of coverage strewn with the “dimwits and crackpots” mentioned above, as journalists lack the understanding or desire to seek a wide array of theological viewpoints. Meanwhile, thousands of Christian missionaries risk their lives both domestically and internationally to make lasting spiritual and physical change in the lives of those in need. Yet their stories go widely unnoticed.
Here is an example of news coverage that you will never see in the mainstream news.
The secular leftist media will run stories about Sarah Palin’s children, and the Duke Lacrosse non-rape, because even though the stories later turn out to be fraudulent, they want to send the right message. They view their work as propaganda designed to effect political change. And I think it is sometimes useful to reflect on the story in the video above and ask why such stories are not covered. And the answer is because the media doesn’t tell people about news that doesn’t fit their rigid ideological stereotypes.
I was chatting with ECM about this post, and he informed me about The New Yorker’s movie critic Pauline Kael, who was surprised by Republicans’ 49-state landslide victory in the 1972 federal election.
She said:
“How could that be? I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.”
And that’s the news media today. They are not informed about views different from their own. They do not question their own fundamentalist assumptions by seeking out debates. Everything they need to know about religious people they learned from watching “Inherit the Wind” and “Jesus Camp” and such propaganda that allows them to demonize anyone who disagrees with their worldview. You would think that their ignorance of the best arguments on the other side would make them cautious, but it doesn’t.
WINTERY KNIGHT 