Good News is No News

Until about a year ago, one couldn’t turn on the news without hearing something about the Iraq War. If it wasn’t a diatribe about how badly things are going, it was about how incompetent our leaders are.

Indeed, when President Bush announced the ’surge strategy’ last year, MSNBC ran the story under the headline graphic, “Lost Cause?”

Current presidential candidates Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton couldn’t stop talking about it.
Obama called it “wrong-headed” and countered with a proposal to pull nearly all U.S. troops out of Iraq by March 2008. Senator Clinton came back from a quick trip to Iraq to declare: “I am opposed to this escalation.”

From the second the troop surge was announced, the mainstream media began its death watch, breathlessly reporting every casualty in the context of the “President’s failed surge strategy in Iraq.”

Soon, the mainstream media found it more and more difficult to ignore the reduction in attacks –down 80% — against US forces.

Iraqi military and civilian deaths are down more than two thirds, with the US military reporting similar reductions among its forces.

The Media Research Center analyzed the network coverage of the Iraq War over the period from the beginning of the surge in January 07 through to January of this year.
An accompanying chart showed that the mainstream media’s coverage of the war spiked whenever the news was bad. When the news was good, the media ignored it.

In January 07, according to MRC, the MSN ran an average of 270 stories highlighting the violence in Iraq.

As of January 08, with violence down by several orders of magnitude, there were fewer than 25, on average.

MRC also noted that the majority of the coverage were in the form of news briefs, rather than in-depth reporting from the field.

As Tim Russert noted in a rare moment of candor on MSNBC Nighty News in December; “with the surge in Iraq and the level of American deaths declining, it is off the front pages.”

For the liberal mainstream media, when it comes to America’s successes, good news is no news.
Assessment:

The general public MUST be aware, at this late date, that there is no such thing as an unbiased news report.

If anybody has lingering doubts, recall the NYTimes hit piece on John McCain a couple of weeks back alleging, without any evidence whatever, that he once had an affair with a lobbyist.
The story was so flawed that very few other media outlets would even touch it. Dispelling any further doubt, disgraced CBS anchorman Dan Rather called the story ‘a magnificent piece of journalism’.

It is hard to imagine that there remains anyone in America who would even buy the New York Times, let alone quote it.

Yet it remains America’s ‘Newspaper of Record’ for reasons that defy logical explanation.
And when the NYTimes can’t find a reason to bash the United States, it can always turn its attention toward Israel.

The Times’ sent Dan Erlanger to cover the Israeli operations in Gaza against Hamas in late February.

Erlanger referred to the “48-hour Israeli military incursion” . . “which killed nearly 100 Palestinians,” and said “residents here were horrified by the numbers of civilians they believed had died….”

But the Times didn’t find the fact that among the Palestinians ‘civilians’ killed were military personnel from Syria, Lebanon and Iran sent to Gaza to train Hamas’ rocketeers worthy of mention, so we’ll mention it here.

The foreign operatives were killed when an Israeli helicopter hit a truck transporting a cargo of over 100 missiles intended for strikes against Israeli cities and towns.

Erlanger’s piece supports Gazan ‘resistance’ to ‘Israeli occupation’ — let’s stop right there.
Israel withdrew from Gaza a couple of years ago. There is no permanent Israeli presence in Gaza — indeed, there isn’t a single Jew still living inside its borders. Gaza has been as ethnically cleansed of Jews as was any city in 1940’s Germany.

So, what ‘occupation’ are the citizens of Gaza ‘resisting’? Readers of the New York Times evidently don’t need to know the answers to those questions.

It is enough that the Gazans are ‘resisting’ the ‘occupation’ — there is no point in highlighting the fact Hamas is resisting Israel’s occupation of — Israel.

The point isn’t the New York Times — it is merely an example of the point we’re trying to make.
One needn’t be a news junkie or a rocket scientist to see the bias inherent in the mainstream media. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine that anybody could be so thick as to miss it. Which only leads to one possible conclusion; it doesn’t really matter.

The public seeks out the news that it wants to hear. Whether or not it is true is irrelevant. If somebody wants to believe John McCain is just another politician, then the Times’ story is accurate. Period.

If somebody wants to believe that Barak Obama is a different kind of politician, then they won’t read stories about Obama and Tony Rezko.

In fact, one has to dig pretty deep in order to find out that Rezko was born in Syria, let alone his connections to Barak Obama.

Tony Rezko is on trial in Chicago in federal court on corruption charges. Obama is tied to Rezko through a shady real estate deal.

Since Obama is running on a platform of ‘change’ as a new kind of Democratic ‘reformer’, one would think that would be headline news, no?

Well, no.

Noted MRC, “A Nexis search through February 2008 finds Time magazine has never mentioned Tony Rezko, despite several soaring cover stories on Obama. U.S News & World Report noted it once, briefly (September 24, 2007).

Newsweek disposed of the smelly land deal in one paragraph – paragraph 20 – in a January 31, 2008 story that actually touted Obama as a reformer.”

MRC also noted that ABC refused to touch it, CBS mentioned it only once in passing, while NBC did just one story on it.

According to Bible prophecy, the antichrist rises to power, not as the result of conquest, but rather, through his ability to deceive. John pictures the Rider on the White Horse as carrying a bow, but no arrows. (Revelation 6:2)

The Apostle Paul says that the antichrist rises to power on the strength of a ’strong delusion’ that Paul says the public embraces, “because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.” (2nd Thessalonians 2:10)

Deception is the hallmark of the last days. Paul warns that ‘evil men and seducers will wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.” (2nd Timothy 3:13)

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” (2nd Timothy 4:3-4)

In this generation, truth is not what is accurate, but rather, truth is what people prefer to believe is true. Indeed, they will knowingly and deliberately seek out a version of truth that suits them.

If that were not true, then Fox wouldn’t have a reputation for leaning conservative and CNN wouldn’t have a reputation for leaning liberal.

Moreover, we are happy to have the ability to choose which flavor of lies we prefer. The conditioning process is complete. The infrastructure of deception is now an acceptable and necessary part of our culture.

And nobody really seems to mind.

This is not telling us Obama is the anti-Christ or we are in the end days, but it is telling us we are willing to be deceived and that, my friends, is part of end times prophecy.

How long that takes only God knows as a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day to Him.

I do believe the end is near for the Church, the body of believers and we will be removed from earth by Jesus Himself. Many others dispute this idea and they may be right too. Either way, it doesn’t affect our salvation.