Blind Willie McTell News - 2

The Exceptional Press

Yesterday, the following was written at the end of that post: "This whining by the Establishment Media is unavailing since they are silent when those things happen regularly to the 99% of us whom their 1% puppeteers are constantly abusing." (The IRS As A Political Weapon - 2).

That quote of course was in reference to the media's feigned outrage, over the past few days, at several IRS employees.

As it turns out, there were some IRS employees who were stressing out several right wing neoCon swift-boat type sites.

Those sites tend to masquerade as "social welfare" organizations which those IRS employees --by asking too many questions could expose --especially questions about what those applicant's "social practices" really are (for which they want to pay no taxes).

On another front, the same thing can be said about main stream media attitudes concerning the DOJ seizure of lots of Associated Press (AP) telephone records.

In fact, a journalist has come out and said as much:

There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are.

(Guardian). Indeed, when it is McTell News that is being assailed then the infraction is the most grave of civil rights violations.

However, when it is "only a common citizen" such as you or I, who is being assailed -- well that is no civil rights biggie:

For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his

McTell It Like It Is

treatment as "cruel and inhuman".

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration's true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as "regular Americans". Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman - once the most vocal defender of Bush's vast warrantless eavesdropping programs - suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

(ibid, Guardian). The elitist mentality corrupts institutions of government when the common citizen is not the focus of their professionalism, but instead they are self-serving.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Like a Rolling Stone?

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