New American Journal graphic by Evan Riddle

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS, Md. – What a world.

It may be the perspective of getting out of Washington and hanging out in the mountain woods, but I’m having a hard time remembering a time quite like this.

It’s not hard to appreciate that people are mad at CNN for the way they handled the Biden-Trump, uh, “debate,” if you can even call it that. By all means, drop your subscriptions to cable because of it. It’s a bad deal anyway.

We did that a long time ago, when it became obvious that cable is over priced for what you get, you still have to endure ads even when the promise of pay TV was no ads, and every breaking news story tossed up onto the screen is wrong on the face of it. They may get some things right after an hour or so, when an actual reporter has time to investigate and write a story the talking heads can read on the wires or on their tele-prompters. Everything else is speculation and opinion “talk,” not news. It’s just talk radio with pictures.

It’s also easy to see why people are dropping their paid digital subscription to the New York Times, since Democrats have been paying for it for years mainly because of the existential threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy and the future of the planet. The Times pursued Trump almost as hard as the Washington Post and the New American Journal, and even for us, their reporting was crucial.

Why would those same Democrats keep paying for it when the Times editorial board and most of their staff writers and columnists, including everyone’s favorite liberals, have now turned their gun sites on Joe Biden in a concerted effort to get the old man to step down after fumbling the performance against Trump on CNN?

It does seem to be a bit over the top.

There does seem to be an underlying financial incentive on the part of the Times to undermine Biden and get Trump back for four more years. They came back from losing money and staff to profitability in the Trump years. They call it independent journalism, but how can that be, when it is a publicly traded company on the U.S. stock market?

The only way you can truly call it independent journalism is if the reporters and writers are not beholden to the interests of not just advertisers, but stock holders.

But don’t worry.

If the Times can’t get Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves and step down from the Supreme Court for their obvious biases and corruption, why would anyone expect their crusade against Biden to succeed? As I have already declared, more than once, the power of the press in this country is deader than dead. In the end, it won’t matter.

The only good news about this may be that for the first time since becoming president, Joe Biden is getting far more publicity than Trump. Up until the circus on CNN, most of the headlines have been about Trump for months, even though Joe Biden was the damn president of the United States. In the entire history of news, the president always gets more publicity than anyone else.

Not in this world.

Not in Trump world.

We’ve spent countless hours over the past couple of years documenting all the money being allocated by the Biden administration from the infrastructure legislation passed in his first two years, back when Democrats controlled the House and Nancy Pelosi was Speaker. Nobody else has been covering it. But since the Biden camp is not bothering to advertise and support us, why should we keep it up?

Here’s the latest.

Report Shows Climate Change Impacting People’s Health and the Environment

One of the major frustrations of being an independent web publisher has been how most people went back to following the mainstream, corporate news media after the fake news story broke in 2017 and Trump started using it to his advantage.

The last of the mass circulation daily newspapers online also used the fake news story to get people to turn back to them for news online, although many of us had found a better perspective on covering things for years.

Remember the Daily Kos? The Huffington Post? Alternet? Truthout? We were right there with them, covering news more aggressively and with less so-called “balance,” another word for objectivity for the capitalists, when we pointed out time after time that objectivity is a word from science, not just 20th century American journalism history.

We strove to tell it like it is without kowtowing to “both sides,” when one side was clearly not only wrong and misleading, but outright lying and using the press for their nefarious propaganda purposes.

Does anyone even remember that Bernie Sanders was talking about the “corporate media” in 2015 and 2016, before he was screwed out of the Democratic Party’s nomination mainly in the California Primary, when he was the only candidate in the race polling 50 percent support from the American people? Hillary Clinton never had 50 percent. Trump was never even close to 50 percent.

A novice reporter for the Jeff Bezos Washington Post started the entire controversy with this story, as I’m sure even those who were aware of it at the time have forgotten. Too much water over the bridge since then.

I have not. I wrote about it extensively at the time:

Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

While we had spent more than 10 years working to build a truly alternative, really independent press on the web, it all began to crumble after this story came out. All of a sudden no one wanted to click on a link on social media or read a newer publication they had perhaps never heard of.

Even Time and Newsweek made a comeback from the dead after this, because people grew up having heard of them, even though the new owners in both cases were just rich, California tech billionaires with no news background.

The most devastating thing that happened to us is that in their own effort to try to address this fake news crisis, Google stopped paying for or even allowing Google ads on our YouTube videos, since we did not get the level of traffic and viewership of CNN.

That was the end of any chance we had to get paid for our traffic by the tech giant Google, the company with the only online ad interface anyone was using at the time. They abandoned us to try to save themselves, which they did, even though by then, Facebook was already kicking their ass in generating online advertising revenue.

Of course Facebook’s ass got kicked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it was shown that Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer stole the data of millions of Facebook users and plugged it into a super computer to ramp up the negative bot messages about Hillary Clinton online, and the positive messages about the new savior of the Christian Right, Donald Trump.

Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal Lawsuit Settled for Undisclosed Sum

But by then, everyone was already hooked on Facebook, and very few people were willing to give it up.

We offered to build something better.

But no one listened or funded it.

So here we are.

What a world?

Now do you see why I’m ready to retreat to the farm and grow my own food?

Won’t you join us?

There Has to Be A Better Way: Let’s Find It Together

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