Hellscape 2020: A New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

“Listen to my story about a man named” … Not Jed, Dick.

Not sure exactly why this popped into my head on Sunday morning. Maybe because I’ve been immersed in Southern music for the past few months, hanging out down the street from Nashville, Tennessee in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Remember Lester Flat and Early Scruggs? Sorry kids. Look it up on YouTube.

Well maybe it’s time for someone to write a new song. Never fear. I’m working on it.

This man nicknamed “Tricky Dick” had an enemies list too. He tried to save himself by attacking the press. Some news outlets and reporters cowed in fear. But in the end it backfired. Richard Nixon had to resign in disgrace from the White House for his corrupt actions as president. He even lost the support of his own staff and fellow Republicans in Congress.

Thank god there was no social media then. He might have gotten away with it.

The vast majority of the American people actually read newspapers in those days, and the three main broadcast news channels had honor then. Remember Walter Cronkite on CBS? The most trusted man in America?

News on television then was governed by something called the “fairness doctrine,” a policy of the Federal Communications Commission, which granted licenses to TV stations for use of the “public airwaves.” They were bound to cover “both sides.”

All that went out the window thanks to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Then came Rush Limbaugh. Fox News. Facebook. Twitter. Elon Musk. Reagan also broke the union representing the air traffic controllers. Ahh, how we forget. It’s all been down hill ever since.

Now planes are dropping out the sky right and left. Forget the price of eggs. Bird flu. Gas prices are on the rise too, and since Trump has no clue how tariffs actually work, inflation is roaring back too, roiling the stock market.

What happens when you try to kick all the immigrants out of the country? There’s no one left to pick the fruit and vegetables, for starters. Trump will tank the economy. This will not help you in your lives. It will simply multiply the pain that already exists.

Now if you simply try to tell the truth on the web – with no paywall, no popup ads mind you – people attack you on social media and literally expect journalists to justify and prove everything they report in Facebook comments. This is absurd.

Remember the movie “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?”

Mississippi Governor Pappy O’Daniel (Charles Durning) on his way to campaign at a radio station: “We’re not one at a timing it here. We’re mass communicatin’.”

My old friend Jim Rutenberg at the New York Times wrote about this for the Sunday paper and web.

“Voters had delivered the president to the White House for a second term, disregarding news about arrests and indictments of former aides accused of breaking the law to help keep him in power. Now, the newly emboldened president and his top officials had a message for the reporters who covered it all so aggressively: It was payback time.”

Yes, as senior officials blasted journalists as “arrogant elitists” out of touch with “real America,” the administration threatened the licenses of local TV stations carrying the major networks’ newscasts and moved to slash funding for the “liberal-slanted” PBS.

The president was not Donald J. Trump. He was Richard M. Nixon.

“The scandal he thought he had outrun, Watergate, would ultimately force his resignation. And his brazen anti-press moves, which initially appeared to cow journalists, would stall in an onslaught of revelations about his role in covering up wrongdoing in his West Wing. That dark chapter in media history is suddenly relevant again, as the second administration of President Trump resorts to a heavy-handed approach to traditional journalists that has all the hallmarks of his predecessor’s attempted press crackdown some 50 years ago.”

Trump has coupled those largely symbolic and by now familiar moves with an attempt to use the levers of government against traditional journalists that goes well beyond his first-term attacks. He and people close to him have threatened to use the FCC to punish the broadcast news networks, to defund PBS and even to prosecute journalists for their coverage of the investigations and criminal cases against Trump and his supporters.

“We have not experienced this kind of raw, blatant use of government power for ideological purposes since Nixon,” said Andrew Schwartzman, a longtime public interest lawyer specializing in media regulations.

“In many ways,” he said, “the threat is greater,” coming with a harder edge against a weaker press corps.

An inquiry into CBS played out in public in recent days when the network cooperated with the FCC’s request for information relating to the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview last fall with Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump had accused the network, in his own multibillion-dollar lawsuit, of deceptively altering the interview to boost Harris’s presidential campaign, which CBS denies.

“This is a retaliatory move by the government against broadcasters whose content or coverage is perceived to be unfavorable,” Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, a Biden appointee, said in a statement. “It is designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.”

CBS is in financial trouble now, but ABC also agreed to give $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit. Why would they not fight it in court? Because they would be kicked off this president’s campaign plane? Fuck him.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, has agreed to pay Trump $25 million to settle a 2021 federal lawsuit alleging First Amendment violations.

Here’s what I don’t get. Why would multi-billion dollar companies and billionaire CEOs cow to this Dickhead Trump?

Elon Musk and his team of hackers illegally invaded the Treasury Department and other federal agencies and hacked your and my Social Security information this past week, then threatened my bank, and somehow got them to freeze my Social Security money and then simply close my personal bank account where my Social Security was directly deposited – with no cause whatsoever.

Elon Musk Security Breach Must Be Stopped

You want proof? Here’s a screen shot of my bank account on Friday morning.

There was almost $1,000 in this account as of Monday. The card would not work at stores all week. Then they closed it.

Yet I am still standing up to this cyber bullying.

Letter to the Freedom of the Press Foundation: Elon Musk Hack of Social Security Must Be Stopped!

Why would Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post, and the other tech oligarchs cow to a grifter like Trump?

It doesn’t make any sense.

But then, much about this crazy world today doesn’t make any sense, which is why I was trying to retire from covering daily news and politics. Not because I am afraid. But because I am burned out on it all, and people are so addicted to the talking heads on cable TeeVee and silly memes on social media that they don’t even think news reporters are needed anymore. Really? Good luck with that. That’s why you got Trump back in the White House. Your stupid memes and cat pics did nothing to stop him.

What a waste of time, energy and bandwidth.

As I wrote last year:

“Now I just want to meander and think and not have to break all the latest news of the world. So please forgive this creative diversion into the past, y’all, digging down deep and back, and back into the bowels of memory long forgotten, pushed aside to open the mind to more possibilities. It’s an old story that involves a close brush with Rock ‘n’ Roll history from 50 years ago. I’m not making this up. It begins in 1973, when I was 16-years-old and started my first rock band in our underground basement in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama.”

It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll But I Like It: Wayne Perkins, The Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd

So if people are not going to support me to continue covering the news, and instead just attack me in Facebook comments accusing me of being a fraud and engaging in a scam, fuck you. You get what you deserve. A fascist dictator for president.

I called it first. But you would rather listen to a podcast from a historian or talking head? Refuse to share my news links or send donations?

Obviously you missed this. Did The New York Times call this? The Washington Post? CBS News? CNN? MSNBC? Did Rachel Maddow say this? Or did she kiss Trump’s fat lilly white ass to stay on the air and draw her insane salary?

Fascist Dictator Donald Trump Stuns American Establishment, Defeats Hillary Clinton for President

Everybody is still wondering how people could fall for Trump’s blatant and obvious con? I explained it a long time ago.

How Wrestle­ Mania Trumped Intelligence in U.S. Politics

Why would I keep trying to help you if you won’t help me?

Maybe because I love my country and can’t in good conscience sit idly by and watch it all go to hell?

As for the uninformed commenters on Facebook, we have NEVER made a profit from this. The goal starting 20 years ago when I first went independent on the web was to cover the expenses of practicing the journalism I knew this country needed, when newspapers were already in financial trouble and NOT doing the job I knew must be done. I considered setting up a non-profit news model 20 years ago, before anyone else thought of it. I rejected that and set up an S-LLC instead, mainly because of the IRS paperwork, prohibitions on engaging in political activity, and did not want to answer to any board.

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