Obama’s Iran Ransom is Media Kryptonite (Opinion)

The media called it “Iran-Contra”.  Working with fellow travelers on the left, the big eastern newspapers and old alphabet networks thought they could use it as a wedge and turn the 1988 Presidential Election over to one of their own.  Ronald Reagan was portrayed as out-of-touch and adrift.  It especially galled mainstream media the program was developed to help fund a war against Soviet allies in Central America.

As a young man watching it all unfold, it set me adrift as well.  I’d given up on the leftist politics after college and had moved into a libertarian orbit that gradually became a combination of Ron Paul politics and conservative values.  And, all the while I was working in news media and began to detest the beast paying my salary.  1987 now seems quaint with the troubles my country faces in 2016 and I fear the media minions having drifted to the extreme left culturally and politically will give President Obama a break on ransom payments to Iran.  Oh, they’ll bluster for a day or two so they can claim in late October they covered the story and were tough on the White House but they’ll have long resumed talking about the “bright” speeches the Democrats gave in July as compared to the “dark” vision of the GOP in Cleveland the same month.

These are devious people with malformed consciences and they’ll do whatever they can to continue their master’s policies in Washington.  Grubby old and coffee stained editors ignore national debt, security breaches and a nuclear Iran in favor of peeing next to your 3-year-old daughter, marrying farm animals and shredding bibles.  A handful of lefties are starting to witness the error of their ways as witnessed by a guest commentary in the liberal Los Angeles Times, although.  One lefty out of millions in California doesn’t constitute much hope against a clock ticking down.  The writer does temporarily focus our attention on a news media that insists it knows better than all of you.  Which is ridiculous.  I’ve been around radio, TV and newspaper folks my entire adult life.  None have the skills needed to cure cancer, build rockets or commune with the Almighty.  They just think they’ve got these skills because interviewing a cancer doctor somehow makes you a surgeon by osmosis.

An overwhelming majority of these people have been campaigning to strip the Second Amendment and snatch your firearms.  They would scream like banshees if someone suggested we start with number one before getting to number two and, yet.  As they continue eroding public trust, the members of old line media may find no one will defend them when the government comes for their notepads and swings a few thousand wretches from lampposts.

I remember when I was working my first reporting gig 30 years ago and was sent to interview the writer Sir Stephen Spender.  I expected a stuffy and condescending Englishman.  Instead, he sipped tea and told stories, cracked jokes and recited his most well-known work for me when I asked if I could tape him speaking the words for a special we were airing at work.  I include a link here.  A great writer, Spender was also a man aware his talent was language and not science, politics or government.  Albeit, it took him some time getting there.

I was 23-years-old.  The “Iran-Contra” story was still a year away.  Media had already decided it was a player a dozen years earlier driving Richard Nixon from office.  Now, we’ve had three generations of news people functioning under the impression it’s their duty to save the rest of us from ourselves.  When the last newspaper folds in the near future, I’m not sure I’ll shed tears.  For all the lame talk about how we won’t have a public watchdog, I’m sick of being bitten by an animal with big teeth, loud bark and more ego than brains.