Mainstream media denounces intellectual diversity, pushes extremist bigotry as 'science'

(NaturalNews) The most trusted name in news -- isn't.

You may have heard the story about NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently admitted that he lied, repeatedly and for years, about being in a helicopter that came under fire in the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It didn't happen.

You may have also heard that Williams, while covering Hurricane Katrina, said he saw a dead body float by in the post-hurricane flooding from his French Quarter hotel window. Well, that probably didn't happen either; there was barely any flooding where he was staying, so he likely couldn't have possibly seen what he claimed he saw.

He also said he got dysentery on the same assignment. But that's been called into question.

Nevertheless, Williams won awards for his Katrina reporting. Now, he's wondering if NBC will even keep him on staff, but you can bet that he'll land on his feet somewhere.

In her book Stonewalled, former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson wrote of several stories that she tracked during the Obama Administration, noting that oftentimes her own network thwarted her efforts to dig deep into stories if it meant a) the details of said stories would embarrass the administration (because CBS executives are mostly Democrats); or 2) the details of said stories would embarrass advertisers or otherwise make them look foolish.

She finally left in disgust; now, she works for alternative media sites, including the Heritage Foundation's The Daily Signal.

The big lie, redux

It isn't that Attkisson is overtly partisan; she isn't, and she'll be the first to tell you that. But she is first and foremost an investigative reporter, trained at the University of Florida -- and she knows her job is finding stories and following leads to the stories wherever they go, because that's what the American public expects.

So she works for people who allow her to do her job, and that's the role that the alternative media now plays.

The intellectual bigotry and outright fabrications of the mainstream media have become legion; Williams and Attkisson, while alienated for far different reasons, are only the two latest casualties. But their cases are illustrative of a corporate media environment that pushes bogus science, promotes politically correct themes and disabuses itself of any semblance of ethics in its pursuit of an unattainable utopian society.

If you own a gun, you're a mass murder waiting to happen. If you're conservative, you're a racist bigot homophobe. If you're a Christian, that term is used as a four-letter word to describe you. If you are a parent who chooses not to vaccinate your children, you're a dangerous threat to society and should be jailed. If you demand to know what is in your food, you're a GMO fanatic and conspiracy theorist. And on and on.

Doctors can only be considered legitimate if they practice "traditional" corporate medicine. Chiropractors are "quacks," and holistic physicians are "kooks" and "whack jobs" who will kill you.

All of these are positions taken by the mainstream corporate media.

Americans deserve the alternative media

Take "global warming" -- slash -- "climate change." The mainstream media has reported, for years, that this "phenomenon" is real, and the earth is warming because of Mankind's modern lifestyle. But once again, the hoax bubble was burst recently by another report -- this time in Britain's Telegraph newspaper -- that temperature data collected by some of the world's most renowned science centers was "adjusted" to make it seem like warming was occurring, when it really wasn't (and hasn't).

From the paper:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records -- on which the entire panic ultimately rested -- were systematically "adjusted" to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified. ...

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record... has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

We can talk about the motivation behind such blatant data manipulation, and we should have that conversation. But what's worse is that this lie has been trumpeted for years by the corporate media -- so much so that public policies have been fashioned after phony data.

Americans deserve better. They deserve a media environment that caters to the truth, that offers up new information and affords differing viewpoints. In other words, the alternative media.

Sources:

http://www.stripes.com

http://www.nola.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk