How We Got Here

It is amazing to me that most folks don't understand how we got to where we are now with regard to the media, misinformation, people hating both political parties, etc. So I thought I'd take a walk down memory lane and invite you along for the ride. Off we go!

The Eisenhower Years

Our story starts back in what most White Supremacists refer to as "the good old days." Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and from all accounts, he was an honorable man, a former war hero, and a moderate Republican. Remember those? Me neither.  These were times when “a woman’s place was in the kitchen” and black people were still being lynched in the South, a practice which believe it or not continued until 1981.

Eisenhower refrained from publicly criticizing Senator Joseph McCarthy during his asinine anti-communist crusade, though he did work behind the scenes to diminish his influence and discredit him. He also was hesitant to support civil rights, and in fact refused to use his presidential authority to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 decision ruling school segregation unconstitutional.

Other than sending combat troops in Lebanon in 1958, he would send no other armed forces into active duty during his presidency. He did, however, sow the seeds of Vietnam via his support of the anti-communist government in South Vietnam. He also sought to improve Cold War-era relations with the Soviet Union (especially after Stalin's death in 1953), and U.S.-Soviet relations were relatively cordial throughout his presidency.

In his farewell address in January 1961, he warned of the rise of the "military-industrial complex," and given what we have seen in the past 60 years, his warning was prophetic.

The 1960 Election

In 1960, the presidential elected pitted a young Democratic, Catholic Senator from Massachusetts against California Senator Richard Nixon, who was Eisenhower’s Vice President. The election proved to be one of the closest in U.S. history. Nixon was a staunch anti-communist “red-baiter” who sowed fear of the Soviet Union in all his messaging. Kennedy stressed his character and the press reported stories of his heroism during World War II to assist him. But both candidates were moderates on nearly every political issue of the time.

Many believe the election was decided during the televised Presidential debates, as this was the first time TV played a major role in a presidential campaign. Kenned was well-tanned, well-rested, telegenic, and well-prepared. Nixon was nervous, tired, sweated profusely under the hot lights, and sported a five o’clock shadow. It was a public relations massacre, and Kennedy won the popular vote 49.7% to Nixon’s 49.5%, and he also took the electoral college by a 303-219 margin despite Nixon winning more states. Kennedy’s faith cost him an estimated 1.5 million votes in November, though Nixon chose to leave religious issues out of the campaign.

There were lessons to be learned from Nixon’s televised failure, and certain parties were paying very close attention. More on this later.

Kennedy chose a Southern Democrat for his running mate, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, to curry favor in the South during the election. This would prove to be a fateful decision in December of 1963.

As President, Kennedy confronted mounting Cold War tensions in Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere and he led a renewed drive for public service. He also provided federal support for the growing civil rights movement. One of his early foreign affairs mishaps occurred in 1961, when he approved a plan to send 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles in an amphibious landing at The Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the intention of spurring a rebellion that would overthrow Fidel Castro. This ill-advised mission ended in abject failure, with nearly all of the exiles captured or killed.

A few months later, Kennedy met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss the divided city of Berlin, Germany, yet two months later, East German troops began erecting a wall to divide the city. Kennedy sent an armed convoy to reassure West Berliners of U.S. support, later delivering his “I am a Berliner” speech.

In 1962, Kennedy again clashed with Krushchev in October of that year during the Cuban missile crisis. A tense standoff lasted nearly two weeks, with the world on the brink of yet another war. But Krushchev relented and agreed to dismantle the missiles and return for America’s promise not to invade the island and the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and other sites close to Soviet borders. Kennedy then won his greatest foreign affairs victory when Khrushchev agreed to join him and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in signing a nuclear test ban treaty.

In Southeast Asia, however, Kenney’s desire to curb the spread of communism led him to escalate U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict despite privately expressing his dismay over the situation there.

Kennedy was enormously popular both at home and abroad, though later stories of his infidelities and personal association with organized crime members would tarnish his idyllic image.

The Johnson Years

Everyone knows what happened in November of 1963. In that moment, JFK’s attempt to mollify Southern voters in the 1960 election became vitally important, as Lyndon Johnson took over the Oval Office.

When he took office as the 36^th president, LBJ admirably launched an ambitious slate of progressive reforms, championing Medicare, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, plus attempts to improve education, prevent crime, and reduce air and water pollution.

It should be noted that during this period, the so-called “Southern Democrats” turned against the Democratic Party due to that party’s support of the civil rights movement. The south, previously a Democratic stronghold in which no Republican stood a chance of election, now embraced the GOP and began a long run of racist behavior in the name of conservatism. The political tables had truly turned.

Despite these wonderful achievements, Johnson’s legacy was marred by his failure to lead the nation out of the Vietnam quagmire. Like the three presidents before him, Johnson was determined to prevent North Vietnamese communists from taking over the U.S. supported government of South Vietnam. He was a staunch believer in the “domino theory,” and worried that America’s security depended on containing the spread of community around the world.

Hence, Johnson steadily escalated U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War, taking the number of U.S. troops there from 16,000 when he took office in 1963 to more than 500,000 by 1968. Yet the conflict remined a bloody stalemate. Casualties mounted, and anti-war protests tore through college campuses and cities across the country. Johnson’s popularity began to plummet, and on March 31, 1968, he announced his decision to not run for re-election. LBJ’s departure was hastened when Eugene McCarthy polled 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, this against a sitting president. And here is where our story begins to take a real turn for the worse.

The 1968 Election

When anti-war advocate Robert F. Kennedy decided to make his run for the presidency, it had to have been déjà vu all over again for poor Richard Nixon. Kennedy’s entry was the death knell for Johnson’s reelection hopes, and he bowed out, his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, entering the fray. Nixon likely had little shot against Kennedy, whose popularity soared.

Still, Nixon’s “silent majority” messaging dominated the Republican Party, and he cruised to the nomination. When RFK fell in June after winning the California Democratic primary, Hubert Humphrey became the de facto nominee, and this move escalated tensions as anti-war protestors flocked to Chicago to pressure the party into softening its stance on Vietnam.

Kenney’s death and Humphrey’s nomination basically threw the election into the hands of the Republicans, aided by a South united by George Wallace’s “segregation now” movement and with his running mate, Curtis LeMay suggesting that the U.S. “bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age.”

But there was another sinister force at work during this election.

In 1967, Nixon met Roger Ailes, who was working on the Mike Douglas Show. Nixon was impressed, and he hired Ailes as a political consultant, his “executive producer for television.” Ailes understood the awesome power of the medium, and he was fully aware of how TV probably cost Nixon the 1960 contest against Kenney. He sought to correct that miscue.

Ailes assembled a group of media experts to help him master the visual language of television. Together, the team choreographed Nixon’s talk show appearances, smoothed out his speaking tics, and staged TV town halls where the candidate could show off a warmed, less queasy public persona. Nixon was given soft-ball questions in advance, and a loving crowd was recruited and filmed. No dissent was allowed. The tactics worked, and Nixon defeated Humphrey in both the popular vote and electoral college, running on a platform of “law and order,” with all the racial and political overtones build into that message.

The seeds that grew into Fox “News” had been born.

Ailes rejected the idea that the TV could lie but conceded that it could magnify and distort. By his reckoning, though, the liberal media was already distorting reality, so when the opportunity came for him to launch his own channel in 1996, he set out to be the nation’s corrective lens.

The Republican Counterargument Begins

People like Ailes, Nixon, Agnew, and countless others in the Republican party HATED the media. They believed the media was liberally biased, and they sought out to build a narrative that supported their conservative views. Hence, the concept of think tanks was born. Quite often these think tank "experts" are depicted as neutral sources without any ideological predispositions when, in fact, they represent a particular perspective. This happens on both the left and on the right. But none of this existed in 1968, and it was born of Ailes’ need to force his warped perspective into the conversation.

So the Republican Party and Ailes embarked on a decades-long quest to build conservative think tanks, supply conservative viewpoints to media and DEMAND they be included in coverage, and eventually to issue in the birth of Fox “News” in 1996.

But there was a major obstacle holding them back, and in 1986, under the watch of yet another president Ailes helped elect, they took aim and The Fairness Doctrine.

The Demise of The Fairness Doctrine

Introduced in 1949, this doctrine required broadcast license holders to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that the FCC deemed “honest, equitable, and balanced.” Naturally, Republicans HATED those three words, and in 1987 the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4-0 vote.

Congress vehemently opposed this action and attempted to preempt the decision by codifying the doctrine, but the attempt was vetoed by Ronald Reagan. In fact, an additional attempt to revive the doctrine was again vetoed in 1991, this time by George H.W. Bush.

The Fairness Doctrine has always been strongly opposed by conservatives and libertarians, who view it as an attack on the First Amendment at worst, “unnecessary regulation” at best. However, it should also be noted that many Democrats, including Barack Obama, opposed the revival of the Doctrine.

But the revocation of the Doctrine opened the doors for media to basically say whatever they want whenever they want to say it, and this has benefitted no one on either side of the political coin. The fruits of this decision are clear on every channel today.

With all that “truth, honestly, and balance” bullshit out of the way, Roger Ailes was free and clear to start and run a “news” channel that could fully run with his warped view of the country.

And for the past 35 years, Fox “News” has been doing just that, in the process warping the minds of millions of Americans who now are fully convinced that:

·         All politicians lie

·         The government is bad

·         The rich need less taxes

·         The poor are dragging us down

·         Immigrants are the problem

·         The blacks are taking over

·         Barack Obama was a Kenyan spy

·         Russia never meddled in our elections

·         Trump is doing more for us than any president in history

·         Hilary Clinton is a war criminal

·         COVID-19 is a Democratic plot against Trump

Etcetera, so on, and so forth. The list is endless.

Truth is, the press was never all that liberal, especially in its reporting of the news. On the editorial pages, yes, I would agree that there were more liberals writing than conservatives. But was the Washington Post being liberal when it discovered and exposed the fact that the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations were lying through their teeth about the Vietnam War? Were they lying when they discovered and exposed the fact that the president of the United States was behind dirty tricks against the Democratic Party?

No, they were not lying. They were simply doing what the press had always done: acting as a watchdog for us over government, and reporting the truth as honestly as they could.