“The clear biased agenda of the media is so blatantly apparent.”
The headlines read, “Woman Convicted for Laughing at Jeff Sessions.” That headline, and variations of it, are currently all over the news. This morning, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post and many more all ran the headline, but that headline does not accurately explain what happened. There was no conviction for laughing. There was nothing of the sort. These slanted headlines are just another example of the “fake news” stories we see every day.
So what actually did happen? Desiree Fairooz, an activist with Code Pink, was found guilty of disorderly conduct with the intent to disrupt congressional proceedings and was convicted by a jury in Washington, D.C.
The charges stem from the hearing on January 10, when Sessions’ then colleague, fellow Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby, said that Sessions’ record of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.”
Fairooz did, in fact, laugh out loud twice at this claim, but according to the charges filed by the prosecutor, she “grew loud and more disruptive” as an officer attempted to remove her from the room. According to the prosecutor, her disruptive behavior included yelling that Senator Sessions’ voting record was evil and waving a sign that read, “Support Civil Rights; Stop Sessions.”
A spokesperson for the jury that convicted Fairooz, who spoke to The Huffington Post on condition of anonymity, said, “She did not get convicted for laughing. It was her actions as she was being asked to leave.”
So here we are again. The mainstream news outlets all run the same slanted story. The intent is to paint the Trump administration, the current Justice Department, the Republican-controlled Congress and anything that could be associated with Trump as unfair, racist, fascists, anti-animal, anti-climate, anti-LBGTQ, pro-Russian, warmongering or anything else you can name. The clear biased agenda of the media is so blatantly apparent.
What has happened is that the mainstream media, in its attempts to support the resistance, has become exactly what it is screaming about. The various news media have become intolerant, closed to any opposing idea, and flatly dishonest in their attempts to put forward their views of how things should be, not how they are.
I can remember years ago when CNN and other mainstream news outlets were respected, unbiased, and straightforward. No longer. Then, news anchors were relied on to report the news as it was, not what they wanted to make of it. Unfortunately, those days are gone.
Just the other day, Rachel Maddow was in the news again, saying, “Trump wants to kill us,” referring to the media as “us”. No, Rachel, it is not Trump you need to worry about; the media is killing itself.
I remember during the Cold War when I was studying the Soviet news outlets, Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News). We had a saying: “There is no news in the Truth and no truth in the News.” That sure seems to fit these days.
