Journalism is Too Institutional

Think tanks such as Pew and Brookings have looked at “institutional journalism” amid the chaotic changes wrought by new technology and the destruction of earlier advertising models that dedicated more money to print publications.
However, as a now retired journalist I observe another criticism is that journalism is “too institutional.”
When I say journalism is too institutional I do not mean the deference given to the “Gray Lady,” the New York Times, or the concentration of mainstream journalism under a few corporate control points.
I am referring to the concentration and tight control of intellectual content itself.
Back in the 1980s I believe it was Randy Hatch and Bryan Mertz who returned from a conference and informed the staff of the Ogden Standard Examiner it was too institutional.  That was what they had gleaned from the conference.
In this case, it meant newspapers rely too much on official handouts and government sources for news articles.
Too often journalists do wait for the press release or only talk to official sources for “conformation”.
Journalists at the higher levels are caught up in this and their colleagues seem oblivious.
A few years ago when a Denver Associated Press bureau chief retired he was asked for the highlight of his career. His response, reported \ in one of the then two major Denver dailies,  was the time the reporter attended a conference in Europe.
On Sunday he was leaving and was offered a ride by Pierre Salinger.  During the drive Salinger gifted the newsman with a press release that was going to be distributed.  At the airport, the reporter recalls rushing to a pay phone and regurgitating - not his word of course - that press release to the world 15 minutes ahead of any other newsman.
That was a major highlight of his career. Regurgitating a press handout before anyone else.
As for me, I recall when the city of Clearfield, Utah was warring over a proposed garbage incineration project in a neighborhood bordering Hill Air Force Base.  Smith Barney, the investment banker, wanted it. The engineering firm wanted it. A Davis County Commission chairman who was also an LDS prophet had a vision it would be built. All but one of the mayors in the county supported it; I heard the hold out was taken to the woodshed by the others.
But residents along the road leading to the proposed burn plant opposed it.  An appointed official on the state’s air quality control commission said during a meeting the placement site was a “nutty idea.”
I reported both sides, often in advance because the community was in the battleground suburban area served by two daily papers in Salt Lake City as well as the one in Ogden, where I worked.
One of my career highlights was when the Clearfield mayor stormed into the council meeting room and threw that evening’s edition of the Standard-Examiner on the podium and shouted he was “sick and tired” of reading about that night’s meeting before it happened.
The emotional atmosphere was explosive surrounding this issue.  And my reporting simply reflected that.
Well, looking back, I suppose I was too aggressive in seeking out both sides to find out what they planned to say. Instead of just waiting for the meeting to guide the flow of information.
But on the other hand….that is reporting.  Full reporting of all aspects of an issue and allowing the public to decide.
The burn plant eventually was built.  It is still in business.
I personally believe the county could have found a cheaper solution with a more conventional landfill, but proponents of the burn plant saw the county as more landlocked and lacking open space similar to big cities in the east which had already incorporated the technology.
But the Ogden newspaper in that moment was doing what it was supposed to do, going beyond the officials and their intentions and seeking out what others thought and knew about the same subject.
Today, newspapers seem more neutered.  Their ownership loves to go along and get along with the ruling elites. To be with them, to be among them, to be one of them.
But the print newspaper empires are shadows of what they once were.
We can now all see a wasteland of print journalism, which seems to have been reduced to rubble in places due to capitalism constantly destroying and reinventing itself.
I see a wasteland beyond that.  A nation that is now engulfed in increasing racial strife, riots, hatred and growing poverty even as the fortunately employed grow ever richer.
A major reason is because a politically correct, submissive press no longer seeks out the opposing ideas.  Logic no longer prevails. Carefully crafted thought patterns are successfully used to shape mass consciousness.
Thus, we have a brainwashed majority now whose concepts and beliefs serve what the highest powers want them to believe.
The other day I watched George Knapp, a mainstream award winning reporter for a Las Vegas television station, recall how he was the first reporter to break the existence of Area 51 in Nevada.  Since then, the phrase Area 51 has penetrated deeply into the American consciousness. It became a prime example of government secrecy, cover up and disinformation.
Yet, how was Knapp treated?
He was made fun of by other news institutions such as the Las Vegas Review Journal.
He was a UFO “nut” in cartoons.
And yet, he was right.  He was correct.  His reporting - though opposite of the official press release handouts which declared the secret base did not exist - proved true in the end.
But attacks on Knapp makes the media look bad. Controlled. Institutional.
Far beyond Area 51, in recent years their have been what are obvious contrived “open air rituals” to shape mass consciousness.
One example was the stampeding of the nation into two “misguided wars” to use the phraseology of outgoing U S Senator Mark Udall.
This was only made possible because information opposing the press handouts has been systematically excluded from the news.
Editors, not wanting to lose a prized job on a daily paper, will not risk offending owners, readers, the secret government.
Reporters will not risk losing their prized reporting jobs. Especially with no where else to go these days.
So open debate has suffered.
In October 2013 CBS news reported the Los Angeles Times will not allow any information to be printed that counters the concept of global warming.
People who dare ask what caused the ice sheets to melt over North America 20,000 years ahead of fossil fuel burning, are branded as “climate deniers”.
The L A Times cited a committee of “top scien

tists” for their decision to end the debate after the committee said it was “95 percent” certain man has caused climate change.
And yet if the L A Times editors would read Bill Bryson’s book on the history of nearly everything, they would see that for the past few hundred years the orthodoxy of scientific field after scientific field has repeatedly had to capitulate and abandon their proclaimed “scientific certainties” in the face of ongoing evidence by persecuted dissidents denied tenure who maintained open minds.
There are no absolutes anymore.
If journalism was less institutional, less reliant on press handouts from committees… it might be functional and more relevant again.
And it truly would be morning in America again.

A Sensible Plan to Reform Congress Now

Pick a poll, any poll.
Odds are the majority will complain the United States is “going down the wrong path.”
And complaining about the messed up politicians is like complaining about the weather.  “You can’t do anything about it!”
Or can you?
Charles R. Hooper thinks you can do something about it.  Not the weather, but the messed up state of affairs in the United States.
His book “The Next American Revolution: How to Demand Congressional Reform Now” outlines a sensible plan to reform an out of control government that could doom the republic to failure.
Hooper points out Congress seems to listen to itself first.  Not the people.
It also listens to money.  The money thrown at it by self  interests who have placed themselves above the common good.
He calls for restoring the representational aspects of government.  A good start, Hooper argues, is to limit the terms of service in Congress.  Let people serve a few years in government, and then go back among the public to live under the laws and regulations enacted by government.
We now have a Congress that passed the Affordable Care Act - but exempted itself from the act.  It passed and oversees Social Security - but awards itself lavish pensions and benefits instead of applying Social Security to itself after leaving government.  This reviewer adds Congress is so corrupt it even exempts itself from insider trading enforcement.
Hooper also believes the contentious two-party monopoly that again people complain about can be fixed with a simple solution.  He suggests reducing the number of Congressional districts within states and then allowing people to stand election for the same overall number of House seats.  The difference is that the winners would be determined by cumulative voting.  In other words, if 26 people sought to win say 12 seats within just three districts within a state, the winners would be the top four vote getters in each district.  Much less gerrymandering to preserve seats for one party or the other.  It also allows parties with alternative views a chance to have more say in government.
These are just some of the gems of thought in Hooper’s 84-page book (plus a brief  epilogue, the U S Constitution and an index.
But then Hooper becomes “controversial” because of how he suggests reform should come about.   Hooper says an amendment convention to consider these reforms should be held.
Researching history, Hooper points out all 50 states at one time or another in the past two centuries have called for an amendment convention as outlined in Article V of the Constitution.
But The Congress, Hooper argues, has acted unconstitutionally by failing to respond to these calls for reform amendments.
Many of us have already heard the reasons against common people convening to suggest reforms (which Congress would have to vote on to approve).
Fear mongers say an Article V convention would spin out of control and destroy everything.
How?
Hooper points out an Article V convention would simply suggest reforms to make government more workable and honest and representative.
The real threat here is not to the republic, if terms were limited and voting became more representatives and if the polarizing two party monopoly was weakened.
The real threat is to Congressional representatives who think their government job should be for life (presumably because they have the experience to understand things better.  But that is not working out, the reviewer notes.)
Term limits and cumulative voting also threatens lobbyists and arm twisters who get paid a lot of money to make Congress do its will and not that of the people.
Another crucial piece of reform is to greatly restrict if not eliminate campaign contributions.
And this sends up a howl from the television industry, which gorges on attack ads every two years.
And it threatens the concept that faceless corporations are like people.
Except that while corporations and foreign lobbies can use their money to get the U S into a war, the corporations and foreign interests do not die on the battlefields.  American citizens do.
Time to make our foreign affairs truly accountable.
It is now a good idea to blow away the smoke and shatter the mirrors.  And take a real good look at how bad American government now is.  How far off course it has gone since the 1960s.
Charles R. Hooper is not just complaining about it. He has outlined some common sense ways to fix it.
His book is a constitutional way to fix the problem.  Don’t wait until the people in charge resort to more unconstitutional behavior.

Are Current Debt Woes a Death Knell?

Today, David Stockman's latest essay is titled:

"Peak Debt - Why The Keynesian Money Printers Are Done"

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/peak-debt-why-the-keynsian-money-printers-are-done/

Deep into his essay Stockman writes:

"Self evidently, all the major economies are saturated with debt."

I would point out that Western civilization is rooted in the Roman universal church established by the Emperor Constantine. The universal church he created became a repository of Roman values and ambitions. When Rome collapsed, the church carried the seeds of ancient Rome for centuries until they could again flourish.

Usury was always suppressed by the Roman church - though allowed to be practiced by non Christians within its empire. More than three dozen times the usury licensees would eventually be seized by the Roman church after substantial amounts of property had been accumulated by the usury lenders through foreclosure. The church would take over the properties for itself. The non-Christian usury agents would be allowed to retain seed funds and sent on to a new location to do it again. This happened over and over.

About 500 years ago bans on usury for both Christian and non-Christian lenders were relaxed...and interest rates far above the imposed limit of 4 percent have been the rule of the day ever since. Usury has been a free for all ...to be enjoyed by the most rugged and ruthless and alert.

Fractional banking and fiat money - boosted by the tremendous energy expansion from exploitation of petroleum and natural gas - have resulted in an explosive expansion of the economy, far above the traditional rural agricultural foundation supporting a few cultural and economic centers.

But to work usury lending rates demand an ever increasing pool of borrowers plus inflation so that borrowers have a sort of chance to keep up.

This incredible economic and population expansion the past few centuries has caused considerable environmental damage and for a number of additional reasons that include economic and moral decline, the Western birth rate is now collapsing. (The environmental damage is accelerating as India and China adapt Western consumerism and resource development. Carbon emissions are just one of the signs, and by the way, the global climate is still driven more by the sun, orbital angles and cosmic dust and volcanic eruptions. Carbon emissions should be viewed as environmental damage.)

Those living under Sharia law, while not enjoying the illusory wealth of the West, have a still very high birth rate. The Average Muslim woman has six children. Western banks and facilitators have opened the floodgates to foreigners far and wide to come in and provide labor and a base for usury lending... Visit U S cities and you will see those living under Sharia law elsewhere - along with the oppressed indigenous underclass of Mexico - are crowding out locals for subsidized housing and related welfare supplements. It is unknown by me how much they are adding to the commercial lending base.

Stockman is describing what appears to be the beginning death spasms of the West...and its 500 year old Western usury lending culture will likely collapse and be absorbed by the Sharia culture, now 1,400 years old and still explosively growing. Population flow charts should be reflecting this in coming years.

There has been no attempt to contain Sharia culture and force it to deal with its own expansionist population policy...instead, it is being allowed to spill into the West... and the rest of the emerging story will eventually become history.

There is no leadership emerging to save the West with common sense ideas. Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul have been ignored...and suppressed as marginal.

Utah UFO's of long ago.....

At Saturday’s Mufon meeting in Minnesota I was bored and almost napping from the droning monotone voice of Linda Moulton Howe, producer of the film Alien Harvest.  But after an hour I snapped awake as she suddenly got into her probe of  a Palo Alto lab involved in totalitarian secretive black op research into interstellar propulsion and other related subjects.

She also touched on the  more recent conclusions that the mysterious Bentwater Rendlesham Forest UFO sightings in England the day after Christmas 1980 were time travelers from the future gathering DNA from humans to repair something that has gone terribly wrong in the future. But that topic was covered in a book review a month or so earlier.

Anyway, the meeting brought to mind three UFO sightings I had in Utah back in the ‘60s and ‘70s..

1)  Zanna was washing dishes at the sink at our home in Sandy in the 1970s (same hometown for the mythical Big Love family). I stepped out on the deck which overlooked I think it was called Dry Creek Canyon which bordered our backyard.  Looking to the east above Big Cottonwood Canyon, I saw a white cloud.  Five or six small white lights flew into that cloud from the north and did not emerge from the other side.  After a few minutes some more small white lights did fly out of the cloud, heading south.  The cloud appeared to be cloaking a possible mother craft.  The cloud remained stationary at that spot for some time..

2)  Twice while out chasing stories for the Salt Lake Tribune when I was night police reporter in the late ‘60s, I saw a large white glowing light descending from the east at about a 45 degree angle and disappear behind the foothills just north of the cities.  In those days there were no homes on that hillside and I hiked them often, walking along ancient game trails and Indian paths.  The first time I was out of my car and saw the hill back

lit by the intense large glob of light when it got behind it.  The other time I was in my car driving on 5th South toward University Hospital and only saw the light descending.  One night a young kid called me when I was at the Tribune after midnight and we chatted and he said he had seen the same kind of lights also.

Just to the west of this area is Mueller Park in the Bountiful area. One Sunday my brother and I drove there and because a large LDS picnic was underway, we walked over to where a low chain or rope blocked access to a footpath leading from the park and alongside the mountain overlooking the Salt Lake Valley.  A sign said no trespassing. Not being Mormon and being counterculture we stepped over the barrier and walked along the path.  After several minutes we stopped. We could clearly hear machinery in the ground underneath us.  There are storage vaults in the granite mountains just east of Salt Lake City, but I believe the mountain we were on is an alluvial deposit, unless there is a more solid rock reef under the looser covering.

3) One night I drove my father to a store just off 13th East at Sugarhouse Park, a mostly commercial area just south of 21st South.  While he was inside buying cigarettes, the top of my Fiat Spyder was down and settled back to enjoy the warm summer evening.  I was surprised to see a large  black object with no lights flying over 13th East just to the east of me.   Though it had no lights, you could see a shape passing almost overhead because of the bright lights in the large parking lot.   It was traveling maybe 40 to 60 miles an hour and was completely silent.  I thought it was a plane going down.  When my father returned I am sure he thought I was crazy as I drove off and turned north onto 13th and sped along looking for a plane crash.   I remember the dark object and it was about 100 to 200 feet above the road. But I cannot say if it was triangular shaped or oval.  This would have been in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Liberals Have a Split Personality On Global Warming

While humans weren't around in big numbers to trigger the Big Melt Off that destroyed the miles thick ice cap over North America  20,000 years ago, liberals are blaming the surging human population for a perceived but debatable global warming episode now underway.

 A man gave a talk on over population and global warming just the other day before a Critical Thinkers Club in St. Paul, MN.

 I clearly recall two generations of American women being told to have only two children because resources are finite and have to be conserved.  The women overall complied and the birth rate fell to about replacement level.

 So why are liberals working so hard to bring people from high birth rate countries into the United States...where their surging numbers are using the natural resources that we were supposed to conserve for future generations?

 The numbers are in.  Mexican women have a higher birth rate in the U S than back in their native Mexico which reportedly has the highest per capital number of millionaires in the world, and those millionaires refuse to tax themselves and provide opportunity to their Indian blooded citizens.  Instead, they deport them northward for U S liberals to take care of.

 Muslim women who are married each give birth to  six children on average. Again, they are being welcomed warmly into the U S. In the Twin Cities area they are filling apartment complexes set aside for affordable housing for American Americans originally.

 Environmentalist Frosty Woolridge of Colorado has been shouting about the harm being done to the U S environment and natural resources by the swarming numbers of illegal immigrants.  And yet even tree hugging liberals - showing their inconsistent mindset - turn a deaf ear to Frosty.

 I  don't count liberals as friends of the U S environmental resources. And by moving high birth rate migrants into northern latitudes, to support their higher birth rates, they are obviously contributing to warming the environment - by their own logic. 

In his book The Hidden West, Rob Schultheis wrote how the big octopus Los Angeles reached out and sucked the water out of lakes and rivers and wetlands up to a thousand miles away in the Great Basin.  

 Now that the Southwest is again gripped in a predictable drought, that huge sprawling urban area - made much more populated by the immigrants the liberals recruited - the city has no where to turn but the ocean.  And the current drought is now having a much more serious impact because millions of illegal immigrants were unleashed upon the Southwest landscape.

Humans are locusts.  We can and do destroy our landscape.   So why do liberals want more and more locusts?

Why don't the liberals  move to the Mideast...to Central America...to all the places where the birth rate is surging out of control.   And take their message to what is the very source of global warming.

 Bring  this up to most liberals and watch them go emotional.  Not logical. 

Thus their split personality.

 Personally, I think the sun and other factors control temperatures more than people do, except in urban areas where development does raise temperatures.  But without a doubt our surging population is having serious environmental impacts. 

Vladimir Putin Traitor to the New World Order.