The situation in Syria is extremely complicated, but some of that complexity is working against Russia and Syria’s own claims that there was never a chemical weapons attack in Douma on April 7, 2018. Today is April 21st, and only now is the team from the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) finally entering Douma.
Does anyone seriously believe that Facebook had so much influence that it would “brainwash” a Hillary voter to go Trump? Are we all like this poor lady?
This is like one of those “a guy walks into a bar…” jokes. Really. Last night on one of America’s most venerable news magazine programs, “60 Minutes”, CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. “Stormy Daniels” for the purpose of getting the dirt on her affair with President Donald Trump. This affair reportedly took place in 2006.
For the last week, the news headlines have been full of a new “scandal” regarding data mining and targeted ad campaigning based on that data. The parties involved were the Social Media giant Facebook and a group called Cambridge Analytica, a firm that built profiles of about fifty million Facebook users and used them for target political advertising.
The people that write and publish the news are among the most powerful people on earth.
Does this sound like an extreme claim? It might because of the expressed level of cynicism about events and stories that are printed or broadcast in various news media. When I ask my friends and colleagues, they often respond with the blanket statement that “all the news media are lying anyway.”
But then…
The rabid mainstream American press is still in a massive state of self-delusion. The usual response they expect from someone who is guilty of some sort of wrongdoing is for them to refuse to comment or leave the room without answering. However, the President appears to be much more grounded in reality than the news media is.
President Trump has found his stride as American Statesman after his first year in office. He has come to realize that the media and the political establishment will never agree to see or take his side on issues. Further, he always knew that his job as President was and is to lead the nation, not to worry about political points from critics.
As far as the news media go, President Donald Trump will never get it right. Tuesday, the criticism among some not-so-hallowed halls of news media was that he had not congratulated President Putin on his re-election victory, secured Sunday evening in a truly landslide victory – nearly 77% of the vote!
Now, of course, much of this criticism came from Russian sources, and given the present climate of really lousy diplomatic rhetoric, it is understandable that there would be a bit of disturbance about this.
Please do not misunderstand. My personal regard for Fox News is actually the highest among American mainstream media outlets. To their great credit, they have been very fair to candidate and now President Donald Trump, and they usually demonstrate a good level of proficiency in outlining the news from a conservative point of view, as long as it is regarding domestic policy.
The Washington Post reported on March 8th, 2018 that a filmmaker who emigrated to the United States from Syria had been involved in creating a film that would be on the order of Schindler’s List for its portrayal of the terrible war and awful conditions in his homeland.
