(Editor's note: This is one of three articles on Ron Paul in the December 8 issue of the River Cities' Reader. The package also includes Kathleen McCarthy's "Ron Paul Personifies Iowa GOP Party Platform" editorial and Dave Trotter's "Electability: Ron Paul Soundly Defeats Obama for These 11 Reasons" cover story.)
Voters memories' are getting shorter and shorter, emboldening the mainstream media (MSM) to utterly fabricate information in order to manipulate public opinion regarding Ron Paul's popularity and electability.
At the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference - an annual multi-day event of speakers presented as quintessential conservatives (Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Donald Trump all spoke at this year's convention held in February in Washington, D.C.) - Fox News edited the footage it broadcast by inserting booing during the announcement that Ron Paul had won the straw poll (for second year in a row), when in reality he was getting loud cheers. Fox was called out quickly by direct observers and had to issue an apology, stating, "It was clearly a mistake; we used the wrong videotape." Said Fox's Bill Hemmer, "It's an honest mistake. We apologize for the error. We look forward to having representative Paul back on our program very soon." (RCReader.com/y/media1) How is deliberately altering footage, replacing fact with fiction, an "honest mistake"? What possible explanation could there be for altering any news footage in the first place? It begs the question: How much of this "editing" is going on in other parts of the news?
Not to be outdone, CNN's Candy Crowley, broadcasting live from Ames in August, boldly lies and states that despite Ron Paul's veritable win at the straw vote, the polls show that he is "among the worst when put up against President Obama. In the end, aren't Republicans going to go for the person that they think is the strongest against Obama?"
Never mind that less than a month earlier, the Rasmussen pollsters released their Interactive Poll results stating: "Looking ahead to November, it seems there are three possible candidates who could give President Obama a difficult time. President Obama would lose his re-election if Rudy Giuliani (53 percent to 47 percent) or Mitt Romney (51 percent to 49 percent) was the Republican nominee. Each candidate would receive 50 percent of the vote if the president was running against Ron Paul. Right now, President Obama would win re-election against the 10 other candidates presented." (RCReader.com/y/media3)
Granted this is only one of dozens of polls and was taken more than a year prior to the general election. But the clear-cut, ongoing effort to spin Ron Paul's success in polling as either insignificant or inaccurate cannot be understated as evidence that Ron Paul is a major threat to the organizations that fund the dominant media, including both major political parties.
The MSM's dismissal of Ron Paul after losing by only 172 votes at the Ames straw vote was so blatant that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart did a segment called "Indecision 2012: Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & The Top Tier": "This pretending Ron Paul does not exist has been going on for weeks," states Stewart, amidst clip after clip of talking heads, pundits, and news anchors completely ignoring Ron Paul's second-place finish by less than 1 percent. "How did libertarian Ron Paul become the 13th floor in a hotel? He is Tea Party patient zero. All that small-government grassroots business, he planted that grass. These other folks, they're just moral majorities in a tri-cornered hat. Ron Paul's the real deal, and Fox News should love this guy." The segment is such an excruciatingly thorough and sadly humorous deconstruction of media malfeasance that it should be required viewing for all high-school or college journalism and communications students. "He's the one guy in the field who does not go out of his way to regurgitate talking points or change what he believes to fit the audience he is in front of," Stewart states.
The day after the Ames straw vote, Ron Paul was invited to be on only one Sunday-morning TV show, and that show purportedly canceled his appearance. Four months later, Ron Paul is still going strong, and he lands an appearance on the venerable CBS program Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer. In the interview, Schieffer asks Paul: "You actually believe 9/11 was America's fault?" Paul replies that our government's foreign polices create blowback, citing published government sources such as the 9/11 commission itself as evidence, to which Schieffer retorts, "I would question the import of what some of those commissions found that you cited." Schieffer's hostility toward Paul was more than apparent and was so blatant that Salon.com's Glen Greenwald wrote: "Schieffer repeatedly mocks, scoffs at, and displays his obvious contempt for two claims of Paul's which virtually no prominent politician of either party would dare express. ... I would have no problem with Schieffer's adversarial behavior here if this were also how he treated claims made by David Petraeus, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton. But one would never, ever see that." (RCReader.com/y/media5)
As Adam Curry, co-host of the NoAgendaShow.com podcast, stated: Ron Paul is "not part of the script" that the Ministry of Truth has provided to the media. "Ron Paul doesn't know he's just supposed to be an extra."
