It is becoming clear that Donald Trump intends to declare war on the news media, calling them dishonest and out to promote propaganda, while it is precisely Trump and his “Alt Right” White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor Stephen Bannon, formerly of Breitbart News, which is working to establish mistrust among the American people toward their own media that dares to challenge and investigate the many shortcomings of Donald Trump and his cabinet appointees, and his future policies in domestic and foreign affairs.
Additionally, a plan to list college professors who are felt to promote a leftist agenda, a reminder of McCarthyism in the 1950s, has been started by a group termed “Turning Point USA” under the name “Professor Watch List”, to intimidate professors from having freedom of speech in their classrooms. So academic “witch hunts” are back, in order to advocate a right wing educational system.
And the usual attack on liberals in Hollywood and the broad field of entertainment, is also clearly beginning, as censorship and attacks on civil liberties and civil rights groups are being encouraged, to attempt a total crackdown on dissent.
The ultimate goal is to sow distrust and doubt in the fields of journalism, education including universities and colleges, and the entertainment industry, including criticism of the humor of “Saturday Night Live” and other programs on cable, television, and radio, as well as film.
All this is advocated as part of the “fake news” which helped to undermine the Hillary Clinton campaign for President in 2016.
With an authoritarian oriented President coming to office, many elements of our basic freedoms of speech and press, and even assembly, are clearly under attack.
Net neutrality is also under attack. http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/01/technology/net-neutrality-fight-trump/index.html
Fake news led to some violence in D.C.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/05/media/fake-news-real-violence-pizzagate/index.html
Lawrence critiqued CNN for having Trump supporters as analysts.
http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/can-trump-separate-fact-from-fiction-825623107723
Many of Trump’s inner circle are conspiracy theorists. http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/12/06/a-collection-of-conspiracy-theorists/#.WEcpjmqvMLA.facebook
“Fake News” includes, and this is going to be upsetting for some people, at MSNBC.
Here is an example:
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs/
LOL! MSNBC is not “fake news”.
Aha! Glenn Greenwald, who is associated with the Intercept article, is a left wing libertarian.
The thing is D, the rest of us here are not libertarians. That’s why we don’t agree with what you say.
Not all of us progressives are on the side of Edward Snowden, D.
2008 was when we first got into checking out political blogs.
Initially, we checked out some of the ones The Professor has listed here such as Common Dreams, Daily Kos, AlterNet, and so on.
We got sick and tired of the constant Democrat bashing we saw on many of those sites, from people we could tell obviously either don’t bother to vote at all or wasted their votes on third party candidates who have no chance of winning.
We did some more searching around and found a pragmatic progressive blog called Winning Progressive. They are now only posting on Facebook. (https://www.facebook.com/WinningProgressive)
They would often highlight the successes of President Obama and the Democratic Party.
When an issue came up that they needed to critique Obama and/or the Democrats on, they would use constructive criticism rather than the flat out bashing that we saw on the other blogs mentioned.
They criticized the bashing that has been occurring. They said that the bashing is bad political strategy that eviscerates Democratic voter enthusiasm that is critical to our side winning. They said it is also misguided and that our major fights should be against conservatives, who are our real political enemy.