This is the big one. This is where history would get robbed, if we had to depend on mainstream media. This is the Rosa Parks story of 2009; and I'm not writing it for readers in the year 2009, but rather for the historians of 2059. This is simply amazing.
As you can see below, a Google News Search on the phrase "This used to be America", brought up only three articles.
At an August 25 2009 town hall meeting in Reston Virginia, Officer Wesley Cheeks asked a man to put down his sign, saying, "If I told you once to take it down and you put it back up, I can charge you with whatever I want to charge you with."
"This used to be America," said the man.
"It ain't no more, OK?" answered Cheeks.
Five days later, August 30 (see the graphic below), a Google News search lists only three articles covering this situation.
As far as the Washington who Rick Holmes really writes for.
Newspapers have so blurred the lines between opinion, fact, columnist, reporter, and blogger.
Here's his column: http://www.wickedlocal.com/watertown/news/lifestyle/columnists/x1194151696/Rick-Holmes-Why-newspapers-are-in-trouble-and-whats-at-stake
He seems like a nice guy, but he's another media insider who doesn't realize that Americans recognize lazy biased journalism, and we pulled the plug on it.
Rick says:
Opinionated writers are easy to find, and a lot of them blog for free. What's expensive is hiring someone to report the facts on which we base our arguments, and if there's no one to pay professionals to do it, we'll only have the facts those with a vested interest want us to have.
Sorry Rick. We figure you do have a vested interest, at least on the national level. Lots of us watched bitterly while CNN, the New York Times, and Boston Globe buried the facts and pitched biased stories at us, until we finally canceled our subscriptions and turned the channel.
Rick says:
A newspaper does more than make money by transmitting information. It builds a healthy community. It connects people to their neighbors. It helps set community priorities and guide public debate. It serves as an invaluable watchdog on government, business and politics.
That's the problem Rick. Newspapers don't even transmit information any more. It's like all the editors and reporters want to do is get home for dinner on time. They don't care about the news -- except the "big news", and we get that in multiplicity, redudantly, from TV, radio, local newspaper and national newspaper.
Rick you want the public to mirror your pro-Newspaper cultural bias. And when we don't mirror your bias you want to cast us as uneducated yokels who are too stupid to appreciate what you have done for us. Did you ever hear of "last ink"? That's the phenomenon, typically in a local newspaper, where the editor orchestrates one or two reasonably factual stories about an issue or political candidate and then pours on the hate juice. It used to be that the candidate's only recourse was to send out his own mailers or just suffer. The internet has changed all that, and we're never going back again.
And here's a guy who got it right.
