When did you have your Epiphany about the Mainstream Media?

[Sandpiper]

I'd had my doubts about the MSM for a long time, but what put me over the top was the run-up to the Iraq war.

During Bushco's orgy of lying and saber rattling, not only was the MSM completely uncritical and unskeptical about anything that Bush, et. al, had to say, they were openly cheering them on. They were excited about the prospect of war.

It was at that point that I had my road to Damascus moment regarding the Mainstream Media, and realized that they'd become nothing more than a megaphone for the power establishment.


How about the rest of you?

[dave123williams]

1. 1996, right after they passed the Telecommunications Act.

It's the consolidation of media outlets in to a few very powerful hands that clued me in.

[Tsiyu]

2. During the Clinton/Lewinsky crap

But I kept hoping the pendulum would swing back.


I can't help it that the Fairness Doctrine is engraved in my soul. Now they tell me fairness doesn't matter.

Democracy says it does.

[murielm99]

14. Me too. All the Lewinsky crap did it for me.

After that, I called it "The Not-the-News" when I watched it with my kids.

I wasn't even a DUer yet. DU did not exist then. I did not know about the terms I hear here -- media whores, corporate media, etc. We still call it The Not-the-News.

I did not stop watching all news programs until after this election, though. I still watched CBS and read Time Magazine. Not any more. The only magazine I read is The Nation. I get my news from the Internet.

[Jacobin]

24. Me three

I remember when the hounds were howling and the media could smell blood and they thought they HAD him for the blowjobgate thing, and Judy WoofWoof reported on a poll saying 65% of americans said Clinton should NOT be impeached and she started whining and complaining and asking What In The World is Wrong with America that they didn't see how Badly He Needed To Be Impeached.

My jaw dropped to the fucking floor.

[phylla]

34. double ditto

My whole life changed as well.

I became politically active...and I

Moved from a very uninformed, lazy Republican who voted occasionally at best....
..........to a radical liberal Democrat.

And I haven't looked back.

[elehhhhna]

3. When I was GROSSLY misquoted by Bob Greene in 1982.

What a booze-soaked goober.

[CoffeeCat]

6. What did he say that you didn't say?

If you want to share, we're listening.

[elehhhhna]

33. He was interviewing tall women about their experiences--

(typically lame material for Bob) and made some insulting conclusions. I called his office to tell him he was full of baloney. He interviewed me & a few others for a rebuttal column.
His interview consisted of his drinking 7 Vodka Gimlets in 1.5 hours and babbling about Nixon (his idol.)

When the interview ran he basically made up everything, put quotes around it, and VOILA. No damage, really, but it became crystal clear to me that there's no accountability and you cannot believe what you read.

He was later fired for harassing & abusing young women he'd interviewed. Didn't come on to me, but he only came up to my shoulder, after all (including his atrocious big wig.)

[CoffeeCat]

35. LOL! Thanks for sharing that...

...I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

The man sounds pretty pathetic.

You wonder how much of that stuff they make up. If they have to invent quotes from people--on lifestyle pieces--then most of it is probably manufactured.

Glad you called his office though. Good for you!

[atreides1]

4. That's about the time for me

They didn't ask any hard questions, and they seemed to buy into the fantasy that US troops were going to be greeted with flowers and candy.

[CoffeeCat]

5. I"m a blate loomer...

*sigh*

Unfortunately, the reality has only sunk in during the last few months.

I'm really, really having a hard time with it.

I feel like the world is collapsing all around me, and that nothing is good and decent anymore.

Sorry to be such a gloomy gus.

[babylonsister]

21. You're not alone.

I didn't pay much attention until this war. I can say since the blivet was selected in 2000, I never trusted or voted for that particular scum. My antenna went up, I started looking around, and landed on DU. This, along with watching the MSM and not having the two sources correlate clued me in. But there's a bit of safety in numbers and like-minded people here, so have faith. :hi:

[Radio-Active]

7. I already knew they were bad..

but when I attended the biggest anti-war demos in American history in 2002 and 2003, and there was a MEDIA BLACKOUT.. it was what you might call an epiphany

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. 22 years ago

when I heard the "official story" about the invasion of Grenada and then heard what was being reported on CBC's "As It Happens." They couldn't both be right, and further investigation showed that the Canadian version was closer to the truth.

This was reinforced when "gee whiz" articles about Japan began appearing in the MSM, articles that were based on a complete misunderstanding of superficial observations.

[charlie]

44. Around the same time for me

While the press wasn't doing hard advocacy like they are today, Reagan and the Repubs were benefitting from selective blindness and inclusion of ridiculous counterpoints for the purported aim of "balance." I thought maybe I was just becoming a hypersensitive partisan until I saw Mark Hertzgaard on TV and read his book On Bended Knee. He confirmed and documented that what I was seeing was active manipulation of public discourse.

[KansDem]

9. Campaign 2000 and Cokie Roberts "charm offensive" stories...

She would report about Geo. W. Bush's "charm offensive." What he would do to "win" people over to his side (nicknames, etc). Not only was it uninformative, but caused me to gag :puke:

"He's charming, oh, so charming" she would "report." I suspected then something was amiss...

[Sanity Claws]

18. I don't remember that but...

during this last campaign, I became convinced that Bush was totally lacking in any kind of personal charm. He can't tell a story and has an annoying smirk. He doesn't listen to anyone. What could anyone find charming about him?

[KansDem]

30. From April 6, 2001...

With the Washington press corps smitten by a "charm offensive," the new administration's initiatives have generally been met by a conspicuous lack of journalistic scrutiny. With a presidency that has already brought us John Ashcroft and the return of the global gag rule, this bodes ill for critical coverage of Bush's agenda.

http://www.msmagazine.com/news/uswirestory.asp?id=6203

I couldn't find any specific quotes from Cokie; what I heard then came from her "reports" on NPR.

Actually, this website offers a good overview of the whore media then, and how it hasn't change much since. Here's a sampling:

Since video cameras couldn't easily excise images of dissent from live reports, the networks were forced to mention the thousands of protesters. ABC correspondent Terry Moran admitted that jeers often drowned out the cheers of Bush supporters, who were "out-organized by what may be a fringe element of people....But it's certainly something that must be reported because it can't be avoided."

When ABC's Peter Jennings asked if demonstrators were expressing "general animosity," Moran responded dismissively, "It's the kitchen sink. There's everything from the National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, to Mumia Abu-Jamal, Billionaires for Bush....I almost don't want to repeat some of what I'm seeing. It is a grab bag of angry people who may not be spoiling the parade but are certainly impacting it."

Instead of interviewing activists, ABC's Cokie Roberts waxed rhapsodic about her favorite artwork under the Capitol dome; Jennings and Barbara Walters debated the proper term for Dubya's Texas home ("ranch or ranchette?"); and Walters divulged the housetraining status of Bush's two dogs.

Edward R. Murrow, eat your heart out!

[hangemhigh]

10. Completely by accident-

I stumbled across a website doing some research for work and never turned back-www.whatreallyhappened.com. I can tell you that the internets totally opened my eyes.

[Betsy Ross]

11. In the early 80s

when Israel invaded Lebanon.

[twenty2strings]

12. When public radio/TV started doing wal-mart mini-ads...

Just like little bitty commercials...Hey! They are!!!!

[Sanity Claws]

13. The campaign

At the time of the run up to the war, I just thought I was different and out of step with everyone else, since high-profile dems were even supporting the war. Remember Hillary Clinton even voted to authorize Bush to go to war.

My enlightenment came slowly during the course of the campaign. I saw some really stupid interview questions by Brokaw. I saw the way certain poll questions were phrased at CNN. I saw the coverage of the Swift Boat Liars. I saw the media ignore the wire Bush wore during the debates. I was slowly but utterly convinced that we do not have an independent media and that they were all whoring for Bush and the Repugs.

[Lisabtrucking]

15. As soon as I started watching it about 30 years ago. never trusted them

[Ladyhawk]

16. Recently: 2002

I knew something was wrong when attention focused so swiftly from Afghanistan to Iraq even though they had nothing to do with 9-11. I was receiving my political wake-up call about then and switched from Republican to Democrat.

The Republican Party is not who I am. It hasn't been since I graduated from college and started to develop my own ideas. It just took me a long time to figure that out.

[villager]

17. as a kid in the 60's, reading about the assassinations

and the MSM attempts to spin these liberals-being-shot as the work of "lone nuts," while the right kept benefiting from these "random" "incidents."

Haven't trusted 'em since, really...

That, plus I grew up reading the underground papers my dad brought home, so always had a different perspective on "official" news...

[RoBear]

19. I appear to be a late bloomer--or perhaps just slow!

I didn't become aware of the problem until I started visiting DU regularly. Might never has realized it without that. So THANK YOU DUers!!!

[SpaceCatMeetsMars]

20. When they trashed Gore

I knew then that they would trash any Democratic candidates no matter who they were. Gore may not be a perfect politician, but they trashed him for things that were not even true.

I figured before then that they might improve at some point and might even see that it could be in the long-run interest of corporations to be fair and honest, but at that point, I realized they were working directly for the Republican party and against regular people's interests. I honestly feel that they have declared some kind of "elite-people's revolution" against regular people.

[Warren Stupidity]

36. It was the first Gore vs Bush** debate

Al was intelligent, in command of the facts, and a bit wooden. Jr. was an f'ing moron. Al wiped the stage with him. The MSM could only talk about how Al sighed audibly. Prior to that I at least thought that NPR provided some objectivity, that the NYT could be trusted to at least report 'most of the news that's fit to print'.

After the selection fiasco it was clear that the MSM was simply not reporting the reality on the ground, that they were reporting from some other reality. The run up to the war, where the whole system ran in zombie-lock-step mode was the final straw. I turned all the shit off, and really haven't watched or listened or read any of it, even with ironic detachment, since.

We were talking about this in the hall at work today. A colleague observed how odd it was that the Iraqi selection has just sort of gone into limbo. I took the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite themes, which is how the MSM creates a fictional narrative and then moves on, leaving the inattentive with a completely bogus impression of events. Case in point: the Iraqi people voted in huge numbers in a triumph for neoclown imperialist policies. Or not. Was it 72%? 56%? Of what? As we were agreeing that the continued zombie mode of the actual real-world election in Iraq, the lack of any results, including voter participation numbers etc. were 'unusual' to say the least, it struck me that we are replicating the condition of the late soviet union with respect to our 'news' media.

In Russia in the 70's and 80's as the system spiraled toward its inevitable collapse, two reality narratives developed. The official pravda narrative was acknowledged by everyone and believed by nobody, including those participating in its creation and dissemination. Meanwhile the samizdat system of mimeographed ad hoc news letters that circulated between friends and acquaintances developed and grew and became the second narrative, the one that people looked to to understand what was really going on.

The blogs are the samizdat of the internet age. The MSM is nearly as locked down as the soviet news media. Be proud bloggers! Be strong bloggers! Be sure that if we speak from the heart, if we speak the truth, that eventually reality will smack the lying sons of bitches in the face and their whole sorry system will collapse as surely as the Berlin Wall came down.

[tom_paine]

45. Yeah, except this time the "Free Market Commies" have their own

portion of the samizdat to drown out dilute and poison the REAL samizdat, making it less effective.

Imagine if Brezhnev and his Thugs had thought of that! The Communists might still be in power. The Busheviks are really pioneers in New Totalitarian Techniques of Propaganda, Infoganda, and Crowd Control/Marketing.

They will likely receive a warm welcome from Goebbels and Molotov and Hitler and Stalin down in hell.

[Warren Stupidity]

46. bum me out

Just when I thought that there was hope :-(

We just have to be louder and better and stronger.

[tom_paine]

59. Don't take my word for it. I could easily be wrong

Don't let it get you down. It's just one mans's opinion. Keep fighting the good fight. And work for candidates in 2006 and 2008.

I will be.

[charlie]

50. Compare and contrast

Al caught hell for being an overbearing Star of the Class the first debate, so he dialed down his aggressiveness in the second... and the bobbleheads shit. Al reinvents himself! Again! They spent barrels of ink cracking wise about which version of Chameleon Al would show up for the third.

In Bush vs Kerry, Dubya careened from one extreme persona to another -- peevish out-of-it dunce, deranged madman, unflappable grinner -- and the beltway dolts didn't make a peep about it.

[tom_paine]

58. Like shooting fish in a barrel, picking any one of many of Orwell Moments

in the brief but hideous hostory of Imperial Amerika.

[KarenS]

22. during the aftermath of (S)Election 2000,,,,,

When CNN gave James Baker center stage to lie about the Florida recounts,,,,,

slowly I quit watching show after show,,,, now I avoid MSM news altogether,,,, HGTV and "The Daily Show" for me :)

[nadinbrzezinski]

23. on the raod to war

CNN was oh so different from CNNi, and so different from BBC et al.

I had access to NWI, and watching CBC and other media I went, to heck with it

The funny moment was listening to Australian radio on the short wave and they covering a story on Euro switcing by Malasya, while CNN and FOX are runnning stories on non stories...

[leanin_green]

25. I've been aware of bias and slant for awhile now, but. . .

when I finally turned off completely was around 12:30AM November 3, 2004, when I actually saw and sensed that CNN was actually skewing the exit poll numbers. The famous, "Computer problems" with the poll.

[CindyDale]

26. Iraq war, definitely

The coverage was bizarre from the beginning. From 9/11 to the anthrax scare to Iraq. It just seemed to have a rhythm all its own, and no one spoke up about it.

[laura888]

49. me, too

it was quite an epiphany

[WilliamPitt]

27. The Gulf War

[greendog]

28. In '83 I went to a free lecture on linguistics...

...by Noam Chomsky at the University of Colorado. At the time I didn't know anything about his political work.

The next day I attended his lecture on "Manufacturing Consent" because it was free and I had nothing better to do that day. Curiosity and boredom.

From that day I've looked at the media with a very skeptical eye.

[Stirk]

29. My first trip to Europe.

I spent way too much of my time there just reading the paper and watching the news. It felt so strange to get news that actually felt authentic.

Not long after that, I returned home and witnessed the sickening run-up to the Iraq invasion. I have no trust in US media at all anymore.

[xchrom]

31. first time: the viet nam war

though at that time we had none of the consolidation that has happened now.
but we still had an ''establishment view'' that permeated everything.
second was reagan -- the man got a free ride.
his policyies were disastrous and iran/contra possibly the country's highest crime ever commited. no news, just the establishment line with a little gasping thrown in for good effect.

[malaise]

39. 1978 when I read

that classic - How to Read Donald Duck. Since then Chomsky always kept me on my toes. Of course living in a country where an ex-CIA agent exposed what was going on in our local media from 1978/79 also helped.

oops - edit added a bit.

[stillcool]

32. Mine was incremental....

Starting with the Grand-daddy Fox. I will not watch any Fox Channel on my television, including sports and regular programming. They were prior to 2000 selection and all the others came to a screeching halt before this past one. During the post-2000 election period I was pretty much glued to MSNBC & CNN, and after 9/11 even more so. The ironic twist to it all is that I am not always aware of how much more well-informed I am as a result of just 'saying no', but it is very apparent to friends and family.

[RBHam]

37. During the 1980's - I first found out about Operation Mockingbird...

And then watched very closely as those journalists who suppoorted the Neo-Nazi right and their Christian Mafia brownshirts were never held to the same standards as their non-partisan brethren...

[Haymare22]

38. When my son....

...brought home 'history' books with one paragraph about Nam. One para was all.....Know books are not same as MSM, but that did it for me. The rest has ALL been bullshit.

[Warren Stupidity]

48. true story

my dad was a journalist for both of the big format glossy magazines of the post WWII era, Life and Look. He had a good friend, also a journalist, who was a bit more conservative in political outlook than he. Our families were friends as well and we were over at their house for the day and towards the end of the day it became clear that the two of them, my dad and his friend, were having a rather heated discussion. We left soon there-after and eventually my parents let us kids know that the argument was about this very thing - my dad's friend had been approached by the CIA and had agreed to 'help them out'. To my father this was an unacceptable ethical violation, while his friend saw it as his patriotic duty. He let us know that these 'requests' were routine, that everyone writing for the mainstream magazines were getting approached, and that it was a huge issue for all of them to deal with.

[BillZBubb]

40. 1980's early on under Raygun

The MSM let that bastard get away with lie after lie. They always spun the news the way Raygun's handlers wanted it. It was becoming clear during Carter's term in the late 1970's that the media was becoming more aligned with the right, but the 1980's clinched it.

[starroute]

41. During the 1956 presidential election

I was nine. My father pointed out to me that the papers tended to print pictures of Eisenhower looking relaxed and smiling but pictures of Stevenson looking tense or frowning. I was horrified by how unfair it sounded and didn't want to believe him, but once my attention had been drawn to it I couldn't help realizing it was true.

That was a moment of extraordinary disillusionment for me, not only in the news media but in the American system as a whole. It was like finding out there is no Santa Claus.

A few years later, my mother told me about how during the Spanish Civil War the New York Times would regularly refer to the Republican forces as being aided by the Soviet Union but would never mention that Franco's forces had help from Germany and Italy. She said it was because they didn't want to offend their advertisers and that it was only thanks to George Seldes that she knew the real scoop.

In the early 70's, I gave up on the Times and most other mainstream news sources over their coverage of Vietnam War protests. And in the Reagan era, it became obvious that they had very little will to oppose the government on any grounds. But I've never seen things as bad as they are now.

[hunter]

42. My great-something grandfather was a drunk in Salt Lake City...

...but he was one of the few guys in town who could do trigonometry and statistics, so everyone agreed he was a special kind of sober.

I feel lucky I never needed an epiphany about the MSM. My cynicism and skepticism have been passed down to me from my ancestors.

My most amazing MSM discontinuity was with Ronald Reagan. A friend smuggled me into one of his presidential appearances in California where it was shockingly clear to everyone that the poor old guy had absolutely no idea where he was. But that evening the news was edited to make him look all crisp and witty and jovial. In real life Ronald Reagan was an old guy barely holding onto the day, but on television that night he was "Presidential."

[tom_paine]

43. Mid-2000 post debate and the discovery of Poll Freeping

(though I didn't know what it was by name, I postulated it's existance)

In 1998, I remember a queasy feeling about the whole Impeachment Circus.

"How can two-thirds of the country be against something and it still continue full blast? The Democrats failed to impeach Raygun because he was too popular, and the Republicans (I hadn't yet realized they weren't Republicans anymore, but Totalitarians) can so easily do the opposite and ignore the people...how?"

Another thought:

"This whole thing seems, I don't know kind of Imperial Roman the way it's so trumped up and the way they are seperating Clinton from his friends and crushing those friends for being his friends. It seems like any of the Real History events of the Roman Empire or the semi-fictional embellishments of 'I, Claudius'."

I was sniffing around the edges in '98, but I had no idea. The idea that IT COULD HAPPEN HERE was foreign and alien. It was, as I suspect it was for so many and still is today...beyond the pale.

There it sat, this vague uneasiness until 2000.

I knew we were at an important crossroads as a nation in 2000, though I had no idea how important. I had recognized, to a much lesser extent, the genuine wrong the Republican Party had become.

Hell, I used to vote for them at least a third of the time, deciding based on the individual's qulities and how close they matched up to my mixed bag of views.

I cast my last Republican Vote in 1996, and swore over the tragi-comedy of that impeachment and the rise of what I now see as Bushevikism, BushPutinism, that I wouldn't vote for them again until sanity was restored. How foolish and naive in retrospect.

Then came 2000.

Now I am a history buff and I watched my first Presidential Debate in 1976. And seen just about all of them since. I could recognize when my guy didn't win. I liked to sort of score them.

In 2000, Gore absolutely destroyed Bush in Debate #1. Scored big points, made Bush fall short of words a half dozen times, including once when Gore brought up Karl Rove said a $15,000,000,000,000 deficit in 2010 was fine.

The after debate the next day was astonishing and Orwellian. My first Soviet Moment and my first inkling that something was VERY WRONG.

Everything was upside-down. Bush told at least two big demonstrable lies, yet they were excoriating Gore for mistaking the name of James DeWitt, and Bush's major gaffes (did he tell the Patients Bill of Rights Whopper in that debate).

I couldn't believe it. Naturally, all internet polls showed Bush winning the debate by double digits.

That was back in the days when they were Freeping unopposed. Truly dizzying to a Free Person who had never dreamed of something like that, but it was just an odd queasiness, and the idea didn't occur to me until a couple months later, when I logged onto excite.com one late nght.

They had internet polls every day, as they do now on most sites, and I would go at that my home page.

I caught the very beginning of the introduction of a new poll, excite tended to release them about midnight. The poll was "Do you have a favorable opinion of Al Gore?"

The results, a mere handful of minutes after the poll was released:

Yes 7 0.1%
No 40000 99.9%

I was stunned...Soviet Moment Number Two, a chill ran down my spine. Obviously, I don;t think this was Poll Freeping as it is generally understood, but something even worse and more sinister.

A Excite.com Freeper had "started the poll of right", I suspect.

Much more scary in it's own way. Could there be an organized or implicitly semi-organized bunch of people who lived to skew polls as if they were Communists?

I had never heard of Free Republic or Poll Freeping.

On that day I finally knew. Still, I had only just Taken the Red Pill and my ideas were still very non-formed.

But combined, the Imperial Romanesque nature of things combined with the Soviet nature was enough to give any student of history a good shudder. Add to that the "Bushevik mentality" which is really just a Kinder and Gentler version of the Nazi Mentality and the language they had begun to use more stridently, and the veil began to fall.

The Stolen Election of 2000 finished the job.

And that's my story.

[Eurobabe]

47. Election night 2000

that was it.

:puke:

[soleft]

51. During the war in Afghanistan

Every time there was a report about civilian casualties, someone would say, of course, this has to be put in context with the attacks of Sept. 11th

[devilgrrl]

52. Right after the MSM called the election for Clinton over Bush I

They were on his ass like white on rice! Then I knew.

[tinanator]

53. Gulf War protest counts

after being forced to reconcile wildly varying head counts during the Gulf War struggle for peace, I realized the pattern emerging was no accident. Lies from above, all the time.

[SpiralHawk]

54. MSM lost hundreds of thousands through 9/11

It has been so clear that their coverage has been superficial and uncritical. They have not probed at all. So many friends and colleages have had the shrouds ripped from their eyes in watching the pathetic MSM coverage of this massive issue.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

55. Reagan's 1984 meandering during the Mondale debate.

And the ensuing cover-up.

[tavalon]

56. No specific epiphany

Just a slowly dawning understanding of what was going on. It was more intuitive than actual until I really looked at it.

[Peace Patriot]

57. When Newsweek permitted Cheney aides to plant a story in its pages...

...about a meeting between Cheney and Gary Condit on the day Chandra Levy disappeared (May 1, 2001), in an issue of the magazine published two months after the meeting became known (an August 2001 issue, as I recall, after Condit's June publication of his schedule for the first week of May). No one in the media, the FBI or the DC police had bothered to ask Cheney or his staff a single question about that meeting--not even, "Did the meeting take place?"--according to the Newsweek story.

According to the aide who planted the story, the meeting between Cheney and Condit lasted about 20 minutes, with two staff people present.

Why would Cheney bother to plant this story--if no one had asked him or his staff about the meeting? And if Newsweek was asking him about it now, why did they wait so long? And...and...? The questions just go on and on, that won't get answered.

Condit had a big hole in his schedule, from the end of that meeting with Cheney (which started at noon) until 3 pm, the very hours of Levy's disappearance. So the length of the meeting (not to mention its content) was an important piece of information.

How could Newsweek let Cheney get away with giving HIS version of the facts of the meeting, through an aide, three months after it occurred, two months after it became known, and while Condit was still under suspicion? The flabbiness and coziness of this "journalism" was just too much.

Two days after Levy's disappearance, and the meeting with Cheney, on May 3, Democrat Condit voted in favor of Bush's first tax cut for the rich (an extremely close vote). Did the Newsweek writers even know this?

This Newsweek/Cheney thing bothered me no end. I had become very annoyed with the press for its dwelling upon the sensationalist aspects of that story, and its complete failure to mention or investigate the political and governmental connections--for instance, simple things like not investigating the Bureau of Prisons' obvious ass-covering tale about how Levy got fired from her internship a week before it was over, just prior to her disappearance; and more complicated things like Condit's presence on the House Intelligence Committee which is privy to FBI and intelligence secrets, WHILE the FBI was investigating HIM, and while the House Committee was meanwhile investigating scandals in the FBI, combined with the info. that Levy had apparently been seeking a job with the FBI--so, did she apply? whose desk was it on? did that get pulled, too? by whom? ...like that. The media just seemed so DUMB!

But when the Cheney bit about the meeting came out in Newsweek, I realized that these major publications had become very, very corrupt, and were just conduits of approved government information--rags for cover stories, playgrounds for government news manipulation.

That wasn't the final straw for me. But it was, say, the first straw. There was so much more to come.

The final straw--the thing that caused me to stop believing ANYTHING I read or saw in the lapdog press (and I mean anything--every single word is in doubt, in my opinion)--and the thing that caused me to simply stop reading ANY of the propaganda newspapers (I'd long ago abandoned TV news)--was January 6 and the challenge of the Ohio presidential electors.

By Jan. 6, there was sufficient evidence of Bush having stolen the 2004 election--including all sorts of expert reports with Ph.D.'s from top universities putting their reputations on the line--for it to be a major story in any reputable newspaper or news organization. The theft was nationwide and the means was electronic voting and vote tabulation, to which Bush partisans had special access. The electronics are run on SECRET, proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by the likes of Wally O'Dell and H. Ahmanson (major Bush donors and rightwing supporters--O'Dell, Diebold's CEO was the Bush-Cheney campaign chair in Ohio!). Further, these electronic voting machines were notoriously insecure and hackable.

And there was hardly a word about any of this in the press. The election system was an open bank vault. Bush had stolen a previous election. Experts were giving odds like 10 million to one against the Bush win, in analyses of election data. Totally ignored by the press.

As for Ohio, the focus of the Jan. 6 challenge, little tiny bits of news in back pages appeared here and there--concerning the most massive and scandalous violation of the Voting Rights Act ever perpetrated. A massive assault on minority voting rights. Hardly a word. Even with a US Senator putting her reputation on the line to expose it! And John Conyers and the Black Caucus begging for an official Congressional investigation.

The press failure on this matter is beyond war profiteering and war sensationalism. It is beyond lying and propaganda. And it is into the realm of Stalinist-style control over the minds of American citizens.

Back up a bit, to Nov. 2, 2004. There is one other thing that caused me to throw in the towel on the BushCon press. Few people know this. Those exit polls on everybody's TV screens showing a Kerry win, on election day, were CHANGED--as the day went on, they were "altered" to fit the "official results"--thus denying the American public the information that Kerry won the Exit Polls.

In no other country in the world do they do this. Elsewhere, Exit Polls are used to verify elections and check for fraud. The people in the Ukraine had the two conflicting figures--the Exit Polls vs. the official tally--and could see that something was very wrong. But we could not.

This "alteration" of the Exit Polls to fit the official tally contributed to the illusion that Bush won. And I do think it was/is an illusion. I think there is overwhelming evidence that Kerry won--possibly by a landslide. Every set of figures you look at--whether it's the exit polls vs. the official tally (and the weird skew toward Bush that they reveal, in just the states he needed to win), or the paper vs. electronic votes (electronic skewed to Bush), or top of the ticket vs. lower ticket (weird anomalies, all favoring Bush), or new voter registration (57% Dem, 41% Rep.-who did all those new Democrats vote for?), or 2000 vs. 2004 voting patterns, or all the machine "malfunctions" favoring Bush, including the numerous touchscreens that changed Kerry votes to Bush votes--everything you look at says Kerry won.

As I said, it's overwhelming. And there is hardly a word, hardly a breath of any of this in BushCon news.

That deception--that changing of the Exit Poll data to fit the official results on everybody's TV screens on election day--may seem like a small thing, a commercial TV discretionary thing. But it is not small. It ranks up there with the lies about Iraq WMDs as one of the worst journalistic crimes ever perpetrated.

It broke peoples' hearts. It made the majority in this country feel helpless, depressed, isolated, and fearful. It deprived people of hope--one of the greatest crimes that one group of people can inflict on another.

It will live in infamy. And it is unforgivable. And, really, that was the last straw. By Jan. 6, I did not expect, not even a little bit, that America's phony "journalists" would do their job.

[Maru Kitteh]

60. What an excellent question! I never thought about it before

I think for me it was less of a eureka moment and more of a slow seeping discomfort leading to total revulsion.

If I had to pick a moment, I guess it would have been the summer of 1989 when I finally started putting together how sick it all was, the grandpa treatment of Ronnie Ray-gun despite all the crime and greed of his reign. Our hubris before the world, the mega corporations and the McDisneyfication stomping slicing killing and plundering every corner of the earth for one goal only. It's the same goal that motivates GWB right now. Power/money/control. All the same word for these bastards.

[Scurrilous]

61. The day I first logged onto the internet...

...and discovered the real thing.

[EnfantTerrible]

62. When I finally got a computer and joined DU!

I never really watched or read any news. Then I began to see stories on this site... things that I felt sure would be Headlines and I couldn't believe weren't being mentioned by the MSM... I discovered Truthout... read Will Pitt... that about did it for me. Now I watch the MSM to learn what the latest propaganda will be out of the WH about whatever attrocities they're planning to commit next.

[neuvocat]

63. During Reagan's term

when I saw that a man who was using his career as an actor to influence people's politics was able to do it so easily.

[liveoaktx]

64. Final nail in my turning it off was *Orwell Rolls in his Grave*

which put all the elements of the Telecommunications Act, Media Ownership and baloney being trotted out by MSN into focus. I still havee satellite and *will* have it, but I blocked the channels of CNN/FOX/etc so that they do not even appear on the program guide.

[jobendorfer]

65. 1970-ish. Age 8.

After listening to hundreds of radio news reports about the Vietnam
war that were slight variations of

"American forces killed 268 Viet Cong in action near
Hue. Six GIs stubbed their toes."

The stories I heard from people who served there painted
a very different picture.

J.

[yurbud]

66. 9/11: Reality and the news parted company

I have a slightly more than a layman's knowledge of how our air defenses work, and any honest expert wouldn't have accepted any of the Bushies' explanations of what happened.