American Thinker 07.12.2011 - Marvin Folkertsma - America's Bureaucracy of Truth.txt

Perhaps the best example of this point centers on media reports of the Solyndra bankruptcy in August 2011, which attentive consumers of news know involved over half a billion dollars in federal loan guarantees to a company favored by the Obama administration. This came in spite of credible projections that the company would go bankrupt at almost exactly the time it actually did. Further, private investors who were contributors to the Obama campaign will apparently take precedence over taxpayers in getting reimbursed first -- an arrangement that reeks of political payback. All of this amounts to a pretty big news story, right?

Not as far as the talking heads are concerned. The Media Research Center's November 2011 Report ("The Watchdog") highlighted this story and others under the headline "Solyndra, Like ACORN, Van Jones, and Other Obama Scandals, Another Cover-up by the Liberal Media." Now the MRC has done yeoman's work exposing accounts like this, especially with the Solyndra Scandal, about which The Watchdog states: "For the three months following the Enron implosion in 2002, those same news networks had run 198 stories -- a 24-to-1 disparity!" Further, "a Pew survey in September showed that only 43 percent of respondents had even heard of the scandal."

But does this constitute bias? Is this a cover-up? Actually, the answer is that no, it is not, because our media operate under firm rules about what to say and not to say, and the rule in this case amounts to blindness to events that are embarrassing to the regime. Again, as in Soviet Russia, this rule is internalized and is followed without thinking about it. In the Soviet Union, the result was an entire country that lived in a fictitious realm that had no news, while in the United States, this zone comprises a bit less than half of the population, at least in this case. For America's Soviet-like media, if you don't talk about an event, it didn't happen, or if it did, it didn't really matter much.

Welcome to America's fantasy land of self-important writers and talkers who are committed to rules of prattle that are often bereft of real news. In the Soviet Union, as noted in agonized words by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russians had to live in a land of lies. In America, the result is not quite as extreme, but on some occasions it comes close. Indeed, it seems that many citizens, even in a free country, cannot avoid living under the non-news regime of America's Bureaucracy of Truth.

Dr. Marvin Folkertsma is a professor of political science and fellow for American studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The author of several books, his latest release is a high-energy novel titled The Thirteenth Commandment.