During the 2000 Presidential election cycle, the national media simultaneously learned a new word, one which I had never heard before, or being used by any of the talking heads on television.  The word was “Gravitas”, and was used to describe an attribute that the media apparently felt  Republican candidate George W. Bush lacked.  Your class assignment today is to look it up.

The fact that this obscure term was suddenly on the lips and computer screens of most of the mass media gave rise to a couple of questions.  Who came up with the term?  And, how did it spread faster than a runny nose at nursery school?  The answer to the first is the campaign of Democratic candidate Al Gore.  The answer to the second is that it quickly became evident that the main stream media was totally under the influence of the liberal left, who was supplying them with “talking points” to use against the Republicans.  That, my friends is not an example of a “free press”, but rather more akin to Pravda and Izvestia, the state organs of the former Soviet Union.

Now, the media has it’s knickers in a knot because President Trump has said so-called “fake news” (I’d be more blunt.  Call it what it is….Lies) disseminated by some media outlets make them “enemies of the people”.  What else can you call them?  Someone who was a master of lying was the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. One of his notable quotes was:  “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”  The liberal left has been in virtual control of our media for a very long time.  Most journalists aren’t bad people, but from their earliest school days, many of them have been shaped into what they have become, ideologues, not truth seekers.  That is dangerous to our country, whether they lean too far left or right.  A free people need and deserve a free press (read “media” in modern parlance).  Right now we just don’t have one.