Broken News

I happened to stumble upon Rachel Maddow’s show a couple of days ago and was greeted by a proclamation of a breaking news story, one that she and MSNBC alone were privy to. The lead in promised that her “scoop” was an amazing bit of journalism, and indeed it appeared to be.

It was, as it turned out, a political poll that showed that a significant number of people disagreed with President Trump about something or other. The problem with this poll was that it failed to show the number of people questioned or their demographics, which to my mind at least nullified this "proprietary-only-we-have-it“ would be scoop.

This kind of thing, much like the unattributed stories so prevalent in the mainstream press these days simply plays on the fears of the public, without providing any source material to backup the assertions. This is the crux of what we call "Fake News" and is a gross disservice to all who consume these purported news stories.

The Dark Clouds Of Conflict

Make no mistake about it, the dark clouds of battle hover over the nation’s capital. Donald Trump’s minions are engaged in an all-out warfare with the U.S. Deep State version of the intelligence services. President Trump appears to be in conflict with the entrenched intelligence community on many levels.

The recent take-down of Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor, based partly on unsubstantiated intelligence leaks along with reputedly lying about his interaction with Russian government sources appeared to be a soft "coup d’état” by dissident factions of the CIA, NSA and FBI. Aided and abetted by Trump’s brand of unscripted, haphazard and chaotic political tweets that flood the media, the battle rages on. But there’s more to the story than this.

The conventional Democratic and Republican parties have miserably failed their constituents. The pundits and political professionals all failed to properly read the pulse of the public. It is true that Hillary Clinton was clearly an uninspiring and compromised candidate, due to her ties to Wall Street and war mongering, but her loss went deeper than that.

Amidst this ongoing political conflict there is another crises at work, and it is both global and systemic. The Deep State factions world-wide, whether conservative or liberal, are being disrupted by mass protests of the disenfranchised. These storm clouds are bearing down not only in the U.S. but across Europe as well. And yet once again the political elites are tone deaf, failing to understand what is happening, Oh so sad.