CNN Is Dead: Network Loses All Credibility As Producer Admits That The Entire Russia Narrative Is Fake News

Nobody else needs to dig a grave for CNN because they are doing it themselves.  There has been scandal after scandal at the network, and now one of their producers has been caught on undercover video admitting that CNN has been pushing fake news stories about a connection between Donald Trump and Russia in a desperate attempt to get ratings.  In other words, CNN’s entire Russia narrative has been a complete lie all along.  Unfortunately for CNN, they are going to discover that once your credibility is gone it is incredibly difficult to ever get it back.

On Tuesday, Project Veritas made headlines all over the world when it released undercover video of CNN Producer John Bonifield admitting that CNN’s Russia narrative is fake news.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you can view the entire video right here.  Now that this video has been made public, I don’t see how CNN is ever going to recover from this.  When one of your top producers admits that the story you have been pushing for months is basically a load of cow manure, it is impossible to maintain the pretense that you are a legitimate news organization any longer…

Project Veritas has released a video of CNN Producer John Bonifield who was caught on hidden-camera admitting that there is no proof to CNN’s Russia narrative.

“I mean, it’s mostly bullshit right now,” Bonifield says. “Like, we don’t have any giant proof.”

He confirms that the driving factor at CNN is ratings:

“It’s a business, people are like the media has an ethical phssssss… All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school you’re just like, that’s adorable. That’s adorable. This is a business.”

And of course this comes on the heels of three reporters being forced out of CNN for publishing a false story that attempted to link a Russian investment fund with Trump…

Three CNN employees have handed in their resignations over a retracted story linking President Trump to Russia, the network announced Monday.

The article was removed from CNN.com on Friday after the network decided it could no longer stand by its reporting.

“In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignation of the employees involved in the story’s publication,” a network spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement.

President Trump has taken a lot of heat for referring to CNN as “fake news”, but after the events of the past several days he has been completely vindicated.

And once news broke of three reporters being forced out of the network for a false story about Russia, he took a bit of a victory lap with this tweet

Wow, CNN had to retract big story on “Russia,” with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!

This is such a shame, because I always liked CNN’s election coverage compared to the other networks.  John King always did such a great job breaking things down county by county, and Wolf Blitzer always made things seem so dramatic.

But now it is exceedingly difficult to see any sort of a future for the network after all of this.

And of course other major news outlets have been guilty of pushing fake news about Russia too.  The following comes from the Intercept

Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.

But with CNN it has always been on another level, and we now have a top insider on tape admitting that a connection between Trump and Russia is being pushed even though there isn’t any evidence.  In fact, Bonifield says that CNN CEO Jeff Zucker has been personally pushing this angle himself

“Just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN (Jeff Zucker) said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with that, let’s get back to Russia.”

I can’t imagine that Zucker gets to keep his job now that this has been revealed.

It may not happen immediately, but look for him to be shown the door in the not too distant future.

All along, Trump has insisted that this whole thing with Russia has been a “witch hunt”, and that is what I have been saying too.  And it turns out that Bonifield feels the exact same way

“I just feel like they don’t really have it but they want to keep digging. And so I think the President is probably right to say, like, look you are witch hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.”

If this doesn’t kill “the Russia story”, I don’t know what will.

This whole thing has been a massive charade from the very beginning, and the big news networks have been endlessly pushing it for ratings.

In their zeal to destroy Trump, they have “jumped the shark” and have destroyed their own credibility instead.

Once upon a time, most mainstream journalists at least attempted to pretend that they were being objective, but those days are long gone.

Today, it is absolutely imperative for all of us to understand that everyone has an agenda.  In other words, every single person that you see on television is trying to get a message across.  So instead of taking in news and entertainment passively, we need to have our filters up and we need to be thinking for ourselves.

Fortunately, episodes such as this one tend to awaken a lot of people, and more Americans than ever are sick and tired of the lies and misinformation that they are constantly being fed.

CNN Tells Americans That The Stock Market Is Not Going To Crash

CNN Newsroom - Photo by Doug WaldronOn Wednesday we witnessed the third largest single day point gain for the Dow Jones Industrial Average ever.  That sounds like great news until you realize that the two largest were in October 2008 – right in the middle of the last financial crisis.  This is a perfect example of what I wrote about yesterday.  Every time the market crashes, there are huge up days, huge down days and giant waves of market momentum.  Even though the Dow was up 619 points on Wednesday, overall we are still down more than 2,000 points from the peak of the market.  During the weeks and months to come, we are going to see many more wild market swings, but the overall direction of the market will be down.

Sadly, the mainstream media is still peddling the lie that everything is going to be just fine.  So millions upon and millions of Americans are just going to sit there while their investments get wiped out.  In the six trading days leading up to Wednesday, Americans lost a staggering 2.1 trillion dollars as stocks plunged, and the truth is that this nightmare is only just beginning.

Early on Wednesday morning, CNN published an article entitled “Why U.S. stocks aren’t headed for a crash“.  I had to laugh when I saw that headline.  If CNN is going to make this kind of a claim, they better have something very solid to base it on.  But instead, these are the five reasons we were given for why the stock market is not going to collapse…

1. “The U.S. economy isn’t on the verge of a recession.”

This is exactly what all of the “experts” told us back in 2007 and 2008 too.  In America today, the homeownership rate is at a 48 year low, 46 million Americans go to food banks, and economic growth has slowed to a standstill (and that is if you actually buy the highly manipulated official numbers).  The truth, of course, is that things continue to progressively get worse as our long-term economic decline continues to unfold.  For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “12 Ways The Economy Is Already In Worse Shape Than It Was During The Depths Of The Last Recession“.

2. “China’s effect on U.S. is limited.”

Really? Go to just about any major retail store and start reading labels.  You will likely find far more things that were “made in China” than you will American-made products.  The global economy is more interconnected than ever before, and the Chinese stock market is the second largest on the entire planet.  Of course what is happening in China is going to affect us.

3. “American businesses are doing pretty well (outside of energy).”

Actually, they were doing pretty well for a while, but now things are turning.  Many large corporations are reporting declining orders, declining revenues and declining profits.  Unsold inventories are beginning to pile up and the pace of layoffs is starting to increase.  All of the things that we would expect to see just prior to another recession are happening.

4. “The Federal Reserve sounds cautious.”

This is laughable.  Ultimately, it isn’t going to matter much at all whether the Federal Reserve barely raises rates or not.  The era of “central bank omnipotence” is at an end.  Just look at what is happening over in Europe.  All of the quantitative easing that the ECB has been doing has not kept their markets from crashing in recent days.  Those that believe that the Federal Reserve can somehow miraculously keep the stock market from crashing this time around are going to end up deeply, deeply disappointed.

5. “Stock prices aren’t crazy high anymore.”

There is some truth to this last point.  Instead of stock prices being really, really, really crazy now they are just really, really crazy.  But as I have pointed out in many previous articles, the technical indicators are very clearly telling us that U.S. stocks still have a long, long way to go down.

But let’s hope that CNN is actually right – at least in the short-term.

Let’s hope that markets settle down and that things stabilize for at least a few weeks.

In order for that to happen, markets need to become a lot less volatile than they are right now.  The rollercoaster ride that we have been on in recent days has been extraordinary

The Dow traveled another 1,600 points during Tuesday’s trading session, adding to the 4,900 points the index traveled in down and up moves on Monday.

Markets tend to go up slowly and steadily when things are calm, and they tend to go down rapidly when things are volatile.

If you are rooting for a return of the bull market, you should be hoping for nice, boring trading days where the Dow goes up by about 100 points or so.  Wild swings like we have seen on Friday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are very strong indicators that we have entered a bear market.

What we have been witnessing over the past week is almost unprecedented.  Just check out this piece of analysis from Bloomberg

By one metric, investors would have to go back 75 years to find the last time the S&P 500’s losses were this abrupt.

Bespoke Investment Group observed that the S&P 500 has closed more than four standard deviations below its 50-day moving average for the third consecutive session. That’s only the second time this has happened in the history of the index.

Of course after such a dramatic plunge it was inevitable that we were going to have a “bounce back day” where there was lots of panic buying.  Initially it looked like it would be Tuesday, but it turned out to be Wednesday instead.

But if you think that the big gain on Wednesday somehow means that the crisis is “over”, you are going to be sorely mistaken.

Personally, I am hoping that we at least see a bit of a pause in the action, but there is absolutely no guarantee that we will even get that.

As the markets have been flying around, more and more Americans are becoming curious about the potential for a full-blown stock market crash.  The following comes from Business Insider

This one’s pretty easy: according to Google search trends, more Americans are searching for “stock market crash” now that at any point since the last crash.

Right now, search traffic for the term “stock market crash” is hitting about 70% of the most volume this term has ever gotten through Google search.

And so while this data doesn’t convey absolute search volume for the term, we do know that Americans appear to be looking for information about a stock market crash at the highest level in about 7 years.

Very interesting.

In addition, Americans are also becoming more pessimistic about the overall economy.  According to Gallup, the level of confidence that Americans have about the future performance of the U.S. economy is the lowest that it has been in about a year.

And remember – it isn’t just U.S. markets that are starting to go crazy.  All over the planet stocks are crashing and recessions are starting.  In fact, I can’t remember a time when there has been this much economic chaos erupting all over the world all at once.

So can the U.S. resist the overall trend and pull out of this market crash?

Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

10 Things About The U.S. News Media That They Do Not Want You To Know

10 Things About The US News MediaDo you trust the news media?  Do you believe that the information that they are giving you is true and accurate?  If you answered yes to either of those questions, that places you in a steadily shrinking minority.  Yes, on average Americans watch approximately 153 hours of television a month, but for their news they are increasingly turning to alternative sources of information such as this website.  Big news channels such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are losing hordes of viewers, and they are desperately searching for answers.  Things have gotten so bad at CNN that they have been forced to lay off hundreds of workers.  The mainstream media is slowly dying, but they will never admit it.  They are still convinced that they can find some way to turn this around and regain the trust of the American people.  But it simply is not going to happen.  The following are 10 things about the U.S. news media that they do not want you to know…

#1 The level of trust in the U.S. news media is at an all-time low.

According to a Gallup survey that was conducted last month, only 40 percent of all Americans have a “great deal/fair amount” of confidence in the mass media.  That ties the lowest level that Gallup has ever recorded.

#2 The news media is far more liberal than the American people.

We hear much about the supposed “conservative bias” of Fox News, but the truth is that overall the U.S. public considers the news media to be extremely liberal.  Gallup found that 44 percent of all Americans consider the news media to be “too liberal”, and only 19 percent of all Americans consider the news media to be “too conservative”.

And it is a fact that “journalists” are far more likely to give money to Democrats than to Republicans.  The following comes from an MSNBC report

MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

#3 Fox News is not nearly as “conservative” as you think that it is.

Fox News may be constantly promoting a “Republican agenda”, but that does not mean that it is conservative.  This is especially true when it comes to social issues.  Some of their anchors are extremely socially liberal, one of the top executives at Fox News is a big Hillary Clinton supporter, and 21st Century Fox/News Corp. has given the Clintons more than 3 million dollars since 1992.

#4 MSNBC is in a death spiral.

After years of lying to the American people, the credibility of MSNBC is absolutely shot.  Pretty much all MSNBC does is endlessly spew establishment propaganda.  One study found that MSNBC only engages in 15 percent “factual reporting” and the other 85 percent is “commentary/opinion”.

So it should be no surprise that only 6 percent of Americans consider MSNBC to be their most trusted source for news…

NBC News and sister cable network MSNBC rank at the bottom of media outlets Americans trust most for news, with Fox News leading the way, according to a new poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.

In its fifth trust poll, 35 percent said they trusted Fox news more than any other outlet, followed by PBS at 14 percent, ABC at 11 percent, CNN at 10 percent, CBS at 9 percent, 6 percent for MSNBC and Comedy Central, and just 3 percent for NBC.

#5 Americans are increasingly turning to Facebook and other Internet sources for their news.

At least that is what one recent survey discovered.  It found that an astounding 48 percent of Americans got news about government and politics from Facebook within the past week.  The numbers for CNN and Fox News were just 44 percent and 39 percent respectively.

#6 Over the past year or so the big three cable news networks have lost an unprecedented number of viewers. 

According to a Pew Research study, the number of prime time viewers for all three networks combined declined by 11 percent in 2013…

In 2013, the cable news audience, by nearly all measures, declined. The combined median prime-time viewership of the three major news channels—CNN, Fox News and MSNBC—dropped 11% to about 3 million, the smallest it has been since 2007. The Nielsen Media Research data show that the biggest decline came at MSNBC, which lost nearly a quarter (24%) of its prime-time audience. CNN, under new management, ended its fourth year in third place, with a 13% decline in prime time. Fox, while down 6%, still drew more viewers (1.75 million) than its two competitors combined (619,500 at MSNBC and 543,000 at CNN).

The decline was even more dramatic for the critical 25 to 54-year-old demographic.  From November 2012 to November 2013, CNN’s ratings for that demographic plunged by a whopping 59 percent, and MSNBC’s ratings for that demographic plummeted by 52 percent.

#7 The big news networks have a love affair with the Obama administration.

Yes, there are reporters that get annoyed by the petty press rules that Obama makes them follow and by their lack of access to the president, but overall there is a tremendously incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and the mainstream news media.

For example, did you know that the president of CBS and the president of ABC both have brothers that have served as top officials in the Obama administration?

And needless to say, Barack Obama does not care for the alternative media much at all.  The following is an excerpt from a WND article

NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd says President Obama was making it “clear” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the weekend how he feels about the rise of Internet news sites like Politico, Buzzfeed and … well, WND.

“He hates it.”

Appearing on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning following Saturday night’s media, politics and celebrity soiree, Todd explained the president’s disdain for independent online news sources was showing during his speech.

“It did seem … I thought his pot shots, joke-wise, and then the serious stuff about the Internet, the rise of the Internet media and social media and all that stuff – he hates it, OK? He hates this part of the media,” Todd said. “He really thinks that the, sort of, the buzzification – this isn’t just about Buzzfeed or Politico and all this stuff – he thinks that sort of coverage of political media has hurt political discourse. He hates it. And I think he was just trying to make that clear last night.”

#8 Newspaper ad revenues are about a third of what they were back in the year 2000. 

Yes, you read that correctly.  As Americans have discarded the print versions of their newspapers, newspaper ad revenues have experienced a decline that is absolutely unprecedented

It took a half century for annual newspaper print ad revenue to gradually increase from $20 billion in 1950 (adjusted for inflation in 2013 dollars) to $65.8 billion in 2000, and then it took only 12 years to go from $65.8 billion in ad revenues back to less than $20 billion in 2012, before falling further to $17.3 billion last year.

#9 News magazines are also experiencing a dramatic multi-year decline in ad revenues. 

Once upon a time, news magazines such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were must reads.

But those days are long gone.

Ad revenues are way down across the entire industry, and any magazine that can keep their yearly losses to the single digits is applauded for it

For a third year in a row, news magazines faced a difficult print advertising environment. Combined ad pages (considered a better measure than ad revenue) for the five magazines studied in this report were down 13% in 2013, following a decline of 12.5% in 2012, and about three times the rate of decline in 2011, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Again, hardest hit was The Week, which suffered a 20% drop in ad pages. The Atlantic fell 17%, The Economist 16%, and Time about 11%, while The New Yorker managed to keep its ad pages losses in single digits (7%).

#10 Even though the mainstream media is dying, they still have an overwhelmingly dominant position.

What would you say if I told you that there are just six enormous media conglomerates that combine to produce about 90 percent of all the media that Americans consume?

If you do not believe this, please see my previous article entitled “Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read“?

This is why “the news” seems to be so similar no matter what channel you watch.

But we aren’t just talking about control of the news media.  These giant media corporations also own movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, video game makers, music labels and even many of our favorite websites.

So we should be thankful that their media monopoly is finally crumbling.

Nobody should have that much power over what the American people see, hear and think about.

What is your perspective on all of this?  Please feel free to share your thoughts on the U.S. news media by posting a comment below…

Is The Mainstream Media Dying?

CNN News Studio - Photo by DougRatings at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have all been plummeting in recent years, and newspaper ad revenues are about a third of what they were back in the year 2000.  So is the mainstream media dying?  Despite what you may have heard, the mainstream media is certainly not completely dead just yet.  The average American watches approximately 153 hours of television a month, and as I pointed out in a previous article, about 90 percent of the “information” that is endlessly pumped into our heads through our televisions is controlled by just six gigantic media corporations.  However, there are a whole host of signs that things are changing – especially when it comes to news.  More Americans than ever are losing faith in the establishment-controlled media and are seeking out alternative sources of information.  Is this a trend that the big media companies are going to be able to reverse at some point?

For years, the “news business” has been dominated by CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.  But now all three channels are rapidly losing viewers.  According to a recently released Pew Research study, the number of prime time viewers for all three networks combined fell by 11 percent last year…

In 2013, the cable news audience, by nearly all measures, declined. The combined median prime-time viewership of the three major news channels—CNN, Fox News and MSNBC—dropped 11% to about 3 million, the smallest it has been since 2007. The Nielsen Media Research data show that the biggest decline came at MSNBC, which lost nearly a quarter (24%) of its prime-time audience. CNN, under new management, ended its fourth year in third place, with a 13% decline in prime time. Fox, while down 6%, still drew more viewers (1.75 million) than its two competitors combined (619,500 at MSNBC and 543,000 at CNN).

And the decline is far more dramatic when you look at just the key 25 to 54-year-old demographic.

From November 2012 to November 2013, CNN’s ratings for that demographic dropped by a staggering 59 percent, and MSNBC’s ratings for that demographic dropped by a staggering 52 percent.

Is this a sign that Americans are finally getting fed up with the endless propaganda being spewed by those establishment mouthpieces?

A recent survey conducted by a liberal polling firm would indeed seem to indicate that this is the case.  That survey found that only 6 percent of Americans consider MSNBC to be their most trusted source for news…

NBC News and sister cable network MSNBC rank at the bottom of media outlets Americans trust most for news, with Fox News leading the way, according to a new poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.

In its fifth trust poll, 35 percent said they trusted Fox news more than any other outlet, followed by PBS at 14 percent, ABC at 11 percent, CNN at 10 percent, CBS at 9 percent, 6 percent for MSNBC and Comedy Central, and just 3 percent for NBC.

And of course it is not just the big mainstream news networks that are in decline.

A recently released Pew Research study discovered that the decline of America’s newspapers continued in 2013 as well…

The Newspaper Association of America has stopped compiling quarterly reports on advertising revenue. According to its annual numbers, which were released in April 2014, overall revenue for newspapers in 2013 was $37.6 billion, a decrease of 2.6% from 2012. Within that total, combined print and digital ad revenue decreased by 7%—to $20.7 billion.

Seven percent may not sound like much, but you have to realize that these declines have been happening year after year.  When you look back over a longer time frame, it really puts the massive decline that we have witnessed in advertising revenues in perspective

It took a half century for annual newspaper print ad revenue to gradually increase from $20 billion in 1950 (adjusted for inflation in 2013 dollars) to $65.8 billion in 2000, and then it took only 12 years to go from $65.8 billion in ad revenues back to less than $20 billion in 2012, before falling further to $17.3 billion last year.

Even when revenues from digital advertising and other categories described by the NAA as “niche publications, direct marketing and non-daily publication advertising” are added to print ad revenue (see red line in chart), the combined total revenues for print, digital and other advertising last year was still only $23.56 billion in 2013 dollars, which was the lowest amount of annual ad revenue since 1954, when $23.3 billion was spent on print advertising alone.

Yes, you read those numbers correctly.  As you can see from this chart, newspaper ad revenues are now about a third of what they were back in the year 2000.

That is not just a “shift” – that is a massive tsunami.

Needless to say, the big newspapers are quite distressed by all of this.

For example, “the Grey Lady” herself is essentially in a state of panic at this point.  Just recently, a 96 page internal New York Times report was obtained by BuzzFeed that basically skewers the company’s current strategy when it comes to the Internet…

A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture.

But they still don’t understand the true cause of their decline.

It isn’t the fact that they haven’t adapted to the Internet very well that is the primary reason for their decline.

Rather, it is the fact that the American people are losing faith in the New York Times and other similar establishment mouthpieces.

News magazines are also experiencing a dramatic multi-year decline.  Ad revenues are way down across the entire industry, and any publication that can keep their yearly losses to the single digits is applauded for it

For a third year in a row, news magazines faced a difficult print advertising environment. Combined ad pages (considered a better measure than ad revenue) for the five magazines studied in this report were down 13% in 2013, following a decline of 12.5% in 2012, and about three times the rate of decline in 2011, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Again, hardest hit was The Week, which suffered a 20% drop in ad pages. The Atlantic fell 17%, The Economist 16%, and Time about 11%, while The New Yorker managed to keep its ad pages losses in single digits (7%).

Mainstream media executives appear to be optimistic that they can reverse these declines at some point, but they simply don’t realize that there has been a fundamental paradigm shift when it comes to the news media in the United States.

The general population has lost a tremendous amount of faith in the mainstream media.  They are increasingly becoming aware that it is deeply controlled by the establishment.

At this point, the charade is so out in the open that even reporters are talking about it.  For example, former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson says that the “influence on the media” by political and corporate interests is “unprecedented”

There is unprecedented, I believe, influence on the media, not just the news, but the images you see everywhere. By well-orchestrated and financed campaign of special interests, political interests and corporations. I think all of that comes into play.

Wow.

Remember, this is not just some outsider that is saying these things.  Attkisson worked in the industry for more than 30 years.

And the American people know that they are getting very little truth from the establishment media these days.  A recent Gallup survey found that only 23 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the mainstream media at this point.  Increasingly, Americans are turning to other sources for news and information.

This is fueling an unprecedented alternative news boom, and more Americans than ever are relying on the Internet as their main source of news.  If you doubt this, just check out this chart.

30 years ago, you would have never been able to read this article.  It never would have gotten past the gatekeepers that had almost total control over what Americans read, watched and listened to.

But now things have changed.  The Internet has allowed ordinary Americans to communicate with each other on a scale that has never been possible before.  As we share information with each other, we are increasingly becoming aware that we don’t need the mainstream media to define what reality is for us after all.

If the mainstream media really wants to keep from dying, they should at least try to start telling us the truth.

Unfortunately, that simply is not going to happen.  The political and corporate interests that control the big media corporations have way too much to lose.

So we will have to continue to learn to think for ourselves and to share news and information with each other over the Internet.

In the end, we will all be much better off being unplugged from “the matrix” anyway.

28 Good Questions That The Mainstream Media Should Be Asking

Why is there so little trust in the mainstream media these days?  CNN ratings have been hovering close to record lows over the past few months.  A recent Gallup survey found that 60 percent of all Americans “have little or no trust” in the mainstream media.  That was a record high according to Gallup.  So why is this happening?  Sadly, the truth is that the mainstream media quit telling the truth a long time ago.  The mainstream media has an agenda, and more Americans than ever are beginning to recognize this.  Once upon a time, control of the news in the United States was at least somewhat decentralized.  But now there are just six giant media corporations that control almost everything that we see, hear and watch.  The version of “the news” that they give us is designed to serve the interests of those corporate giants and the other corporate giants that spend billions of dollars to advertise their products through those outlets.  Watching the news on television can be an extremely frustrating experience these days.  Yes, there are little bits and pieces of the truth in there, but you have to wade through an awful lot of “infotainment” to get to those bits and pieces.  That is one of the reasons why the “alternative media” has absolutely exploded in recent years.  The American people are hungry for the truth, and they are increasingly turning to alternative sources of news on the Internet in an attempt to find it.

We live at a time when the world is changing more rapidly than ever before.  Just about everything that can be shaken is being shaken, and anyone with half a brain realizes that we are heading for challenges that previous generations never even could have imagined.

There certainly is no shortage of news, but instead of focusing on the terribly important issues that we are facing, the mainstream media feeds us an endless stream of fluff, scandals and celebrities.

Just check out some of the headlines that I found on the front pages of major mainstream news websites today….

“Man Dies After Roach-Eating Contest”

“Ex-NFL Cheerleader Admits To Sex With Minor”

“Facebook Rolls Out Pinterest-Like Tool For Buying Stuff”

“Grumpy Cat Becomes Internet Sensation”

So what should the mainstream media really be talking about today?

The following are 28 good questions that the mainstream media should be asking….

1. Why is the IMF warning that there is an “alarmingly high” risk of a deeper global economic slowdown?

2. Why is Switzerland preparing for “major civil unrest” throughout Europe?

3. If the Spanish financial system completely collapses, what is that going to mean for the rest of Europe and the rest of the globe?

4. Is Turkey about to drag the rest of NATO (including the United States) into a war with Syria?

5. Why aren’t people screaming in outrage about the fact that the U.S. national debt increased by more than a trillion dollars for the fourth straight year in 2012?

6. Should we be concerned that the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt on the first day of fiscal year 2013 than it did from 1776 to 1941 combined?

7. If temporary refinery problems can cause some gas stations to shut down and cause gas prices in California to skyrocket to all-time highs, what would a real crisis do?

8. Why are some analysts predicting that a “rapid collapse” is coming for the U.S. dollar?

9. Will the U.S. dollar soon lose its status as the primary reserve currency of the world?

10. Why is Marc Faber warning that the wealthy “may lose up to 50 percent of their total wealth“?

11. By keeping interest rates near zero, is the Federal Reserve crushing the retirement dreams of millions of elderly Americans?

12. Why do Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and most members of Congress continue to stand behind the TSA when nearly 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from travelers since 2003?

13. Why are nearly half a million employees of the federal government making over $100,000 a year?

14. How in the world can you have a debate about the economy that lasts for an hour and a half and never even mention Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve or quantitative easing?

15. Why are Romney campaign signs being smeared with excrement?

16. British taxpayers spent 57.8 million dollars on the royal family in 2011.  U.S. taxpayers spent 1.4 billion dollars on the Obamas that same year.  How in the world can this be justified?

17. Why does the U.S. government treat our military veterans like garbage?  Many of them have given everything for their country.  Shouldn’t we treat them with more respect?

18. Why is the mainstream media ignoring a warning that an international gang of cybercriminals plans “to steal money from the online accounts of thousands of consumers at 30 or more major U.S. banks“?

19. The New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts is warning that rapidly rising global food prices could soon lead to massive food riots all over the planet.  Is this something that we should be concerned about?

20. Why is the United Nations pushing to have the authority to impose “global taxes” on all of us?

21. How did we get to the point where sex trafficking is now at epidemic levels all over the United States?

22. Why are so many young people being arrested?  Should we be concerned that 41 percent of all Americans have been arrested by the time they reach the age of 23?

23. Why are most Americans either overweight or obese or severely obese?

24. How was one Baltimore woman able to accumulate 30 free cell phones all paid for by the federal government?

25. Why are nearly 30 percent of all young adults in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket living at home with their parents?

26. Why has the birth rate in the United States fallen to an all-time low?

27. With the race for president incredibly tight right now, will the side that loses end up accusing the other side of using voter fraud to steal the election?

28. Is the U.S. Supreme Court about to make it illegal to resell our own stuff at yard sales, in thrift stores and on eBay?

Do you have any questions to add to this list?

Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….