Here is the The Daily Signal’s opening of the article that accompanies the above video:
Sharyl Attkisson, an award-winning investigative reporter who resigned from CBS News earlier this year, says the news media are heading down a dangerous path with attempts to “censor or block stories” that don’t align with their preferred agenda.
“There’s a tendency in the news media, on the part of some managers, to censor or block stories that don’t fall in line with the message they want sent to the viewers,” Attkisson said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal. “I think that’s really a very dangerous perspective to have.”
In the first of three segments, Attkisson shared her views on journalism and life after CBS News. Her newest investigative report—about oxygen trials conducted on premature babies—was published by The Daily Signal today. She will serve as a senior independent contributor to the news organization, which made its debut Tuesday.
Attkisson made headlines in March when she left CBS News after a 20-year career at the TV network. In subsequent interviews, she cited her inability to get her stories on the air.
Read more: The Daily Signal
Here is an incredibly important excerpt from that video — Attkisson was asked about the goal of her upcoming book, Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, that’s to be released in the fall:
What I hope to do with Stonewalled is explain to the public how images that they see every day — not just on the news but including the news and social media, on television, on billboards — how these images are manipulated and covert and surreptitious ways by political forces and financially backed forces that they have no idea about. If you can become savvy to this manipulation — and sometimes outright propaganda — you can learn to recognize and sorta filter through it, which I think helps people make up their own mind about what’s really going on in the world.
There is a movement in Washington DC to affect public opinion in ways other than direct bombing. People know about campaign lobbying contributions given directly to members of Congress. Now there’s a whole industry set up around manipulating public opinion or swaying public opinion in other ways through social media; maybe setting up blind accounts or accounts through pseudonyms; through editing Wikipedia in certain ways; through posting on Twitter and Facebook. There are all kinds of ways people’s opinions are being shaped — through forces that they don’t know are behind the shaping up those opinions — and I really think it’s important that people know who’s behind the efforts.
The political left owns the k-college education system, the old (but still dominant!) media, the big players in the new media (Yahoo News, Google News, and others), and most of what makes it to prime time TV and your local movie theater. Yet they’re not satisfied with that. Highly funded government employee as well as private sector unions spend many millions on efforts to sway public opinion. Then there are the countless non-profit organizations which understand fully the power of propaganda. As Attkisson outlines in this interview, political lefties keep seeking new ways to shape the public mind.
And where is the political right?
Comparing the understanding and ability of the political left and the political right when it comes to their grasp of what’s needed, well, it is no contest. And that’s why liberals continue to win the information war.
