The Coast News Group
Baby Boomer Peace

Don’t believe everything you read

It’s nice escaping the world sometimes but I have always loved local newspapers over the high and mighty mainstream press. Reading The Coast News harkens me back to another time and not so faraway place.

I’ve read a lot of front page news since I was a kid. I started my first paper route when I was 12 with a freebie paper called The Californian that most customers used for their birdcage.

I guess I learned to be a true entrepreneur at a young age as the newspaper didn’t pay me. At the end of the month I would try to collect from my allotted 200 customers. No one was obligated to pay for the paper but when the kindhearted would give me something, I was allowed to keep it all. I was learning at that young age that sometimes you work hard and you don’t make much money but if you have the right product you can succeed.

Eventually I became an afternoon delivery boy and delivered the San Diego Evening Tribune until the age of 16.

Any crises that occurred in the world, I knew about. I would read the stories while folding and stuffing the papers into my bike bags. I grew up with news and always believed that the press was telling us the truth and all the truth.

I love writing for The Coast News since our paper is still pretty much “old school” with its diversity in its lifestyle columns yet straightforward with its news reporting, sans ideology.

This paper is special but the rest of the mainstream press is at best, suspect. We aren’t always getting the straightforward news reporting that we deserve.

The American people should expect that their news is not slanted so as to become propaganda instead of news. The Founding Fathers wanted an independent press in order to keep power in check.

The press was supposed to be the fourth estate of government. Unfortunately the mainstream press today seems to have an agenda instead of neutrality and the American people can easily be manipulated in their assessments of “truth” if they are not careful.

For example, here are some interesting facts about the relationship between our current government and the mainstream press. Ian Cameron, ABC News executive producer, is married to National Security Advisor Susan Rice.

CBS President David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, who is President Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications. ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman is married to former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. ABC News and Univision reporter Matthew Jaffe is married to Katie Hogan, Obama’s Deputy Press Secretary.

ABC President Ben Sherwood is the brother of Obama’s Special Communications Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood. CNN President Virginia Moseley is married to Hillary Clinton’s former Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.

And we all know that NBC is owned by General Electric. General Electric President and CEO Jeffrey Immelt was, until recently, a cabinet czar in the Obama administration.

Unfortunately the American people have to take the “news cycles” with a grain of salt. The news that comes out of ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC has to be looked at with a jaundiced eye. Recently we have learned that Brian Williams, NBC’s evening news anchor and news director, has been reporting “whoppers” for years. As the anchor and news director of NBC News, Williams could pick and choose whatever he wanted to report.

Similarly, Dan Rather, in his run at CBS, had near complete control over truth and eventually was caught delivering even bigger whoppers than Williams when he tried to influence an election at the midnight hour before the polls opened.

The American mainstream press is so ideological and slanted that they felt justified in spending more than two years digging and reporting dirt on the governor of New Jersey’s “bridgegate” scandal (over a two-hour traffic jam) that eventually delivered no wrongdoing whatsoever yet spent virtually no time investigating and reporting the IRS’ treatment of conservative nonprofits, the gun running scandal Fast & Furious, the falsity of a video as the cause of the Benghazi attack and the DOJ’s spying on the Associated Press and Fox News reporters.

The list is almost endless in the hypocrisy pushed on the unsuspecting American people by this ideological press.

Our country is at peril right now with all the enemies that we have and it would be nice to get the truth without ideology behind it.

Therefore, I still love the unbiased simplicity and truth that comes from our own hometown family-owned newspaper that is beholden to nobody except you. It would have been nice to have been a paperboy for The Coast News as a kid because readers of news and entertainment only want the truth, good or bad.

They don’t want propaganda whether liberal or conservative. I think I would have made some really good coin had the paper been around back then.

I’ve just returned to my little piece of heaven down in Mexico for the next month so I promise that my next column in two weeks will be devoid of such controversy and negativity and be one of hope and spring eternal. Fifty percent of my readers are going to think that I’m lying and the other 50 percent are going to say, “It’s about time someone had the guts to say that!”

I’m going to enjoy my simple life for a month. I wish the same for all of you and pray that those at the highest levels of the MSP would have an epiphany because no one likes being lied to. Go in peace!

Joe Moris may be contacted at (760) 500-6755 or by email at   [email protected]