Those of you who have worked with radars or who have seen them depicted on TV or in the movies know that the usual radar presentation is a TV-like screen with the radar in the middle of a circle and its beam sweeping around in a clockwise movement. As the real radar beam sweeps across a reflecting object like an airplane, or a boat, or a ship, the radar reflections from the object are painted with each rotation of the sweep on the screen showing the distance and the bearing of the object from the radar. But out at the very edge of the radar screen you may see a single reflection that quickly fades away. Something may be there or not -- who knows! A single reflection that soon fades away is called a blip.

The more inconspicuous and obscurely-placed the story the better. Following this line of logic, the most advanced BLIP New stories are important news stories that should have been published, but never were. God knows what the American people would do if these stories had appeared in print in the Mainstream Media!

But First, My Discovery of DRIP News

I became conscious of BLIP News ONLY because I had been previously exposed to a particularly egregious example of what I have come to call DRIP News. This is taken from the ancient Chinese torture of securing a bound victim beneath a slowly dripping source of water. At first the drips do not bother the victim, but after a while, the anticipation of the next drip drives the poor person into distraction and then into mania.

As a rather unsuspicious kind of a guy who generally thinks well of most people and who used to believe most American newspapers were honest and objective, I did not think too much of this until it had been going on for months. I then began to read the Mercury News much more closely, subjecting specific articles to certain critical and analytical skills I had developed over the years in critically reading intelligence reports from a variety of sources. (This is just a fancy way of saying I have transferred the ideas behind the concept of "Defensive Driving" over into the concept of "Defensive Reading.")

I soon noticed that the DRIP News did not appear in the local news reporting being produced by the reporters of the Mercury News. After sitting in meetings between the reporters and the senior editors earlier this year, I could see why. They have great integrity and they report the local news as fairly as they can and as objectively as they can. Unfortunately, the good reputation they and their editors have gained for the Mercury News locally is destroyed by the national political bias of the Knight-Ridder media chain and the other national news organizations. [See my March 1998 letter to Jerry Ceppos in another Web page.]

But the focus, the deadly focus, was on Clinton.

I believe that what I have seen in the Mercury News over the past four years is duplicated at almost every local newspaper in this country. A newspaper gains a well-deserved credibility through the fair and objective coverage of local news and through the fair and objective coverage of most topics in national and world news. Using this as cover, the newspaper can then subtly promote its own political agenda. It is a very careful and a very slow process. It is also a very effective process. The Democratic office holders at the state and national levels in the Santa Clara Valley and in the rest of the country have yet to realize what is going on.

As all of this started long before I went on the Internet, I began cutting out and saving these stories. I also began writing long letters to the paper complaining about the coverage of Whitewater and pointing to blatant criminal acts involving S&Ls that occurred during the Reagan administration which were never reported. Due to the incessant deadline pressures of a news cycle that grows shorter day by day, it was clear no one on the Mercury News National Desk was monitoring the material coming in on the National wires on the subject of Clinton and the whole subject of the Clinton scandals. (I later recommended to the Mercury News that they put together their own "book" and timeline on Whitewater and the other "Scandals," so they could check incoming stories against their own material and discover the inconsistencies, the outright fabrications, and the other "hyped-truths" in this material (see below). I was not arguing with the Mercury News about covering Clinton or of subjecting him to well-deserved criticism, but I thought it would be nice if they did it in an honest and objective way. If you are going to hang someone, you really should make some effort to determine if that person is guilty or not.

In the early months of 1994, and after I became conscious of DRIP News, it quickly became apparent that the intense scrutiny of things Whitewater by the National Media was unprecedented in recent history. It was DRIP News in its most sophisticated form. A SUSPICIOUS line item in a billing record, the SHREDDING of documents at the Rose Law Firm, the sale of a ten-year-old car -- all of it was grist to the media mill. If one accusation did not stick, make another. If that did not do the trick, try a third one. The Mainstream Media was not checking the accusations for veracity, they were too busy promulgating them across the country. If an action by the Clintons could be explained in several different ways, it was always the worst connotation that was assigned to their actions and the most benign to their opponents. (And as we read or heard again and again, only the White House "spins.")  

Many of the Washington Press corps are drawing down such large salaries and other income from a variety of sources that they believe investigative reporting is beneath their dignity. For this reason, there is very little Mainstream Media investigative reporting going on at the national level. Besides they already know what is true and what is not. If they do need information, they can go to the nearest GOP disinformation unit, lobbyist or Republican official (it is difficult to sort them out these days) and get a handout.

More important, there simply is not enough time anymore to do leg-work. The overwhelming objective of today's Mainstream Media is to get the news out fast. It does not have to be right, but it has to be fast. The new motto of the Mainstream Media seems to be: THE NEWS FIRST, THE FACTS LATER OR NOT AT ALL. Why ruin a good story with the truth? News is now a cheap commodity. It is also a commodity with a growing lack of content. Added to this, of course, is the "dumbing down" of the news and the fact that most of reporters in the Washington press corps could not investigate their way out of a paper bag (see below).

From the Discovery of DRIP News to the Discovery of BLIP News

Because Whitewater was about putative illegal doings involving a Federally-insured Savings and Loan, I and went to my local library and began researching what I consider to be the Crime of the Century -- the looting of our savings and loans by a number of Saving and Loan Thieves who got away with billions of dollars during the Reagan and Bush years. (And you thought most of the Reagan millionaires during the 1980s made their money from electronics!)

Moving from the intensity of the Mainstream Media investigation of Clinton to the Mainstream Media coverage of the Savings and Loan Lootings during the Reagan and Bush years was like moving from a dark and ominous night into the sunny skies and light air of a summer's day. There was coverage, but the stern prosecutorial tones of the Clinton coverage had been muted into the far-off twitter of small birds. It was Morning in America, and all was right with the world and with the Mainstream Media.

In addition, and fortunately for the American people, about six or seven books on the great S&L robbery have been published during the past decade. This is not to say they have been read, but they have been published and they should be read. The total cost so far of the S&L Scam alone during the Morning in America is between $400 BILLION and $500 BILLION dollars. This averages out to about $5,000 dollars for every family in the United States. If you work for a living, and depending upon your income level, that means you and your family were robbed of between $4,000 and $10,000. (Please remember however, this amount of money stolen from you and your family does not include the DOD Scam or the HUD Scam of the Reagan years.)

What a difference a presidential election made! We moved in one day from the Age of BLIP News into the Age of DRIP News.

If there is NO NEWS REPORT on a crime, there is NO CRIME.

If there is NO CRIME, there is NO PARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION.

If there is NO PARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION, there will be NO SPECIAL PROSECUTOR.

Starting on January 21, 1993, the inverse of these rules went into effect:

UNSOURCED ACCUSATIONS OR ALLEGATIONS, IF REPEATED OFTEN ENOUGH IN THE MEDIA , ARE SUFFICIENT TO ESTABLISH THE POSSIBILITY OF A CRIME

WITH THE POSSIBILITY OF A CRIME, IT IS POSSIBLE TO SET UP A PARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION TO PROVIDE NEWS ON SLOW NEWS DAYS (SOMEBODY HAS TO FILL UP THAT SPACE)

WITH A PARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION, IT IS POSSIBLE TO SHOP AROUND AND GET A PARTISAN SPECIAL PROSECUTOR, WHO WILL ALSO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL NEWS AND LOTS OF STUFF ABOUT SEX

As the years went by, I noticed the "news hole" in the paper getting smaller and smaller and the advertisements getting larger and larger. For the last five years, the news articles have usually appeared across the top one-fifth to the top one-half (rare) of each page. Most of the stories appeared to be rather terse, so in the case of national news stories, I obtained copies of the original Washington Post or New York Times articles when I traveled. When I got home, I would look for the article or the topic of the article to see which ones had made it through the selection process to the pages of the Mercury News. If it did, I would compare the same article from the Mercury News and the Post or Times. I found many of the stories in the Mercury News were highly condensed to fit into the new and highly-truncated "news hole." This policy continued until the Lewinsky scandal when the national news staff of the Mercury News went back to publishing either the full text of articles from the Washington Post and the New York Times or something close to it.

But because my informal data base was so small, I was unable to determine the number of news stories that NEVER MADE IT INTO THE NEWSPAPER. My guess: some two to three national and world stories a day never make it into local newspapers these days because there simply is not enough space for them and the advertising.

It is my understanding most "regional" and "local" newspapers throughout the country have followed this same process over the past ten years. What this means is that much of the national political news is news with a particular political bias. It also means severely truncated news stories on topics the Mainstream Media would just as soon you did not pay too much attention to, and "missing" news stories that are anathema to certain interests in this country. The San Jose Mercury News learned this the hard way when it published the Dark Alliance series a few years ago on the smuggling of cocaine into the United States during the 1980's in an effort to provide additional funds for the Contras. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times severely criticized the series for shoddy journalism. There was better investigative journalism (as well as journalistic flaws) in that series than we have seen in any of those newspapers for the past twenty years.

With the new streamlined Mercury News, it is possible to conceal stories some people do not want the reader to dwell upon. They are usually concentrated into in a single paragraph. Most of these revealed/concealed stories usually have to do with criminal activities of various American corporations -- "So and so corporation paid a two dollar fine for polluting most of Lake Michigan as far as we can tell as the court papers have been sealed." When some form of Orwellian NEWSPEAK is introduced in this country in the next few years, these paragraphs will be further compressed, releasing more paper for larger ads.

We have to remember these were BLIP News stories the paper hoped would soon fade away. If accused of deliberately concealing information, the paper could then say, "Well we covered that in the issue of such and such a date." (And if you look here under my thumb, you can get all the details.)

I became conscious of another kind of BLIP News one day when I turned to the editorial pages of the paper and saw an above the fold DRIP News story on the crimes of Hillary Rodham Clinton written by a gentleman who turned out to be affiliated with the Republican Party (as it turned out- see the following paragraph on a truth-in-labeling law that should be required of the Media). In that same issue, there was a very small BLIP News paragraph under Washington News in Brief on illegal contributions to the Bush campaign of 1992 for which the Bush Campaign was fined. I believe the amount of the fine was $300,000 dollars.

With the Lewinsky scandal, the Mainstream Media has moved on to new and greater things. Has anyone but me noticed that news stories on things of importance to the people of this country have been almost swept away in the coverage of the Lewinsky affair. This is another function of DRIP News -- to force the important stories on things that really affect working Americans off the front page and preferably out of the newspaper entirely.

Medical Care in this Country and Taxation Without Representation. The BIG LIE or is it? I do not know.

I will give you one final example of my frustration with the news coverage of the Mainstream Media and then quit. Several years ago, Representative Gephardt came to town and was quoted in the Mercury News as saying something about the amount of money in the health insurance premiums going for other expenses. I did not understand the article so I stored it with the rest of my clippings. I kept getting it out to read and read again because it bothered me. I think I am a fairly intelligent person, but I was confused. Finally, the light went on. At the time, both the company I worked for and I were jointly contributing to my health insurance premiums. When I started working for this company, the health premiums had been fully paid by the company, now I was contibuting half and my company was contributing half. Let's say the total premium was about $4,000 dollars a year (it was actually closer to $6,000). Evidently ONLY 75 per cent of the health insurance premiums across the country were going to pay for the health care of the insured. When Gephardt came to town, he had a business executive with him who had also complained about this. The only good thing about the insurance company TAX ASSESSMENT was that some unknown amount (????) of the other 25 per cent was evidently going to various hospitals for the treatment of the poor and indigent.

So $1,000 dollars of my premium (and like amounts from the health insurance premiums of all Americans with health insurance) was being used each year by the insurance companies for purposes of their own. We are talking about sums of money that amount to HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS or TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS each year. In short, as far as I could tell, millions of people (and the corporations they worked for) were and are being taxed by private corporations, with no accountability for the money. I believe that is known as Taxation without Representation, and we fought a revolutionary war about that. I wrote a letter to the paper asking if my understanding was correct. I received no answer.

I DO NOT KNOW BECAUSE I HAVE NOT BEEN INFORMED.

I DO NOT KNOW BECAUSE I DO NOT KNOW WHERE TO GO TO BE INFORMED.

So much for a well-informed electorate in the United States.

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Go to the Politics forum, then to Zippergate, and then to the Thread:

"The Media's Handling of the Clinton Scandals"

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 THE WATCH DOG THAT DID NOT BARK

A LETTER TO JERRY CEPPOS

A PROPOSAL TO AMEND THE BILL OF RIGHTS

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA'S ROLE IN THE WHITEWATER SMEAR CAMPAIGN

Press here to go to MEDIA pages introduction 

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Press here to go to SAVINGS AND LOAN SCAM pages introduction