Earlier this week a now-former subscriber came to the Register asking that I read a newspaper he had in hand.
“You’ll not get my renewal until you read this,” he said. I gave him my promise, but I doubt he’ll hold up his end of the bargain.
The newspaper is The All American Banner, published in Adair, Okla.
It’s not a newspaper in today’s sense of the word. Rather, The Banner has as its objective a political agenda, much like the newspapers of the late 1800s when Robert McCormick and his Chicago Tribune, William Randolph Hearst and the San Francisco Examiner, and Joe Medill of the New York Daily News, held sway.
Those newspaper titans geared their news to promote their personal agendas be it abolition, federalism, going to war with Spain over Cuba or anti-war. Today’s analogies would be Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News station and its ultra-conservative agenda. On the left, would be MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell shows.
The Banner does not distinguish opinion from news. Most every story is a personal column of some sort written with a particular slant and slander.
President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in general are the bane of The Banner.
On page 1, President Obama is called a “Marxist/Islamist leader,” a “dictator,” and a president who is in office “illegally.”
Elsewhere in the paper Obama is alleged to be the son of a communist father and “leftist” mother, who sent him to prep and Ivy League schools where “his contempt for the country was reinforced.”
The source of this “news” is Rush Limbaugh, the radio polemicist.
I seriously doubt if Honolulu High School, Obama’s high school, has anything in common with an East Coast prep school such as New York’s Darrow — tuition $32,000.
Or that Occidental College in Los Angeles carries the prestige of a Yale or Princeton. It wasn’t until Obama enrolled at Columbia University — still not Ivy League — that he became a serious student, which earned him the marks to study law at Harvard, also the school of choice of George W. Bush, class of 1975. Unlike Bush, however, Obama attended university on scholarships and incurred student debt.
No silver spoon in sight.
AS AN AMERICAN it’s embarrassing our president must prove he is a U.S. citizen, a Christian, and that he was elected by a majority of the U.S. electorate in 2008. As a journalist, it’s disturbing that The Banner is seen as a purveyor of news, when it’s no more than propaganda for a right-wing conspiracy to defame the president and his administration.
Obama wasn’t the only victim of vitriol. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also was accused of undermining the Second Amendment because of her efforts through the United Nations to halt international arms sales to gangs, criminals and violent groups.
“It’s merely a convenient facade to conceal the Arms Trade Treaty’s true intent: to force gun control on the United States,” The Banner wrote in a sinister tone.
As can be imagined, most of the Banner’s news comes from outside sources including RedState, a conservative newsblog; Rick Morris, a commentator on Fox News; CNS News, originally known as the Conservative News Service; WND, a conservative news website with an “emphasis on aggressive investigative reporting and gossip,” and the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation. Several stories also were obviously “lifted” from news service but given no attribution — a no-no with principled publishers.
