“…The 1965 CBS documentary Hunger in America began with outright lies, citing an infant dying in a hospital as the victim of malnutrition, which was pure invention. The 1971 CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon actually took the answer of an assistant secretary of state to one question and edited it so that he was giving the answer to another question – and the documentary did that over and over again.
ABC News, weeks before the 1972 presidential election, in which national defence was the central issue, broadcast the documentary Arms for Defence: How Much is Enough, which began with the completely false statement that “six out of every ten federal dollars goes to defence.” The correct number was 38%, and that included the expenditures related to conducting the Vietnam War. This “documentary” was pockmarked with utterly dishonest statements, one of which was an “expert” telling ABC News staff that we did not need to build the B-1 bomber because we already had a supersonic bomber, the B-52, when the B-52 was subsonic and not supersonic. All of these errors supported the left’s belief that we were spending too much on national defence.
One might have thought that NBC or ABC or CBS or PBS (notionally the people’s network) might have picked up on these frauds or, at best, gross incompetence because of congenital bias committed by these “competitors,” but in fact the leftist establishment media five decades ago were worse, not better, than today. This tired old establishment is so weak now because of a confluence of factors.
Today, most Americans can simply ignore the leftist media. Those media have not become worse; they have simply become pathetically irrelevant..” The Myth Of Good Old Media