Bob Barney: My View on the State of the Press (Transcript)

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The press in America is just beyond belief in my personal humble opinion. This is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today and I did a story, a show about, I don’t know, maybe a year or so ago. Maybe we can find it and put it up at nighttime. But this show is basically a show about where the press has gone in the last 10, 15, 25 years, but especially now even in these Trump years, I am absolutely amazed how Donald Trump’s belligerence and threatening to sue everybody has caused a lot of the press really to not be the

0:39press and not ask the tough questions because they’re afraid of the retribution maybe. I don’t know if that’s the case or not or we just have a journalist today that just do not understand the basics of journalism and you know the we, what, why, where, and for whatever that was. But I listen to even what I would consider anti-Trump media and it seems like none of these people, these reporters, ask the right questions. Maybe it’s just me, but I listen to a

1:13question and then sometimes a follow-up, and I think of a real follow-up that would absolutely interest people. And I give you an example. When there was a cabinet meeting and one of the press persons asked about the Jeffrey Epstein deal and the idea that Pam Bondi did not have, claimed there was nothing, there was no no-there there, and that he did commit suicide and there was no list and on and on and on. When Donald Trump said, do you have anything different to talk about than the Jeffrey

1:50Epstein thing? He’s been dead for years, it doesn’t make a difference. The next question that should have been responded is, we’ve known all along that he committed suicide here in the press, but it was your administration, it was you running for president, it was your Pam Bondi, it was Kash Patel, it was Dan Bongino, who all said they knew better. And then it was your Attorney General who said, I have on my desk the list and tapes of videos of the pedophile in the

2:23horrendous crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. And why wasn’t that there was a follow-up question. I keep hearing this administration, and I want to be honest, it was Biden before that, it wasn’t Trump the first time around, he didn’t have this kind of press, I should say, but it was Barack Obama the whole time. It was not George Bush II, or I always call him King George II, but for the

2:52most part there is never any follow-up to these questions when you hear White House staffers, White House pundits, put out just plain propaganda and just no one has a follow-up question. I sit in the morning and I try to watch the different news shows on TV and I try to read the different things on the internet

3:19and basically, in America, there is simply three ounces of brain matter and all the press put together. Now, I will admit, a lot of times if you go to Europe or you go to some Asian countries and you go to some other places around the world, their press seems to be reporting real news and not fake news. But I am just, like I said, this show is just weeks of frustration. And you can hear that in my voice because I am kind of frustrated

with the attempt to say, I will give you one example. For example, he calls April 2nd, which was Passover, Liberation Day. Everybody calls it Liberation Day, just because he calls it Liberation Day. I am watching, I believe it was Fox Weather Channel, and there is a picture of the United States of America, and there is this great big shot of the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s labeled the Gulf of America. Since when does a President of the United States have the right to name any body of water, any landmark, any state, any country? Just think about that. And you have maps now portraying the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, and people do not seem to have a problem with this. Now, I have to admit, if the United States Congress was behind it, and they passed a ruling, and the people of the United States thought it was a good idea, I could see, we want to call something the Gulf of America, let’s call it the Gulf of America.

However, do you know where the Gulf of California is? Well, the Gulf of California is in Mexico. It is the sea, it’s a little sea jetty that goes off the Baja Peninsula on the inside, and it’s actually quite long. I think it’s a couple, two, three hundred miles long, but it’s called the Gulf of California. It’s not called the Gulf of Mexico, or the Gulf of Guadalupe, or the Gulf of Acapulco. It’s called the Gulf of California, and California now is in America. It’s just the idea that we just adopt whatever word Trump wants to put on it is okay. I’ll give you another example of that. The big, beautiful bill, and everybody calls it the big, beautiful bill. Even the people who don’t like it, for the most part, except for a few Democratic Congress women, call it the big, beautiful bill. It’s the congressional budget bill, and you could give the number on it. Every congressional bill has a House number or a Senate number. You could do that, but the truth of the matter is, if you were a reporter, you’re not going to call something a big, beautiful bill, unless you were to say something like, Donald Trump, who calls the House and Senate budget bill the big, beautiful bill. If you’re going to say it that way, then it’s okay if you attribute it to Donald Trump, or if you attribute it to the Republican Party. But to say matter-of-factly that a budget bill coming out of Congress is called the big, beautiful bill, when that is not anywhere on the heading of that bill, it’s the news media accepting terms being presented to them by the White House or the Democratic Party, in some cases, or some mayor or some governor, this is not what the press is to be about. The press is supposed to be a neutral party, and I know for the last 40, 50 years, they have not been a neutral party. They’ve been ultra-leftist. The communist movement, you know, Khrushchev said, we’ll kill you by infiltrating your press, your schools, and your morals, and your Hollywood, and that’s what they have done for the last 50, 60 years. But at the same time, even in the times of, you take the big three, ABC, CBS, NBC, and even when CNN first started, when they had people like Bob Novak and Pat Buchanan on, along with liberals as well, there was real journalism going on.

There were real tough questions going on. I cannot believe in my whole being that Mike Wallace, Chris Wallace’s dad, for those who do not know who Mike Wallace is, younger people may not know who he was, but Mike Wallace, I cannot see him being pushed aside by the White House press secretary when he asked a tough question and just walk away like a neutered man. It just would not happen. He’d have a follow-up question. A good reporter has a question in mind that he really wants answered, but he also has the follow-up, and the next follow-up, and the next follow-up, and how does he do that? Well, he’s got to study, and that’s maybe where we have a problem because maybe the press today just simply are lazy, and they want AI to do everything or something else, but they’re lazy. But a good reporter, well, let’s say he wants to get the real scoop about, say, Jeffrey Epstein. So you’re going to ask the President of the United States, there’s reports that your own people in the FBI, especially Dan Bongino, has a problem with Pam Bondi and the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Now, when you ask that question, you just don’t wait for an answer. You have to know what that answer is going to be. You should know Donald Trump, or Pam Bondi by now, if you’re in the press and you have any kind of ability, you should know what their answer is going to be, or what their probable answer is going to be. And I’m going to give you a joke here in a minute to really explain it. So when the probable answer of Donald Trump is going to be, which I did not expect, by the way, it would be, it’s nothing, sorry, I mean, he’s dead, but I thought he was going to say, you know, we’ve investigated it, and we just can’t find anything there. If there ever is something there, we’d put it out. But right now, it’s not there. And so the follow-up question to that is, why did you think it was there? And why did your attorney general say she had something on her desk, a report with videos? And then you have to anticipate his reaction to that one by saying, knowing Trump, he’s going to say to you, where are you from? I’m from, let’s say, CNDBC.

And he says, well, no wonder why you asked such stupid questions. And then your follow-up to that is, it seems to me, it’s not a stupid question when it came out of the lips of your attorney general. And right now, all you’re trying to do is throw the blame on me, asking the question that 50 million MAGA supporters want to have answered. And that’s what a reporter did. That is what the reporters did when I was growing up. They, I mean, Ronald Reagan had a hostile Sam Donaldson, but he knew how to handle them, number one. But Sam Donaldson didn’t back down. Nobody expected Sam Donaldson was going to back down. And to his credit, I don’t think Sam Donaldson backed down to even a Democrat president, not just Ronald Reagan. I think he maybe had a little bit more against Ronald Reagan than he did, you know, Jimmy Carter or somebody like that. But my point is, tough questions is what we expect of our leaders to be able to answer and not to be shouted down or bullied down by the leader that has been elected. And it’s like I said, it’s not just with Donald Trump, it’s everywhere. We just don’t see good follow-up questions. We’ll go back to this Texas flood. We have a lot of sympathy for these children and the people who died, and so do I. But I don’t, and we have politicians trying to make hay against the Donald Trump administration by saying, oh, he wants to cut FEMA. Well, he didn’t cut FEMA yet, and that had nothing to do with this report. The Weather Bureau did put out a warning, be it maybe a little too late or maybe it was, maybe it was or was not. But that isn’t really the real tough questions.

The truth is, the reporters don’t want to ask the real tough questions here because it’s an inconvenient question to ask, and it doesn’t get any political hay. So you’re never going to hear a Democrat congresswoman from California, who happens to be Black, say maybe the locals have some responsibility here because she wants to blame everything on Donald Trump. She’s ready for impeachment 2.0. And that’s the problem again with the Democratic Party. The Democrat Party, by the way, in my humble opinion, could absolutely take over in 26 and 28 if they only could find someone with more than three quarters of a gram of brain matter. Because we have the stupidest, AOC is the leading candidate right now for president for the Democratic Party, a former coffee maker in a coffee shop, bartender who stole the tips of the waitresses. I mean, she’s a joke. And this is the leader of the Democratic Party right now with communist Bernie Sanders. Well, she’s a communist too. And then this joker from New York, who, when some of his background gets out, and you notice the reporters have not got into his background. Well, I have some pretty good reporting on my own to tell you he’s got a pretty sordid background if they want to investigate that. And now that Andrew Cuomo said he’s going to run as an independent, maybe this time around he’ll bring up that kind of stuff with some good research. It’s easy to find. The guy could be easily hurt with his background. But just to say again, it’s not just with Trump, pro-Trump press, which, you know, you watch Fox News and it’s nauseating. You listen to, you find a story on the internet that talks about the worst inflation in four years.

And this last inflation report shows that inflation is going is going up. And I’m just given a generic thing here. And so you see the Daily Mail say inflation is staggering the economists. Then you see BBC say the same thing. And then you see MSNBC, who you don’t trust too much, at least I don’t, say the same thing. And then you go to News Nation, which I think is probably one of the better ones today. And they say basically the same thing. Then you switch on, you switch to Maria on Fox Business and you hear her talk about China, never talking about, you know, she’s a business show. It’s Fox Business Channel. She’s talking about China. That’s all she can talk about, it seems like. And don’t even mention, you know, the report about inflation. Then you go to Fox in the morning, Fox and friends, and they say, good news for the Trump administration because the latest economic data shows America is really booming. And you say to yourself, where did that report come from? And they sit there and they read and you look at the whole report in online and you find out one paragraph said the only good part of this bad inflation number is the price of eggs went down by 47 percent, though the price of food in general went up by 21 percent. I’m making all this up. I’m just trying to make a point. And then they say the price of eggs have fallen 47 percent. Inflation is under control and the tariffs had nothing to do with it. And you say to yourself, that’s journalism. That is a cheerleader. You have a press secretary. Yes, she’s pretty to look at. She’s a lot better than what Biden had there to look at. But you look at her and all she is, they ought to put pom poms in her hand and give her cheers. And she can stand up there and do cheerleading because she don’t act like a press person. She acts like a cheerleader for the administration. This is the greatest administration of all times. And that’s not what a press person for the White House should be putting out the news of why the White House is doing something and then ask a question. I’m not saying she shouldn’t defend the White House and she shouldn’t defend Donald Trump. But you sit there and you berate anybody who asks a question of interest because you don’t have a good answer.

And then you sit there and you smile and you giggle and you laugh at how great everything is doing when everybody watching, including myself, is struggling. Everybody I know is struggling. If you’re in the middle class, if you are not a billionaire or a multi-millionaire right now, I don’t care who you are, you’re probably struggling or you’re working for the federal or state and local governments, which they’re immune to everything because their paycheck comes no matter what and they can do whatever they want. But if you’re working for yourself in your own business or you’re working for a small business or you’re working for a big company, you know, like GM, who’s laid off 15,000 people, there are problems. But you listen to TV and you say, must be only me. No, it’s not only you.

I’m going to tell you when I come back from this quick time out, a joke about the same thing.

Hi, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today. It’s brought to you by theplaintruth.com. Go there every day and see what the top news stories are. Go to The Message Board and find even more news stories of interest. Your Health Today and find out what health articles you should be up and knowing. And then finally, these broadcasts on theplaintruthtoday.com or you get to it from theplaintruth.com. Please visit us. Thank you for listening.

There’s an old joke. It’s actually a card trick.

It’s not even a joke, but it’s something you can play. Maybe you play this on people who are unsuspecting and never heard about it. But you take a queen of spades out of a deck of cards and you put it upside down in plain view, but upside down. And then you said you’re the person and you lead them along. This is what a good politician is meant to do. And if somebody is not there to question why things are going on the way they are, then they’re going to be duped. And you say there are four suits of cards. Can you name the four suits? The person will go, well, there’s hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades. Can you name any two of those? Well, there’s clubs and diamonds. Well, that leaves hearts and spades, right? Yes. Well, of the hearts and spades, which do you want? Spades. Okay. Now there’s face cards and numeral cards. Face cards would be the ace, king, queen, jack, and the numeral cards are the ten down to the two. Do you want face cards or numeral cards? I’ll take the numeral cards. Okay. Numeral cards of spades, you said? Yeah. That leaves the face cards of spades, right? Yeah. Okay. Of the face cards of spades, there are the ones I named to you. Which two do you want? I’ll take the ace and the queen. Okay. Ace and the queen of spades. Of the two, which order do you want? The ace. Okay. That leaves the queen of spades, right? Yes. You turn over the card.

See, I knew you were going to say that. You know, every time I’ve ever done that, for the most part, if you do it quick enough, people are, how did you do that? Do you know how I just did that? Well, this is how you do it. There’s four sets of cards and no matter what you need to get to spades, no matter what they say, it’s either yes, because they mentioned two of the four are spades, or they did not mention it, and you say that leaves clubs and spades, right? Right. And then you would say, you got to get them to spades, and let’s say, okay, now you got clubs and spades. Which of the two do you want? Now, if they say clubs, you say that leaves spades. But if they say spades, you say, okay, now there’s face cards of numeral cards. What do you want? And if they say numeral cards, you say that leaves face cards. But if they said face cards, you say, okay, that’s right. Now, name any two face cards. And if they say queen and jack, well, you got, the queen is what you need. And so you say, okay. But if they say jack and king, you say that leaves the ace and the queen, right? And they’ll say, yeah, okay, what do you want? The ace or the queen? And in this example I gave, they said the ace. That leaves the queen. Do you understand? I led the entire conversation. And no matter what you chose, you picked what I told you, you picked.

That’s what a good politician does. I’m sorry, but that’s what a good, that’s what a good politician is trained to do. They’re trained to, to get you looking elsewhere. And it’s the press’s job to say, wait a minute, Bob, you say that leaves the queen of spades, but I picked the ace of spades. Yeah, but it left that. Yeah. But two times before, when I picked the hearts and the spades, you said, okay, you didn’t say that leaves, you’re changing the subject. That’s what the press is supposed to do. They’re supposed to be smart enough to know what the politician or the leader or the businessman is doing to them. But they’re not, they just play the game and they’re dumbfounded that you picked queen of spades or they picked the queen of spades when you did for them. And that’s what’s going on with the press today. And one of the problems I have, I turned 70.I’m not ashamed of my age. I’m kind of discouraged with my age because you’ll, you start looking in the past more than you look for the future. But, um, when I think of, I sit there in the morning with Tammy and I think I’m a youthful 70.I exercise a lot. I work hard at work. I put in a long day at work and I exercise more than three and a half hours a week.

Um, and I’ve lost a lot of weight doing so. I really, uh, tried to increase my health, trying to live longer if I possibly can. Uh, I know the truth about death and the truth about death isn’t going to heaven sometime and sitting on a cloud and watching my loved ones down below on earth. I understand what death really is. It’s going into a grave and awaiting resurrection. That could be a hundreds of years from now. I have no idea. But I sit in front of the TV sets at the kitchen table. We don’t have a dining room table, but the kitchen table, we’re looking at the TV and we go between news nation, sometimes Fox business, because they do have the best checker telling you where the gold and silver is and stock market constantly and CNBC. Once in a while we throw on, uh, Politburo television, communist MSNBC to see what they have to say. And frankly, it’s sad to say that sometimes they’re more honest about what’s going on than Fox is. And then we go to CNN and we go to other news outlets as well. We discovered, uh, not on dish network, which we use, but when we’d lost dish for a week, waiting for it to get repaired, uh, we started watching the BBC news, which was through our local spectrum. And it was pretty interesting to get a European view on some things because that is a different perspective. But anyway, going back to, I’m getting carried off the deep side here. We’re sitting there watching TV and we’re listening to an expert. Let’s say we’re watching CNBC and we’re going to listen to this expert on the economy. And she’s going to tell us everything we need to know about what the Trump tariffs are doing and not doing and what the Fed is doing and not doing and why, and what the real meaning of this all is. And if you really dealt with it and she looks like she’s 17 years old now, she’s probably 24, 25, maybe 29. And I say to Tammy, is it me or do I, am I some old fogey here that just don’t want to see a teenager tell me what I already know. And I want to have people on the news that I think I can still look up to, not looking like they should be listening to me, not me listening to them.

And when you listen to what they say half the time, they don’t even make sense. I’ll give you a good thing. I’ll tell you something right now. And this is even somebody that you would think would have, these are not youngsters. When you watch CNBC, Becky Quick is probably in her mid-fifties. Joe you’re listening to Marie Bartolomeo on Fox business. And she’s probably in her sixties by now. You will hear the top of the news and they will say inflation number was 2.3% and it was better than they expected. And then you will hear the anchor start quoting things that their own report four minutes earlier had a different answer. And then you say to yourself, did they even listen to their own report? Do they just sit here and wait for the next thing? And they don’t even listen to what’s being said. And this happened. I gave you a made up story there, but I’ll give you one that wasn’t made up. And this is during the flood when we knew that the count was going to keep going up and up and up and up and up. And underneath this woman on News Nation, and she’s quite young, she was maybe 30, 35, but at the time where you can start listening and thinking that people know what they’re doing by then. And she says, there’s at least 70 known dead and there’s at least 27 missing. And right under the screen is flying by confirmed dead 101, missing 166. And for two hours, she says the same thing at the beginning of every show. And for two hours, but it gets worse. The ticker keeps giving a different number, but it gets worse because an hour three, which is, I think it was a 10 o’clock on Sunday, the Sunday of the flood, July would be July 6th. She interviews the guy on the ground there, and he’s showing how high the water is. And it’s starting to go down by Sunday. And he says, you see where I am now? Well, there was six feet of water here. And, and you can still see the 14 feet higher than it should be, whatever it has been. And he goes, there’s been now a confirmed 127 dead and there is 166 missing. And that was of that July 4th. And of course the number has gone up even more since then. Well, an hour after that, she comes back and she’s talking to another person and she says, there’s nearly a hundred people dead now.

What do you think the number is going to be? And I’m saying, you just heard it’s 121. It’s going up and there’s 166 missing. That’s probably about 300.Why would you say there’s about a hundred dead now? Why wouldn’t you give the exact number that was given to you by your own reporter in a, in a interview, a live interview view at that, that you yourself are asking the question. It means you never listened to the answer. You have your own show notes and you have what you wrote on those show notes and you don’t change it when the facts change what you wrote on your notes. This is not the press of 50 years ago. This is not the press of 30 years ago. And I’ll only go back to 30 years because by 1995, the press started going bad. I will tell you that right now. But you, I will admit that in the 1960s, I did not watch Walter Cronkite. I did not watch him at all .I didn’t like him. My whole family watched Harry Reasoner and Chuck Huntley. Chuck Huntley was on NBC and Harry Reasoner was on ABC. And we would watch those two news. I thought Walter Cronkite was, you know, a liberal idiot. And I was not a big fan of his, though I thought he was a professional. I did not. When you listen to him, if you knew his political leaning, which was easy to find out, you could understand why he did the stories that he did, because he had a bias to him. Everybody does. I do. You do. But he did not allow that bias to show in that actual. He might. The bias might have been the reason he did a certain topic, but he didn’t give that bias during that interview. And that is what a press person was trained to do. And we liked Brinkley and Huntley and the other news people of the time because we knew they were more conservative. And I thought they had a better news program. I always thought that the Walter Show on CBS was really made for people who wanted to be told to be told the news and what to think and not to investigate on their own.

And that’s always the difference, in my opinion, over the years of a true Republican. Republicans are the people who want to know what they can do to change things and to understand things where the Democrats want a leader to tell them how to change things and what to do and not to do it themselves. And the old saying about the teach a person to fish and they will always defend them, support themselves by fishing, give them a fish. And when they eat the fish, they’ll be back starving again. That the Democrats give the fish, the Republicans teach you how to, this is the old Republicans anyway, teach you how to fish. And that was what I grew up with. That was the news I grew up with. But anyway, I just wanted to get this off my chest. I am not happy with what I see in this press. And I think it’s going to have bad consequences for the United States of America and for the American people, in my humble opinion. So anyway, Bob Barney, for The Plain Truth Today with a little anti-press.