About Peacock Watch
Written by PeacockWatch on June 11, 2009.
“The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.” –Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823.
“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” –Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785.
“News is what the consensus of journalists determines it to be”.
Andrew Marr, BBC journalist.
PeacockWatch.com has been established by a group of concerned citizens who are vitally concerned about the state of the mass media in our country.
Our founding fathers were very aware of the power of a free press to either protect democracy or destroy it, yet they intuitively understood that trying to control the press was fraught with more danger than not. They felt that at the end of the day competitive forces in a truly free press would provide the agitation process that would somehow get to the truth.
In the two hundred plus years since our independence much has changed. We have the technology to disseminate news instantaneously over a multitude of channels. Yet, human nature has not changed, and the tools we have at hand can spread both lies and truth at the speed of light.
From the perspective of PeacockWatch, there is no debate about the fact that our present day mass media has a liberal bias, and it was virtually admitted to by the media in the last election. The question is: does this bias kill the agitation that Thomas Jefferson speaks of?
Every news outlet has the right to a bias, but in the past that bias had been confined to the editorial page of the newspaper. The explosion of news channels has served to blur this historical distinction, and once what is reported as “news” is biased, the truth suffers, and if done in the same directional bias, the agitation process grinds to a halt, and news does become “the consensus of journalists.”
The objective of PeacockWatch is to hold the mass media accountable, and demand simply that it distinguish the reporting of news from its editorial bias.
We have chosen NBC and its associated cable programming as the focus for our efforts since it represents to us the network that has been the most offensive in biasing its news reporting. Further, this is the only network that has the potential of a biasing the news to support the businesses of its parent company, General Electric.
How will we accomplish our objective? We have some ideas, but in all honesty, we do not at this time have a fully developed plan. Our current objective with this site is to establish a dialogue with like minded people and to collect your input as to various approaches to achieve our objective.
With nothing less than our liberty at stake, we ask you to join us in this cause.
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