Billionaire NBA owner of the Dallas Mavericks and 61-year-old host of ABC’s “Shark Tank” reality TV show asked the government to regulate TV news, claiming that much of what people watch are opinion shows. Networks like Fox News, CNN and MSNBC provide 24/7 of what passes off as news when the programming is heavily biased toward the Democrat and Republican parties. Cuban wants all those cable shows labeled as opinion programs so U.S. citizens can decipher factual news from politically biased programming. With the line blurred, Cuban doesn’t see that it’s far more insidious than just popular cable channels but runs the gamut of nightly and weekend network TV shows that show every bit the bias of cable shows are but wrapped in phony network legitimacy. Cuban wants the government to regulate programming to identify opinion shows from straight news.
What Cuban doesn’t get is that more subtle forms of propaganda occur on so-called straight news broadcasts where producers and editors pick-and-choose the stories reported or, for that matter, stories that wind up on the front-or-back-pages of U.S. newspapers. “Any politician that says they will push for a law that say no TV or streaming network can brand, market or name themselves a News Network unless the 6 most viewed hours of very night is greater than 80% fact checked news and opinion is labeled as opinion only, gets my vote,” Cuban tweeted Sunday. Cuban’s rubric won’t stop cable or networks from spewing pernicious propaganda unless the content of shows is carefully evaluated. Fact checking guarantees nothing when fact-checkers themselves reflect a political bias, deciding which facts to check and which ones not to check. Cuban’s on the right track, but the problem’s more complex.
Take the current closed-door impeachment proceedings headed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) were convinced they had a smoking gun with Trump withholding military aid from Ukriane in exchange for dirt on the Bidens. Amb. Gordon Sondand testified Oct 17 before Schiff’s committee with major stories from the anti-Trump media contending Sondland confirmed a quid pro quo. Instead of giving 73-year-old President Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, all major Democrat-friendly broadcast and print outlets had Trump convicted of high-crimes-and-misdemeanors, the necessary crime to oust him from office. Today, Sondland clarified any misunderstandings, saying any quid pro quo was related to the White House anti-corruption efforts. Trump has insisted that he was looking into Ukrainian corruption.
Yet if viewers listened to the broadcast and print media Oct. 17, you’d conclude that Pelosi and Schiff had an open-and-shut impeachment case. Cuban, who’s a big critic of Trump, primarily wants to strip Fox News of its name, claiming it deals in pure opinion or propaganda. Yet the same would apply to CNN and MSNBC whose networks run 24/7 anti-Trump programming. Cuban wants to reverse the toxic partisan atmosphere that exists in the country, he claims exacerbated by politically biased “news” shows. Nothing Cuban advocates would change the country’s polarized state with Democrats and Republicans finding themselves in pitched battle on the airwaves and on Capitol Hill. When former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Democrat candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Ha.,) ad “Russian asset” Oct. 21, the extreme nature of pernicious propaganda was exposed for all to see.
Hillary was the one in 2016 that branded Trump a Russian asset, prompting former FBI Director James Comey to launch a counterintelligence investigation against Trump and his campaign. Calling Trump a “Putin puppet,” based on her paid opposition research AKA “the dossier,” prompted Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein to appoint former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel. Twenty-two months and $30 million later, after hundreds—if not thousands—of TV shows and newspaper stories supporting Hillary contentions, Mueller debunked the propaganda March 23 with his Final Report, stating clearly there was zero evidence that Trump conspired with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. Yet every Democrat-friendly broadcast-and-print outlet had Trump convicted of Russian collusion. Schiff insisted April 19 that he had absolute proof that Trump colluded with Russia.
Cuban’s got the right idea trying to regulate the extent to which network and cable news has been infiltrated by political parties. Fact-checkers won’t stop politically biased producers from putting on stories that advances the Democrat Party’s agenda. At the very least, the government should warn viewers that certain TV and cable broadcasts advance the agendas of the Democrat and Republican Parties. Just like warning labels for food, posting a warning label to alert viewers that the content presented mirrors the network or cable station’s political bias would help to viewers. Network and cable news shows have persuasive hosts, capable of selling a politically biased agenda. Regulating network and cable news shows would be a step in the right direction but only if in includes nighttime and Sunday news programs to reflect the fact that they are propaganda-driven programs.
