Sharyl Attkisson Exposes Big Media in The Smear

[Geee]

American Thinker

Journalists today are elitists with their own agenda, never actually practicing journalism.  Only a handful can be respected, trusted, and believed.  Sharyl Attkisson falls into this category.  She is an author and investigative reporter who hosts the syndicated TV news series Full Measure.  Attkisson is a whistleblower of sorts in educating the public about the biased media.  Her latest book, The Smear, reveals the tactics used to influence opinions in order to obscure the truth.
In the beginning of this book, Attkisson discusses the propaganda campaign used by the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA.  They had asked the legendary Marlene Dietrich to sing "Lili Marlene" in German and English in order to make the Axis forces feel homesick and realize they were fighting for the wrong side.  She contrasts this with Hitler's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels's playbook, which calls for creating a big lie – the bigger, the better to get more people to believe it.  Repeat it often enough so it becomes the truth, and persistence is the most important requirement for success.
Today's media and leftists seem to take a page not out of the OSS, but out of Goebbels's strategy.  Attkisson wants to inform Americans on the tactics used by political operatives on both sides as well as corporate operatives.  These tactics fall into categories of "Astroturf and transactional journalism," all tools of the smear campaign.  She told American Thinker her definition of a smear: "taking a sprinkle of truth and perverting it into a weapon of mass destruction to advance an undisclosed larger goal, often political or financial.  Smear campaigns take something that many times has a grain of truth and amplifies it to accomplish the annihilation of their target."