How the Propagandists Are Dealing With the Death of the Patriot Act

[PREFACE: My apologies, I'm still working out some of the page styling. Images might load kinda wonky for my first few posts]

Before I say anything else, I have to say this: GOOD RIDDANCE.

But will anything actually change? 

I have yet to go over the USA Freedom Act, the proposed legislation to act as "reform" to an expiring Patriot Act, but from what I've read thus far it may simply be a rebranding of extensive spying programs.

But that's not what I'm here to focus on. What I'm mostly interested in is how the media, acting as various arms of propaganda for multiple states, are handling this. I'm going to analyze this alongside some foreign news sources known for disseminating anti-American propaganda.

eBiz MBA ranks American news sites based upon Alexa, and has ranked the top 5 most popular American news sites as Yahoo! News (175M monthly viewers, or just over half the country), Google News (150M), HuffingtonPost (110M), CNN (95M) and The New York Times (70M) as the top 5. Following this we have Fox News, NBC News, Mail Online, Washington Post, The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

I won't bother too much with Google News, as it isn't an actual news site, but a hub of stories from elsewhere.

Last October Business Insider put together a nifty little report on the political leanings of various news sites based upon this Pew Research study. And it is no surprise that most arms of the American media are left leaning.

Yahoo! News

Seeing as Yahoo! News is fairly centrist and the number one source of news online for Americans (which is significant, because television as a medium is dying, and it isn't limited to TV shows, even television broadcasts of news are dying), let's see how that's handling this first. We'll just take a stroll to their front page, because the expiration of the USA PATRIOT Act is of pretty big fucking significance.

This ought to be front-page news everywhere, as a victory for civil liberties and everything America stands for, so clearly -

Or, you know, not. But SURELY big news like this has to be trending right now-

Okay, bullshit celebrity "news" and consumerism. Maybe if we just scroll down a bit-

Okay, MAYBE if we hit CTRL+F and search the page we'll surely find SOMETHING, right?

Really, Yahoo?

Come on!

Searching for it actually brings us to the goddamn CNN article instead. The biggest source of "news" in America, is a sham, peddling irreverent bullshit, ignoring anything of actual significance in this country, all while being too busy freaking out that some former Olympic athlete has some kind of severe mental disorder that leftists have decided to rebrand and market as an "alternative lifestyle choice", but that's a post for another day. So let's look at that next.

CNN

CNN at least has a handful of stories on the subject, with one being published today about how the Patriot Act has actually, finally expired. But the subject matter itself is fear mongering bullshit. The word "terror", on its own or as a root of a word, is used 14 times, and the Patriot Act is framed as a collection of "tools" for "fighting terror", despite the fact that this is completely false (I'll have a follow-up post on this matter in the next few days). The opening two paragraphs of the article frame the entire ordeal as a hindrance to national security, which means imminent danger. In fact, the entire article is 50% "here's what's happening" and 50% "We aren't as safe anymore!". One of their headings is actually "So could America be less safe?"

And that's just on this article. Keep reading, there's more!

Huffington Post

This is the first website I wouldn't describe as centrist in any way, but a very far left-leaning website (according to my earlier posted sources, HuffPo is further left than Fox News is right). The front page doesn't mention much, but makes a bit more of an effort than Yahoo! did, leaving this article on how Edward Snowden is finally receiving the recognition he deserves for what he did, only to turn around and run another article called "Huge Pieces Of The Patriot Act Just Expired. Here's What That Actually Means.", where they proceed to in the first fucking sentence denounce Edward Snowden and instead give all the credit to "congressional dysfunction." Of course, they steadfastly refused to mention Rand Paul's epic 10 and a half hour filibuster, most likely 100%, definitely, entirely because he himself is a Republican, even though the move itself has pissed off a lot of other Republicans. 

Don't believe me?

You'd have to be fucking stupid to write for these people and say anything good about Hillary's opponent

The article itself is actually fairly informative, and lacking in the "OH SHIT WE'RE GONNA GET 9/11'D AGAIN!" undertones present in the CNN article.

So, let's switch gears and see what Fox News has to say.

Fox News

Expiration of the Patriot Act isn't one of the huge stories on the front page. If we decide to CTRL+F to search for what they're saying about NSA reform, we can type in "NSA", and we see it is mentioned 4 times on the front page, linking  to 3 articles:

Paul battles critics as NSA collection program expires

Video: Paul: Expiration of NSA bulk data collection a 'big victory'

Gen. McChrystal: 'Never saw abuse' of NSA surveillance tools. This one was mentioned twice.

 [I am at my day job and currently unable to watch these videos, I will watch it when I get home and update the post accordingly].

Searching for the phrase "Patriot Act" actually comes up with a plethora of articles penned and videos shot in the last 24 hours, much more so than our previously analyzed sites. They ranged from being fairly laid back, saying "It's not a big deal, we should review legislation from time to time" to Sean Hannity and Jim Sensenbrenner (the Patriot Act's author) discussing how the secret FISA courts have bastardized his original plan, so it's good that it's gone, and also good that the USA Freedom Act is being passed (again, I intend to read it and give you all my take on it).

I don't know if I'm even going to bother watching Gen. McChrystal's lies and drivel, because we know damn well that the NSA was abusing the hell out of it's powers that it never used to combat terrorism anyway, even going so far as to make a LOVEINT tag, where NSA employees would regularly spy on their love interests (LOVEINT meaning "Love Intelligence", using standard intelligence format where things like SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] and HUMINT [Human Intelligence] during investigations).

So, some truth and some lies on Fox News. What else is new?

Impending Terror: A recurring theme

There is, however, something else I noticed. 

There's another big story competing with this one, and it's being run on all the news publications, even advertised on all of their front pages when this was being buried. 

Full Story Here

CNN too, full story here

And Fox News as well

Even google got in on the fun

While the media is fawning over Bruce Jenner and his "transition" to become a "woman", this isn't the only 'huge' story hogging the headlines. For those of us who really couldn't care less what a former Olympian and somehow the most irrelevant member of the Kardashian clan are doing for attention now, there's another actual 'big' story right now: that the TSA is absolutely awful at their jobs. 

The story is that the Department of Homeland Security decided to run undercover audits of the effectiveness of the TSA screening, only to find that just 3 out of 70 tests successfully detected high explosives and weapons being smuggled through airport security. 

This story is being run today for a reason, the reason being that they can't openly advocate for the Patriot Act to make a comeback. Most people in this country, at this point, thanks to Edward Snowden, are aware of gross government overreach and civil liberties being trampled upon. We all know that it's happening, so it would be career suicide to openly advocate it or pretend it isn't happening. Instead, what they're doing is downplaying the fact that the Patriot Act has expired, and key parts of it that have been ruled unconstitutional have come to an end. They discuss how this means we have less tools to fight terrorism (again, utter bullshit to be covered in a later post), while actively promoting a different story intended to stir up fear of a possible 9/11 repeat in the future due to an ineffective TSA. 

What about foreign news?

Russia Today, ever the "alternative" news source, ran a big story on the expiration of the Patriot Act, which you can read here. Well known for being anti-American propagandists loyal to Putin, they ran a comprehensive, informative story on the subject matter, focusing a bit more on the actual battle between Senators who wanted to force it to expire and those who wanted to extend it. They painted our politicians (not entirely incorrectly) as hyperbole-happy and lying through their teeth, desperate to keep their powers which have already been ruled as illegal by our court system, and immediately ran another story about how Obama still wants to prosecute Snowden despite all of that. 

But that's all just my take on how the highly-refined, super efficient propaganda machines of today are handling the loss of the great American spying program.