Posts Tagged “Joseph Goebbels”

Hang on to your hammer and sickle, we’re about to get a dose, as the Obama administration starts it’s own news network.

Reads the print pool report from that day: “After shaking hands with the team’s parents and members of Congress who showed up, the president walked the team over to his basketball court and shot hoops. The pool was held back from the stroll down the drive and around the corner, and couldn’t see the court. Poolers could hear periodic cheering coming from the other side of the bushes.”

Read the TV pool report: “Your Pool was not allowed to go over and shoot POTUS with the team shooting hoops. We protested loudly.”

Now we know why: Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who’s speaking.

Also, just like a network, they have their own little logo!

It’s perfectly fine, of course, for the White House to put out its own version of events — but is it right to do so by preventing actual reporters from covering something? (Even something like a pickup basketball game).

Do Obama White House officials think their media coverage isn’t flattering enough?

Is the goal to ultimately replace the pesky photographers who film what they want to and not what they’re told to (not to mention the annoying reporters who ask uncomfortable questions about, say, detainee policy and bank bailouts)?

As one blogger noted:

It could just be that the White House doesn’t want press coverage of Obama sans teleprompter. But hey, they have a car company, an insurance company, and some banks. Why not a news network? Maybe Keith Olbermann can be their chief White House correspondent.

Wait a minute….doesn’t Olbermann already work for the federal government?

Sounds like it may be right out of Joseph Goebbels playbook.

Hitler was deeply impressed by Goebbels’s success in turning the small Berlin section of the Party into a powerful organization in North Germany and in 1929 appointed him Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSDAP. Looking back many years later (24 June 1942), Hitler observed: “Dr. Goebbels was gifted with the two things without which the situation in Berlin could not have been mastered: verbal facility and intellect.. . . For Dr. Goebbels, who had not found much in the way of a political organization when he started, had won Berlin in the truest sense of the word.”

Hitler had indeed cause to be grateful to his Propaganda Leader, who was the true creator and organizer of the Fuhrer myth, of the image of the Messiah-redeemer, feeding the theatrical element in the Nazi leader while at the same time inducing the self-surrender of the German masses through skilful stage management and manipulation. A cynic, devoid of genuine inner convictions, Goebbels found his mission in selling Hitler to the German public, in projecting himself as his most faithful shield-bearer and orchestrating a pseudo-religious cult of the Fuhrer as the saviour of Germany from Jews, profiteers and Marxists.

The Fairness Doctrine can’t be far behind. Move over, MSNBC.