Something Worth Watching?

Hey Everyone!! :-)

I'm back with the next installment of my new series on videos that caught my eye!:-)  Today, I'd like to talk about another video by Jordan Chariton. Yes, yes, I know, I said that not all of the videos I post in this series will be about politics, and they won't. But this one is. ;-)

The reason I chose today's video is because it's a particularly outstanding example of what journalism is supposed to be.  Something that a lot of people, including everyone in mainstream, corporate media, seem to have forgotten is that the press is, by definition, supposed to have an antagonistic relationship with power. Journalists and politicians are not supposed to be friends, because it is the journalists' job to find out and report on things that the politicians want kept quiet. The same can be said about journalists and the management of large corporations.

The purpose of the fourth estate is to be a check on power by informing The People about what's going on so they can take action to stop excesses and abuses by those in power.  That's why the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States includes the guarantee of a free press.  Because the Founding Fathers knew that if journalists did their job correctly, the government and those in power would want to stop them. That kind of censorship is an anathema to a free society, so the Constitution provides a guarantee to journalists that they will be able to do their job without government interference.

Unfortunately, with most media companies now being owned by large corporations that have bought and paid for the politicians, most of the press in this country has ceased to fulfill its primary purpose.  However, most is not all, and Jordan Chariton provided us with a wonderful example of what all press outlets should be doing when he confronted the DNC interim Chair Person, Donna Brazile, about the way she colluded with Hillary Clinton to provide the Clinton campaign with one of the questions she would be asked during a Town Hall.

This was a problem because Donna Brazile was working for CNN and was privy to information that shouldn't have been shared with any political campaign.  The purpose of having a Town Hall is to provide voters with a look at the candidate's candid response to questions about issues that concern the country. By sharing the question ahead of time, Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton time to prepare and rehearse her answer to the question.  Which defeated the purpose of asking it and also gave Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage over her opponent, Bernie Sanders.

It is a glaring example of the systematic way in which the DNC worked against Bernie Sanders to rig the primary election in favor of Hillary Clinton.  This certainly isn't the only way in which the primary election was rigged, but it's one of the ways and this email is black and white proof of the fact that the Clinton campaign abrogated democracy to force their choice on the voters.

Naturally, the DNC and Donna Brazile don't want to talk about this, and they are doing everything they can to confuse the issue. As you'll see in this video, one of their favorite smoke screens is the claim that the Russian government hacked their servers and gave the emails to Wikileaks. A claim for which there is no evidence, by the way.

Regardless, whether the DNC was hacked or not or who did or did not hack them is beside the point, and Jordan did a fantastic job of staying on point in this video and holding power accountable.  He's not the only journalist who does this, I've already shared with you some of Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!'s work in my last video post, but too many do not.  If all journalists would uphold such high standards of journalistic integrity, maybe we wouldn't have two Presidential candidates who are almost equally despised by the electorate.