Once again Americans have been inundated by a tsunami of one-sided “news” coverage and an officially sanctioned mourning period and state funeral were exploited (at taxpayers’ expense) for political purposes, as we were subjected to a hagiographies of former President Jimmy Carter.
We endured hours of propagandistic MSM radio and TV reportage (or what passes for it), whether we liked it or not, often preempting regularly scheduled programming, that has totally failed to provide a full, comprehensive view of the Carter presidency, completely missing its very dark side, in particular Carter’s Big Lie.
This includes outlets that purport themselves to be “Left,” such as The Nation. Consider the obituary penned by that outlet’s editorial director and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, which never so much as mentions Carter’s unforgivable sins. The Nation may flatter itself as being “America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture,” but the fact that it ignores Carter’s crimes makes it, at least in this case, no better than MSM. (This could account for why The Nation drastically cut back its print publications in 2023, declining from a weekly to a monthly. If an “alternative press” outlet fails, like the corporate media, to do probing analysis and investigative journalism, why should someone bother to read and subscribe to it?)[1]
Instead, the rosy picture flooding the airwaves et al. is of the simple “Man from Plains,” a Georgia peanut farmer who rose to the White House during the post-Vietnam War, post-Watergate period by promising the world-weary American people that he would never lie to them. On December 29, 2024, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution headline ballyhooed: “Jimmy Carter was nation’s Sunday School teacher.”
A chyron on the reputedly left-leaning MSNBC dutifully instructed us that Carter was a “humanitarian and peacemaker.” As flags fly at half-staff, the 39th president is being lionized and lauded for brokering a peace deal in the Middle East, and for subsequently being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, championing human rights, pioneering alternative energy, building Habitat for Humanity houses, the Carter Center’s election monitoring abroad and eradicating of diseases, and so on.
Commentator after commentator extols the Georgian as our most exemplary ex-president, while some do mention (in passing) some problems that took place when this one-term president was in the White House, such as an oil crisis and his failure to bring U.S. hostages home from Tehran while he was still in office. But I have not heard a single talking head dare delve into the dirty deeds and tricks of the Carter presidency, the reverberations from which we are still living with today.
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