By LEO HOHMANN
A very disturbing story appeared in the European press this week that should concern all of us on this side of the Atlantic.
Stick with me while I explain why.
According to the Times of London, concerns have been raised about an “ethically dubious deal” between the government and national newspapers that involves journalists writing positive pieces about the Ireland 2040 plan.
The government’s “strategic communications unit” arranged for sponsored content to appear in local, regional and national newspapers including the Irish Independent and The Irish Times.
What is the Ireland 2040 plan, you ask?
It’s a €116 billion national development plan to prepare for an estimated population growth of one million people over the next two decades.
And where is this population growth going to come from, since Irish women have stopped having babies, as evidenced by their paltry 1.7 children per woman fertility rate?
How’d you guess? The projected growth Ireland’s technocrat leaders have planned is in the form of mass migration from the Third World.
This amounts to a plan straight out of the playbook of the United Nations 2030 Agenda and a 2000 UN document called Replacement Migration: Is it a solution to declining and ageing populations? It sets out spending plans for infrastructure, affordable transportation hubs and subsidized housing for the migrants.
The Times story continues:
“It is understood that a number of journalists at Independent News and Media were asked to write positive news pieces, which could not include negative or critical content. The double-page advertorials stated they were done “in partnership with the government.”
Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, noted: “As absurd as it sounds for the Irish government to be paying journalists to sell out Ireland, it appears to be a more widespread practice than most people realize.”
I am here to tell you, from first-hand experience, we would be naïve to believe this type of unethical prostituting of the media only happens in Ireland, the UK or Europe.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
I worked my entire professional life in the newspaper industry up until February 2014. As the industry lost ad revenue and profit margins dwindled, I saw ethical standards all but disappear at many newspapers. As an editor with a suburban Atlanta newspaper which I will not name, I sat in a boardroom with the county commission chairman in which the chairman literally dictated to the publisher of our newspaper what we could report and when. It made me sick and I started to complain to the top editor [I was second in charge of the newsroom at the time]. Needless to say I didn’t last long after I spoke up. It was a matter of a few weeks and I was told my services were no longer needed, without so much as a reason why.
Now, I will share another, more recent newspaper story from right here in the U.S.
It happened last week in South Dakota.
After myself and two colleagues testified last Wednesday before the SD Senate Committee on State Affairs in which we pointed out nothing but facts about the dark side of refugee resettlements of migrants into the Dakotas, Minnesota, Ohio, and several other states, the largest newspaper in South Dakota, the Argus Leader, put out a very fair story that laid out the testimony of both sides, for and against the continuation of these resettlements.
The article actually used a quote from myself as the featured headline. It read, “You don’t want to know the truth!” This was what I said directly to committee chairman Bob Ewing when he told me to wrap up my testimony half-way in.
At least I am told the story was fair. I never got to read it. The story only lasted about 40 minutes online before it was pulled down and rewritten with an all new headline. The reworked version scrubbed all mention of the three of us who testified in favor of Sen. Neal Tapio’s bill — a bill that was designed to rein in the resettlements. It went from giving details of what we said in front of the committee to not even mentioning our names. It’s like it never happened. Down the memory hole. Only the positive aspects of the refugee program were included in the rewrite.
Did the reporter get back to the newsroom and write up an honest report of what happened, only to post it prematurely before her editor got hold of it? Or did the editor post it, only to get a phone call from some powerful state legislator? I don’t know, but something happened to change a well-reported story into an incomplete and deceptive one.
The new headline was the much less attention-grabbing: “Citing concerns of discrimination, S.D. panel shelves refugee resettlement ban”
But in the editor’s rushed and sloppy attempt to revise away the original reporting, he forgot to change the original headline’s url, which you can still see below:
Did somebody place a call to the Argus Leader? If so, I can hear the conversation now…
“What in the hell are you guys doing publishing a story that makes those guys look like they knew what they were talking about?!!”
I can honestly say that those of us who testified for the bill, myself, economist James Simpson and former Homeland Security officer Philip Haney, definitely did know what we were talking about, and South Dakota cannot say it wasn’t warned.
The Argus Leader isn’t the only paper providing cover for the refugee program in South Dakota. When a Somali refugee was convicted of attempted rape of a mentally-disabled woman at a group home in Aberdeen in January 2017, the newspaper in that town, the News American, ignored the story. I reported it for WND.com after calling the local newspaper editor, J.J. Perry, and asking him why he felt the attempted rape of a disabled woman in his city wasn’t worth reporting. He was shamed into running the story but buried it on an interior page and left out key details, like the fact that the convicted sex offender was a Somali refugee.
The Minnesota media also routinely covers up Somali crimes in cooperation with the local police departments. The most recent example was the case involving Somali refugee Mahad Abdiaziz Adbiraham, who stabbed two men at the Mall of America. The cops and media said it was a failed robbery attempt, but Adbiraham spoke up publicly at trial and admitted he carried out the attack for Allah.
The media acted the same way in England when the Rotherham sex scandal broke three years ago, and it acted the same way in Germany when the New Year’s Eve events turned brutal for German women, leading to more than 1,200 reports of sexual assaults, gropings and molestations at the hands of migrant Muslims. Their first inclination is always to cover for the migrants, to protect them.
This is not the way I was taught to do journalism, but apparently this is the new normal. Local newspapers take their marching orders from chambers of commerce and elected officials. And these newspapers wonder why their subscription lists keep evaporating into thinner and thinner vapors.
Speaking to the Irish parliament, opposition leader Micheál Martin branded the government’s latest use of the media to promote its scheme as “ethically dubious.”
“The blurring of the lines is genuinely worrying from a parliamentary democracy point of view,” he said.
When the Fourth Estate gives up its independent, watchdog status, democracy is not served. It fact, it gets undermined. We need more honest journalists. But unfortunately, from what I have experienced, the honest watchdogs typically don’t get promoted up the ladder.
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Leo Hohmann is a veteran journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad.” If you appreciate this type of original, fact-based and independent reporting, please consider a donation of any size to this website. We accept no advertising and are beholden to no one.
LeoHohmann.com 
Having worked and lived in the Dakotas, Illinois and Ohio, I can say unequivocally that the author is right on point. The refugees have been brought in to small towns and large, rural and urban, in small enough numbers, at first to blunt any criticism. Of course the charge of ‘racism’ is also there available to the Left and the religious resettlement people who do the actual work (for very heavy payments from the taxpayers).
This is Stealth Invasion, for sure. And guess what? The current administration is not doing anything about these programs…the resettlement types stay in the shadows and the work progresses, while the public is distracted by the FWall, guns, etc. Not to say they aren’t important, but kicking the butt of the refugees out of the country is the only thing that can be done to help preserve us. The Left attacks on all fronts simultaneously.
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It is my opinion that the end goal of shuffling refugees from place to place around the world fits right into the Globalism agenda. First of all to”blend” cultures to the extent that the native culture no longer exists in an identifiable way. What follows is total obliteration of traditional values and norms which leads to cultural confusion. This supports the advent of a supreme ” world leader” and one world order results. Of course, one world order is a misnomer. One world domination and disorders describes it much more accurately. Think it can’t happen, look around you-it is happening-today.
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