Hi everybody Cheryl Ackison

Cheryl Ackison here.

Welcome to another edition of the Cheryl Ackison

podcast on just the news.com, a digital news site dedicated to facts, not spin, and reporting on underreported stories and views that cut across the grain. I hope you'll subscribe to this

podcast and to all the Just the News Podcasts John Solomon reports and the

pods honest truth. Today I'm going to talk about government, censorship, and journalism. I think you'll

find this a very eye-opening reality check. A reminder that you can preorder my new book, Sl, how the news media taught us to love censorship and hate journalism.

It'll be out in late November.

It's a great Christmas gift for yourself or someone who's interested in this subject matter and it supports independent journalism.

A portion of the proceeds will go to good journalism charities as always.

You can pre-order slanted at Amazon or anywhere. Now the best way I can summarize what I think has happened

to journalism today and I've learned a lot from my travels throughout Europe and even

attending a global journalism conference in Russia, this is all a global trend.

What you see and read on the news is now largely what special interests, corporations, and political

interests want you to see rather than from original

news gathering by reporters. The secret tactics that many use to manipulate are

called in general terms astrotf, as in fake grassroots.

And they use these tactics to manipulate the public, reporters, and the news.

Plainly speaking, you've probably heard the term, but I think of Astro Turf is when political people, companies, or other special interests who make money and gain power if you think a certain way, when they disguise themselves and do things, often online on the internet, to convince

you of something, sometimes in very subtle ways.

So they don't say, vote for this guy or buy this product because that's too obvious.

Instead they may push out comments on social media or pay so-called experts to write things

...