we want to present. something. tonight on arts you just because they report it doesn't mean it's true american viewers are taking the hand and straying away from news from network news outlets will ask the host of the young turks where viewers are turning to to get their dose of daily headlines. and while the mainstream media struggles to find an audience when his apology is across the u.s. are having a hard time paying their bills countless towns are filing for bankruptcy one after another but one city is fighting back against the banks in a big way we'll tell you how coming up. it's thursday july twelfth eight pm here in washington d.c.

i'm liz of all in you're watching our. well losing faith in the media americans confidence in television news has hit a new low that's according to a recent gallup poll these days only twenty one percent of americans have confidence in the news that's a forty six percent drop since one thousand nine hundred three and confidence a newspaper is not much better here you can see that it's dropped to twenty five percent that's a twelve percent drop from two thousand so where are people turning to instead it looks like citizen journalists could be giving the mass news networks are run for their money our correspondent arena pour in iowa has the story. venning goodness statics round the clock operations a product always being exported america's mainstream news industry generates power and profits but it seems partisan reporting and frequent gaffes may have made many americans turn away from the big broadcasters a recent gallup poll shows an all

time low of only twenty percent of the public trusting the news many say this means citizen journalism is becoming a big game changer and the amazing thing about training citizens to be really good pundits is that they they have a wealth of information that journalists just don't have when you help them connect what they know are exposed to their experience with a big picture. political event it's very powerful on what that journalist and best selling author and i only wolf not only supports citizen journalism she and business partner lisa thomas have built a nonpartisan training ground for it it's called daily klout dot com we're not just teaching people to vent we're training people to write rigorous shapely opinion pieces which are eight hundred words long and also to source their assertions we also teach them how to link what they are exposing are calling for with

action steps. daily clout also features a legislative search engine that monitors and explains bills making their way to capitol hill a tool allowing everyday people to hold federal state and corporate leaders accountable when america's fourth estate fails to i think the mainstream media has become about entertainment. and also concerned who holds the purse strings if the mainstream media is controlled by large corporate interests they're going they're beholden to them but this website is independently financed giving tens of thousands of citizens the freedom. to report on topics many news networks are accused of suppressing i think one of the best ways you can judge the state of democracy is an approach. and i think if you have a situation where the citizens of the country are actually bypassing the mainstream media i think that says

a lot of the stage of democracy critics however argue that only properly educated and experienced journalists should be intrusted with understanding the rigors and ethics involved in news reporting but even then. there is no guarantee the public will receive facts this is premature justices have struck down the individual mandate for the unconstitutional the direct blow to the president i would say it's a direct blow to his democratic party the individual mandate has been struck down it has been struck down no it has not. stopped. us mass media still maintains a stronger and wider reach that citizen journalism but it no longer holds the power to determine what the public is the baby doing or even reporting about very important artsy new york. well it's like a further into this issue of americans losing confidence in network news outlets

when it comes to fair and accurate reporting journalist happened to sources to help tell the story but what happens when you don't accurately disclose who your sources are well that's exactly what happened when news outlets reported on obamacare and the lawsuit to stop it they wanted to get the take of a small business owner you know just your run of the mill small business owner and they all happened to find the same guy. because of the increasing health care legislation coming down the line in things like regulatory burdens is really making us it making it that much more difficult for me to make a decision to increase and expand my business without a doubt it's something that we're ready to expand and at this point would all do is either hold off or i'm a higher part time employees and in form of instead of full time employees we've seen an increase regulation of health care we don't know where it stands where it's going to lead to what was supposed to help small businesses but it's so narrowly

targeted it's not going to be of any help to my company. as the blog balloon juice first pointed out throughout his various appearances joe oliver was called a small business owner but what they didn't tell you was that this man also happens to be a part of the national federation of independent businesses it's a right wing pro corporate lobbying group they were also a plaintiff in the supreme court challenge to challenge to obamacare but in all these reports no mention of his lobbying ties so it turns out he's not so random but in fact he is in fact using the media as a platform to further the lobbying groups interest we say if you want to interview him that's five just let the audience know who he is so all this could provide clues as to why americans are losing faith in the fourth estate to talk more about this decline and news viewership gent ugur host of the young turks joined me earlier today. first of all i was going to say i love that story you guys did on

that fake lobbyist guy small business owner all right now why are they losing faith in news because the news sucks they're fake no one believes them and they're right so places like c.n.n. will have their fake balance as they will romney said this and obama said all right who cares what are they what's the truth i don't need you to be there i need you to tell me what the facts are but they're deathly afraid of telling the american audience what the facts are because it might hurt the government they might be called biased by one side or another so people are turning out because they're saying well obviously these guys aren't real and they're not going to be straight but i actually took a to the streets of washington d.c. to ask the oars why exactly they are turning out here's a look oh well folks outside i feel like it's a lot of misinformation and they're just trying to and things like tom cruise. is

in the news. do you believe everything you see on the news for the most part it's factual i think it's just a matter of how much time do you have to go when you have that story immediate supposed to be the fourth the state's kind of. a watchdog of sorts do you think that maybe they're abandoning that responsibility. i think they're more working. with their goals in mind instead of just being like here the public hears the facts figure it out they've got an agenda and they're using their own agenda because they want days it's biased one of the other you can't get an objective report anywhere with the rich and you go to his going to swing one end or the with the other channel you're just listening to another and if you're going to tell a joke tell it you want everybody to know what everybody is doing wrong just don't decide to pick on one group of people that don't make sense if not t.v. where do you turn to for the news instead. on mine definitely where do you go to instead i go to the web and then look for the news that i need to find. i was funny

when i was out there trying to talk to people trying to ask them why they're tuning out i didn't run into one person that said yes i'm completely happy with the media the way that it is today so i mean it seems like people are getting fed up. good there. we'll i lost you for a second but but i did see the package and let me just say the one thing i think that they're absolutely right about is that they already read it you know my my dad also says that now that just goes to unfortunately good news on television being laid by the nature of our technology these days you know my dad used to watch prime time news every single night i notice that he had been doing that for a long time i said why i said why do i need brian williams it's on me something i read three hours ago so that's a huge problem for television news and then the other problem is they don't point out obvious facts like if yasser americans say do you think there's too much influence of money in politics eighty four percent say yes the overwhelming

majority now how many times do you see in the mainstream news where they say oh these politicians they just do whatever their campaign contributors tell him to do that's what you four percent of americans believe and that is what the reality is that people are right how often do they say it on the news almost never i that you know it was interesting you had mentioned your father there and there was there was once upon a time where people did trust in the news but we're seeing we saw the graph there it's kind of declining gradually what is it about the news today that way is it about the climate or the pressure are what is it today that is causing people to to lose confidence in the. honestly the news has been systematically bought and it's very logical if you think about it who pays for the news well that her ties to so now do you think they're going to do incredibly hard hitting news corp's and the things they're doing wrong that's the hand that feeds them you want to buy that and

then the corporations have also systematically bought our government through campaign contributions ninety three percent of the time in congressional races the guy with more money wins so it doesn't matter if you're a democrat or republican liberal or conservative doesn't matter what your point of view is on the issues only thing that matters is who's got more money now the corporations are giving that money and they're buying the politicians and they're also bought. all the advertising has paid for the news you think the news is going to report to you that the corporations have bought our government of course they're not going to report that so it's a it seems like they're the media's first loyalty is to advertisers instead of their viewers absolutely and i can tell you from my time in the mainstream media i mean there was a lot of things that they freaked out about the thing they forgot about the most is if you touched advertisers and then that the red flags waved everywhere it sounds like there's a little bit of a conflict of interest there and you know this gallup poll was actually taken before the whole health care debacle and major networks came out and actually broke

the wrong story so could we expect these numbers to actually be much lower you know i hear you on that i actually didn't think it was that big a deal to be honest i know i'm in the minority here that c.n.n. and fox news got it wrong and it's they're probably jumpy because they're so used to online news and being of the story that they'll get we we got it we got to read the first that is go out and right away we're going to be all line for the birds done so but you know overall it's a honestly if you ask me a minor mistake i think the structural problems the news where they don't actually report the real motivations of our government is a much much bigger deal so yes because of image problems it will erode people's view of news a little bit more t.v. news at least but but i think that that's the wrong element that we're talking about fair enough there so you had my social media when i was out there they say a lot of them are turning to social media and to these online outlets i do think

people are now finding these sources to be more trustworthy. well i have to confess to the audience that i'm enormously biased. we have a. show that happens to be the top news show in the world and they are here disclosing now you're putting it out there like you know a businessman right but look in terms of why we had that success and we have seven hundred fifty million views on you tube alone a million a day etc and i think it's because we're real with the audience we don't use a prompter so that they know that i'm having a conversation with them it's not something a producer wrote i'm not reading it like a robot and they know that i'm going to be honest with them and tell them hey look this democrat is doing something wrong this republican is taking money from that oil company etc so when they see it they go oh my god that sounds true that's why we've got an audience that we did that's why c.n.n.

is losing their ratings and t.v. news reducing their ratings and they're coming to on line outlets like us and i want to talk more about that small business owner where you know all these outlets were turning to him as the voice of the typical small business owner and he turned out to actually be part of this lobbying organization i mean how does that even happen i mean i know you've kind of seen the inner workings of this how does that happen i mean is it intentional is it lazy i mean what is it. it's both it starts out as intentional so there will be lobbying groups who will make such a person vailable to their allies so someone like fox news and fox news knows that he's actually a lobbyist and they are perfectly happy to pretend he's a small business owner there is have a symbiotic relationship with the republican party in fact they donate millions of dollars to the republican party and then they have republican party officials on as spokespeople not just officially in their roles but then they'll pay them like they'll pay sarah palin newt gingrich rick santorum who want up running for

president cetera so it starts on purpose as a propaganda campaign and then the other networks because they're lazy will go ok great you know well. it's news as a small business owner it must be a small business owner what am i going to do go to find actual small business owner that would take a lot of work so i'll just take their word for it and then it spreads and it spreads and fox news knows this phenomenon that's why they have such a powerful voice here in america because they need the other news networks to amplify their voice for them to kind of sounds like it turns into this vicious cycle but it doesn't really seem africa all. it's gross it's horribly on a go that's absolutely right look i've been inside the mainstream machine where i see the cable stations flipping as we watch so fox news keeps covering a story over and over and over again because they have an agenda to push c.n.n. doesn't have an agenda they don't know what the hell is going on they're trying to keep up with what was on lot of i don't know that seem to be

a story that's and then every once in all their executives will look at fox news be like well they've been covering that for so long i guess everybody must be talking about it so let's switch over and cover and then when c.n.n. switches over then m s n b c panics or goes oh my god a fox news and c.n.n. are covering it we've got a switchover and then boom wall to wall coverage and that's how our cable news gets hijacked by fox news actually brilliant now i have to say again i'm biased here but i work for current television and that's cable news that is not hijacked by that process by the way one of the reasons is it's independent so it's not reliant on the same you know mega corporations that they own their ego and i also want to point out this is actually a very good thing for us here at our another shift where people are turning to the news these days over in canada r.t. has risen to be one of the most popular international news networks we now surpassed sky news over there so i mean what do you think that means are people

kind of just getting tired of the mainstream and they want something different. this is another side of it. yes it is and i'll tell you why you know i have friends who sometimes travel abroad and when they do and they see other news outlets like b.b.c. becoming like oh my god do you know the rest of the world gets real news because here our media instead of challenging the government which was their original role that's what the press is supposed to do there be supposed be a check on the government they do the exact opposite they cover for the government in every way imaginable that's part of the reason that they despise julian assange but like oh my god that guy still michael johns appropriately government secrets that's so embarrassing for us because we're lapdogs and so that's why when people travel abroad like oh my god look at people criticizing the u.s. government and factual grounds and other governments the syrian government the russian government whoever it might be and i think that you know when you see both side by side for the audience it's an easy decision which one you go with the fake

news or the real news jank and i really appreciate you coming on the show that was django there and be sure to watch the young turks on line from three to five pm eastern monday through friday and nightly on current t.v. at seven pm eastern and i should mention that the young turks has a new show the point on the town square which you can find on their you tube channel thanks jack. thank you so much well it's been a brutal couple of weeks for the state of california in the past two weeks three cities have filed for bankruptcy here they are san bernardino california they're the most recent one they filed bankruptcy this a few days ago they had a budget shortfall of forty over forty five million dollars and then there's stockton california the biggest city to file so far they filed june twenty eighth they have a budget shortfall of twenty six million dollars and there's mammoth lakes california

they filed that bankruptcy back in the beginning of july four hundred forty three million dollar court order placed against the town and now oakland though they're taking a very different approach they are fighting back against the big banks that they blame for putting the city in the economic crisis to begin with. goldman sachs faces a fifteen million dollars penalty if they break this deal with goldman sachs oakland though is there any not to invest in goldman sachs again. so what happened was the oakland city council voted unanimously to break the deal with goldman sachs the city would be required as i mentioned earlier to pay a fifteen million dollars penalty fee if they break a deal with goldman they made back in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight the deal locked in the interest rate at the time but the problem with that is the federal reserve set interest rates much lower after the financial crisis and this was done to help struggling cities like oakland tackle the debt but oakland has

been still been forced by goldman sachs to pay the higher rate costing the city of four million dollars a year and oakland is sick of paying wall street at the expense of police teachers and other public services such as oakland stand a chance against the big bank to talk about this joining me now is dr lou's caliber organizer for the coalition to stop goldman sachs' welcome there lose so why i know that you are really fighting back fighting against goldman sachs why is this the approach you're taking as opposed to filing for bankruptcy like like your predecessors. yeah we're in a community based organization a coalition that found out that our city is paying goldman sachs four million dollars a year we've paid twenty million so far and we're probably going to play if we don't get out of this deal in another twenty million we think that this is just outrageous when our city is separating from budget cuts to libraries our roads are

full of potholes just basic services are being workers are being laid off so we think it's time to buy back and we've actually convinced the city council to make. make. to demand actually that goldman sachs let us out of this toxic swap deal and i mean why dividing the blame goldman sachs for the financial crisis that the city of oakland is facing right now why do you blame them for putting them for to rip it's very complicated these interest rates swaps but cities and transit districts across the country are involved in these interest rates swaps and in the case of opel and the underlying bond was paid off many years ago but because the contract is locked in for for this many for so many years we're still

pain in the interest rate on a bond that has been retired this just seems unfair and it seems like the ninety nine percent who are the people who are living in oakland are transferring our hard earned wealth to the one percent which is well known facts and work that out we've had enough and we've found his way to fight that now at the end of the day there lose i mean i guess the argument could be made that a contract was made to abide by these interest rates so i guess both sides of the party now need to abide by that contract. that's correct that's exactly the counterargument but the way that we see it is that the reason that this this interest rates swap turn into a toxic asset for our city is because when the kamiya crashed in two thousand in any the lower the interest rate to protect the big banks the big banks are the ones that caused the. economy to crash so they got bailed out

and now they're it's like a second bailout because our money continues to go towards them because of the federal policy of keeping the interest rates at near zero if the interest rates were fluctuating in a normal way this would not be a toxic swap for our city and for cities across the country but because of this policy to protect the banks the cities and our residents are like losing two times or now so now you're refusing to to go with this still refusing to pay the fifteen million dollars penalty. have you gotten a reaction yet from goldman sachs rightly so last week the city council voted. goldman sachs' would have seventy days they would have seventy days to negotiate an end to the swap and if that woman starts refuses to let us out of this toxics what the city of oakland will have used to do anything you should business will coleman

sounds so that's the leverage that we have and ask how we're hoping other cities and chance of districts will take note of how or why we missed so aggressively for the first city to fight in this aggressive way and we're hoping to inspire other people to also buy for so that they do have time but as of now you have not gotten a response from goldman sachs is that correct ok and you said that your leverage is that you're going to refuse to do business with them i mean goldman sachs is pretty pretty huge do you think that is really enough leverage to get them to listen. well it's the leverage we have and i think they have also because of the fact that we're really people are paying attention to what's going on in oakland we're hoping that this will inspire as i said other cities and that collectively we're going to be able to figure out where. the poor are in oakland are not pain for this

financial meltdown how do you have faith do you expect the goldman sachs well we'll negotiate we're not sure more wait we're in a wait and see mode and we're going to step up some credit direct pressure on goldman's that to let them know that this is their residents of ohio and are watching this carefully and we're going to do our best to pressure them and unite with other people who are also suffering from these interest rates lineups to pressure goldman sachs directly in the next seventy days and then wall this is the public battle and we're prepared to debate it now oakland is kind of trying something new oakland is the first city to fight back and to say hey we are not just going to go along with this we're not even if we're not going to file for bankruptcy do you think that maybe some of the other cities because this three already in the past couple of weeks in the state of california have all have filed for bankruptcy do you think that in these scenarios are sometimes do they rush into

filing for bankruptcy when there could be other alternatives. well i think each city is going to have its unique situation of how the financial meltdown has impacted them i do know that across the nation and certainly across california many many cities are locked into these toxic interest rate swaps and we do think politically there's there is room to organize against those in particular and that it's a potential place for us as citizens to be able to buy that it's hard as you note of course that isn't stuff i'm ways to buy that back against these big banks. and even though these interest rates really complicated to explain to your normal person on the street everybody has a gut level i understand that yeah this is wrong that warpaint wellman sachs there's money and that's get out of this deal you're looking at fifteen million dollars that's what goldman sachs wants and i know that you know oakland is

a struggling city how can this fifteen million dollars be better spent in your opinion or where else could this money go. i mean there are so many ways that our city is that green like i like i've mentioned before i mean i'm a college professor so i'm a big believer in libraries libraries and ours have been cut shrinking libraries are so important for her poor communities who don't whose students don't have access to computers for example to do their homework so we really need these services in our city and we need them expanded and not kept back and not. putting up a fight over there thanks so much for coming on the show that was dr lou's calvin organizer for coalition to stop goldman sachs. well drugging a detainee's with mind altering med sounds like a line out of a movie right but it turns out that's not

a far cry from what happens in real life and a partner defense or for report reveals that the government is doing just that the report which was made public thanks to a freedom of information act request shows that military prisoners are prisoners excuse me in military custody or forced to take powerful mind altering drugs here's how the lead investigative reporter for truthout dot org jason leopold summed it up . in the case of one detainees that we identified in the report. you know he said that his interrogator essentially asked him. or he confessed to his interrogator that he was a member of al qaida and we also know that this detained he was injected with how do all we also know from the report that the inspector general determined that this detainees was diagnosed as borderline with borderline personality disorder schizophrenia and psychotic and after he made this confession while he was on these

while he was on this anti-psychotic they kept locked up in guantanamo for three more years it was jason leopold lead investigative reporter for truthout dot org and an update now to this story in response to these recent allegations the pentagon sends out a new report claiming that no evidence exists of any officials act on tunnel bay intentionally using mind altering drugs to interrogate prisoners the lawyers for the men held at the present suggest that their report still shows that the government relied upon the faulty statements of doped detainees will keep you posted as the events develop but that's going to do it for the news today from on the stars because varitek are you paid youtube dot com slash r t america you can also check out our web site that is r t dot com slash usa and you can also follow me on twitter liz wall for now have a great night we'll see you back here tomorrow.