Poll: Majority Of Americans Say Corporate Media Puts Out Fake News
To some, it’s a yet unknown epiphany. To most, it is an obvious fact.
Sometimes, it’s really easy to catch (Fox News), other times, it takes a bit more thinking (MSNBC, CNN, NY Times, Wash. Post, etc…). Regardless, it should be quite obvious that our “journalists” do not have journalistic integrity, and instead, without hesitation, serve the needs of the elites, corporate America, and the political leadership of the two major parties. This often leads to propagandistic coverage of many events. Thankfully, the majority of the American people recognize this dissonance between reality and how it’s depicted by the corporate media.
The Hill reports: (http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/334897-poll-majority-says-mainstream-media-publishes-fake-news)
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the mainstream press is full of fake news, a sentiment that is held by a majority of voters across the ideological spectrum. According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris poll, which was provided exclusively to The Hill, 65 percent of voters believe there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media. That number includes 80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents, and 53 percent of Democrats.
There are several examples of fake news being reported in corporate media outlets, two of which are extremely painful to witness.
One was the coverage that lead to the Iraq War. They essentially put out propaganda for the Bush administration to help them get public opinion on the side of the war.
This is what the Washington Post had to say about weapons of mass destruction that were eventually never found: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/irrefutable/e598b1be-a78a-4a42-8e1a-c336f7a217f4/?utm_term=.aa92d3b083a3)
After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.
Not only is that a painful example, the textbook definition of fake news should be the “Bernie Bro” narrative. It was ridiculous, not grounded in reality, and easily detectable to be so by critically thinking minds.
The Harvard poll reported on by The Hill shows that the American people saw through the lies, and picked up on the non-existent respect for reality the corporate media has.
But even when the corporate media does report on something accurately, they report on the wrong things. At the core of journalism exists the ambition to speak truth to power, to defend democracy, and to highlight the problems that are affecting ordinary people. Yet, all our “journalists” constantly defend power, defend destroyers of democracy, and ignore the problems that are affecting ordinary people. Instead of reporting on how $500 billion of our discretionary budget is spent on the military — more than the next seven countries combined, they report on how “beautiful” the strikes in Syria are (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/brian-williams-leonard-cohen-syria_us_58e76c44e4b058f0a02e12b1). Instead of reporting on how Bernie Sanders is currently the most popular politician in America, they try to compare him to a Venezuelan dictator because he has a podcast (http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/04/19/bernie_sanders_new_podcast_is_awful.html). Instead of reporting on how tear gas, water cannons, mace, ravenous hounds, and concussion grenades were used to assault peaceful water protectors in North Dakota, they reported (falsely) that the protectors were violent by repeating a statement from the militarized police (http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/21/us/dakota-access-pipeline-protests/).
The corporate media does this because they are in a bubble of elitists and the Washington establishment. They don’t want to work for the people, they want to work for themselves; greedy corporations who want nothing but money and power.
What people do like are principled, independent media outlets that stick with the whole journalism thing, that speak truth to power, that defend democracy, and that actually report (truthfully) on problems that are affecting ordinary people. That’s why less and less people are watching cable news, and more and more people are getting their news through independent media outlets and content creators on Youtube. Only about a month ago did The Young Turks, an independent media outlet, raise $2,000,000 for investigative journalism.
Along with marijuana legalization, universal healthcare, and other progressive policy positions, the American people got it right again, and are discerning the corporate media’s lies.
