Can We Survive a Corrupt Media?
The media is keeping half the country in an alternate reality
The concept of bias in the media has probably been around as long as there has been media. Certainly, editorial boards consistently supporting one party over another is nothing new. Nor is bias limited to politics. When a certain business, or businessman, does something the media doesn’t like, the coverage can change dramatically. I can’t think of a starker example of this than before and after Elon Musk announced his purchase of Twitter.
Overnight he went from the brilliant innovator who would save the planet with his electric cars, to a crazed billionaire who literally wants to murder people by having less bias, and as we now know, outright corruption and collusion with the government, on a social media platform.
Putting on my rose-colored glasses of the good old days, I remember the media mocking Reagan, Bush senior, Dole, W, and Romney, while simultaneously applauding their Democrat opponents. If you’re old enough I’m sure you remember the love affair with saxophone playing Bill Clinton. Going so far as to ignore previous claims of sexual harassment and rape, and mocking Republicans for making a big deal of the Monica Lewinski scandal.
It is odd that a country desensitized to politicians and their sexual predations yawned over various October surprise allegations against Trump. Much to the supposed shock and horror of the supporters of Bill Clinton and his wife.
Recently, however, the media has crossed from bias to engaging in outright misinformation and censorship.
It’s Bigger than Left vs Right
As a conservative, it has largely become expected for me to dislike the media because of their bias. And while I loathe the media in its current form, and despise many individual reporters for their overt roles as regime propagandists, it’s not their bias that I hate. It’s what they’ve done to the country through their deliberate abuse of their positions.
Because despite my feelings on the Democrat/media alliance, having a functioning, objective, truth-seeking news media is vital to a free country and unfortunately, we don’t have one.
The legacy media outlets have absolutely destroyed their credibility and are in the process of destroying the country with it.
Such is the state of their collective dumpster fire that half the country now thinks national news organizations intentionally mislead them.
Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.
So, we effectively have two halves of the country living in different realities. A country simply cannot survive in such a state. It’s no wonder discussion of “national divorce” has made it to the halls of Congress.
Let’s Look at COVID for Instance
I’m not going to rehash every aspect of COVID and the response to it. We are all well aware of what happened and how it played out. Judging by the number of masks I still see, there are plenty of people who still believe the fearmongering.
Some are now acknowledging the massive overreaches of the response and trying to play the, “well some mistakes were made but let’s have a COVID amnesty because we just didn’t know! It was all in good faith” card.
No. I don’t think I will support an amnesty because we knew who was most at risk of COVID from the beginning. We knew it was the elderly, and soon after learned it was the obese and people with related underlying conditions like diabetes.
COVID didn’t cause us to derail the global economy. It was the corrupt media, and bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci, who forced the biggest global disruption since WWII.
Well, in between fawning media appearances anyway.
If we had anything like an objective, truth-seeking media industry, it would have gone differently. But we don’t. We had a media so bent on getting Trump they led billions of people into disaster.
How do I know this? First of all, they say it. Second of all, the “debunked conspiracy theories” are all turning out to be true.
After the recent revelations about the origins of COVID, masks, and the COVID “vaccine” (byline August 2021), who can blame people for not trusting the media? On the single biggest issue of the last several decades, rather than do their job to inform the public, the media deliberately stifled and mocked multiple arguments about the disease and the response that turned out to be correct.
In a letter to Rep. James Comer, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, an NIH official admits that a “limited experiment” was conducted in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ace2 receptor in a mouse model.”
They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors…
…That paper, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was sent to Fauci for editing in draft form and again for final approval before it was published in Nature Medicine on Feb. 17, 2020.
It was written four days after Fauci, and his NIH boss Dr. Francis Collins, held a call with the four authors to discuss reports that COVID-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan lab and “may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.”
The media went so far as to mock, shame, and say that people who didn’t take the COVID vaccine should be denied health care. All of this despite the information being available showing that the vaccine is actually more therapeutic, potentially reducing the severity of COVID infection, but not preventing contracting or spreading the disease.
From Tablet:
In late 2021 and early 2022, it was commonplace for journalists and public intellectuals to demonize and shame “the unvaccinated,” a group that in the United States was disproportionately low income. The New York Times ran pieces like “I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated,” and “Unvaxxed, Unmasked and Putting Our Kids at Risk.” The Los Angeles Times published a column titled “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary.” An opinion piece called “The Unvaccinated Are a Risk to All of Us” appeared in Bloomberg, and The Washington Post printed a piece called “Macron is right: It’s time to make life a living hell for anti-vaxxers.”…
…During the Dec. 10, 2020, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) meeting when the first mRNA vaccines were authorized, FDA adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated, “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.” Despite the data presented for individual efficacy, he continued, “we really, as of right now, do not have any evidence that it will have an impact, social-wide, on the epidemic.” The FDA EUA press release from December 2020 also confirms that there was no “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-COV-2 from person to person.”…
…Yet studies had already shown by the fall of 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent infection, that natural immunity was at least as protective, that vaccinated people had similar viral loads to unvaccinated people, and that vaccinated people had a role in transmission.
Despite all of this being publicly available, it was suppressed from mainstream news coverage in favor of the continuation of lies promoting the fearmongering responses.
To recap, here are a handful of the ways the media deliberately refused to do its job by asking questions, telling the truth, and holding the powerful accountable:
Fauci funded gain of function research involving spike proteins and bat viruses
Fauci lied about funding gain of function research
The virus escaped from the lab where this research was funded
Fauci commissioned a “study” to say this isn’t what happened
Fauci refers to the “study” he prompted to say, See? It’s a naturally occurring virus that came from bat soup.
The “vaccine is safe and effective” at preventing infection and transmission, despite the manufacturers not even making such claims.
The Democrat/media alliance, seeing a chance to undermine Trump, ran with all of this and spent the next two years locking people in their homes, demanding they wear masks, and take an experimental “vaccine” that doesn’t prevent contracting or transmitting the virus, massively disrupting the economy, spending trillions of borrowed dollars, and dutifully ignoring all of the vaccine side effects and dramatic increase in excess deaths since the mass distribution of the vaccine.
Given the chance to hold the highest-paid government bureaucrat accountable, the man most responsible for the existence of COVID-19, and certainly the driving force behind the most egregious response overreaches, this is what we get from the media.
What the Media Should Be
Everyone has biases. It’s completely normal. Journalists used to have professional codes of ethics and integrity that would, in theory, keep these biases to a minimum in straight news coverage. Those safeguards have been breaking down for decades as journalists disappear and news personalities multiply. Such is the allure of becoming personally famous and landing that big-money show on cable.
Is anyone reading this and not thinking the phrase “journalistic integrity” is a punchline?
I would be fine with all of this bias and negligence as long as everyone knew and acknowledged what was going on. If the mainstream outlets just admitted their leftwing bias and reported it as such, people could decide for themselves if they should be believed.
But they don’t. They continue to gaslight the public, and possibly themselves, into thinking they are still stalwart truth-tellers, speaking truth to power and other such nonsense. Who can forget this cringe?
If we had an equally large and respected alternative media, the problem of a massively left-wing media existence could be mitigated. And while alternative media sources are growing, they are still tiny in comparison.
Such is the disparity between “conservative and liberal media” that most people can go through life and not know alternatives exist. Liberals can go through life never even seeing the other side unless they specifically seek it out. It’s impossible to do the opposite with legacy media.
The statistics I pointed out at the beginning of this article show that many people are waking up to the reality of our broken news industry. The problem is that legacy media is doing next to nothing to fix the problem. Instead of blaming themselves, they blame the public for not listening to them.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem that can be ignored forever. Two partisan bubbles cannot continue existing in such close proximity before one of them pops.