By Tim Dunkin
By now, it ought to be obvious that if a person gets all or most of their information from the mainstream media (i.e. from ABCNNBCBS, and even Fox in a lot of cases), they will be sadly misinformed about just about everything going on in the world. This is because of the undeniable left-wing bias that oozes from the pores of just about every anchorman and “investigative” reporter employed by these organizations. This bias affects the way news organizations report on events that take place, involving the use of selective reporting and terminology that are intended to aim the thinking of the viewers in certain directions so that, with the right guidance from the input received by the talking heads, they will arrive at the “correct” conclusions about whatever it is that is being reported.
Another way in which news media bias manifests itself is in the choice of what stories to emphasize, and what stories to bury. Oftentimes, the MSM will take upon itself a censorship role that it would decry in any other entity, private or public, if they were to do the same thing. Some stories – typically those that can be spun to make conservatives, Christians, Republicans, patriots, and other crimethinkers look bad, or which would serve to advance some element of the leftist agenda – will receive wall-to-wall, nonstop coverage for weeks on end. Other stories, ones which would do the opposite, get spiked like a rail timber, barely or never to see the light of day. The point is that the MSM sets itself up to act as a filter, sifting out or passing through (in modified form) depending on whether “the people” should be allowed to know about the story or not.
Sometimes this bias is unconscious – slanting a story to the left just happens naturally when our journalists are graduates of left-wing programs in left-wing universities where they are taught that the purpose of journalism is to “change” the world, instead of just informing us about it. Other times, bias is a very deliberate act on the part of decision-makers within media organizations who want to use the power of the microphone and the television camera to try to alter political and social realities to fit their own worldview. Either way, the effect is to create a false image, but one which (hopefully) will eventually become its own self-fulfilling prophecy.
In some cases, the leftward bias in the media is so obvious, so blatant, so outlandishly preposterous that it just has to be called “yellow journalism” – “yellow” in the sense that the media are so obviously afraid to let “the people” know the truth that they are going to all lengths, however ridiculous, to hide it from us.
So what are some ways in which the leftist MSM have been exhibiting this bias?
Take, for example, the backstory surrounding the recent, and wildly overblown, Hurricane Irene. As it actually turned out, Irene was a pretty standard hurricane, if a bit on the small side, that did things that hurricanes her size usually do – blow some stuff around with 100 mph winds and dump a lot of rain wherever she went. But, the story in the days preceding the hurricane was that Irene was this massive, unprecedented storm that was going to vaporize the entire eastern seaboard, pounding New York City into a pulp and turning New Jersey into an aquatic wasteland (which might have been an improvement). “She’s a RAAAAAARE storm who’s moving so much further north than hurricanes usually do! She’s dangerous! She’s unparalleled!”
Why all the hype over a storm that was trending a little further north than hurricanes usually go (but which is not all that unprecedented)? Global warming, of course. As this story, for example, shows. After reeling off a list of adverse weather conditions like Hurricane Irene and droughts and whatnot, the Yahoo News/LiveScience story cites a “climatologist” (I can still remember back to the day when “weather scientists” were called “meteorologists,” rather than the more politically suggestive “climatologists”) saying,
“It's when events become persistently volatile over decades that these short-term explanations no longer work, Robinson said. Ocean patterns can drive multi-decade weather patterns, he said, "but you also have to look to human impact, at least if you're a responsible climatologist, the fact that we're loading our atmosphere with greenhouse gases.
“You can't conclude with any significance that it's human impacts and only human impacts," Robinson said. "But you can't discount that there might be some human impact as we see these events becoming more frequent."
So, if you’re a “responsible climatologist,” then you attribute hurricanes and other “persistently volatile” weather to global warming. If you’re an irresponsible climatologist, one supposes, then you attribute weather, which is notorious volatile, and always has been, to things like “the sun.” Essentially, the take home message that Yahoo News (and other MSM outfits who were running similar stories, especially on the Weather Channel) wants its viewers to get is that global warming – and by derivation those evil coal-burning power plants and gas-guzzling SUVs and those horrible “deniers” who are worse than racists and Nazis – is why Hurricane Irene was “so huge,” “so powerful,” and “so far north.” According to Al Gore and his sycophants, conservative Republicans are trying to kill us all by continuing to allow hypercharged, planet-engulfing super storms like Irene to scour all life from our coastal regions.
Irene certainly was “hype”rcharged, however.
Look folks, there have been other hurricanes that travelled as far north as Irene did – even back before the Industrial Revolution, if you can imagine. For instance, there was the Colonial Hurricane of 1635 that struck New England. Then there was the Accomack Storm if 1693 that struck as far north as Fire Island, near New York City. The so-called Independence Hurricane of 1775 was so powerful that, despite having made initial landfall in North Carolina, it still had enough force to smash in the roof of the Maryland Statehouse in Annapolis, continuing on north into Pennsylvania as a hurricane. The Great Gale of 1815 brought 11 foot storm surges to Providence, Rhode Island and engulfed New England. In 1846, a hurricane pushed all the way up to Camden, New Jersey. These hurricanes all occurred prior to even moderate-scale industrialization. They happened before evil, terrible industry started burning lots of coal and oil and pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Perhaps the real take home message is that weather is a lot more unpredictable and complex than our “climatologists” think?
But that wouldn’t advance the leftist agenda of deindustrializing the West and destroying our high standard of living, would it?
Likewise, the MSM never misses a chance to credulously bandy about every piece of unsubstantiated gossip like they were a group of high school girls in a clique. Just look at the coverage of the candidates in the coming election. Obama, as you might imagine, can do no wrong. No expense is spared in trying to paper over his many failures. The man is nearly as gaffe prone as Joe Biden, but the media are silent about his many verbal faux pas. He can say something one week, completely backtrack the next, and throw his former allies under the bus the third, and never will we hear a word about it from the networks.
Conversely, however, there is the coverage of the Republicans and their candidates. Every half-baked conspiracy theory about Rick Perry finds prominence in each daily news cycle – usually peddled by fake, establishment-controlled “conservatives” like Joe Scarborough. Sarah Palin has taken the brunt of the media-driven smear campaign for years now. Just look at how coverage of the Iowa Tea Party speaking-or-not-speaking non-scandal was handled recently. Especially mystifying were the efforts to concoct some sort of “Sarah Palin vs. Christine O’Donnell” girlfight angle to the story – one imagines that the news crews could crowd around them in the lunchroom as Sarah and Christine pull each other’s hair and scratch each other’s eyes out over the football team captain.
Then you have the MSM coverage of the recent comments by Andre Carson, a top-ranking Democrat in the Congressional Black Caucus, who said that Tea Partiers want to see black Americans become second-class citizens and to see them hanging from trees. Really? So he thinks Lloyd Marcus wants to see that happen? He thinks that little old ladies sitting on lawnchairs protesting out-of-control government spending are equivalent to Klansmen in the Old South? What sort of mouth-breathing imbecile even thinks that’s worth considering, even for a second?
Oh, right, the news media. Let’s give it wall-to-wall coverage, and the dolts out there in viewerland will believe it. Sad part it, there are a lot of dolts out there who WILL and DO.
By the way, don’t you think it’s racist to have a congressional caucus whose sole reason for existence is the color of its members’ skin?
Yet another example of this tendency to repeat gossip without concern for facts is seen in the on-going efforts by the news media to attack Christian organizations. For example, take the coverage by CNN of Hephzibah House, a fundamental Baptist girls home and boarding school in Indiana. Basically, Hephzibah House’s ministry is to serve as a place where girls from Christian homes who start getting into things like drugs and so forth can be enrolled by their families to try to get them back on the right path. Often, the girls are beyond the abilities of their parents alone to keep their behavior in check. Also, some of the girls in Hephzibah House are young women who have previously suffered abuse at the hands of state institutions or in state fosterage programs – girls being rescued from the uncaring, mechanical attention of the government which refuses to exercise oversight of its own programs.
As you can imagine, not every young woman who is enrolled into Hephzibah House by her family appreciates it. Many of them continue in their rebellion against the standards held by the ministry. While many girls are rescued from basically destroying their lives, some are not, and when they turn 18 and leave, they are often bitter about the experience – their “freedom” was taken away from them. As a result, there is something of a cottage industry on the internet of former residents of Hephzibah House who seek to harass the ministry legally, often inventing wild allegations of abuse and whatnot that they will then tell to anyone who seems even halfway interested. We know that these allegations are baseless because so many other former residents of Hephzibah House have come forward to defend the ministry, basically saying that the allegations are groundless, and generally having nothing but positive things to say about their experiences at the home. One of these former residents is Lucinda Pennington, who has written a book entitled They Meant It for Evil, about the terrible abuses she suffered in state foster programs before she came to Hephzibah House and found the Lord Jesus Christ and trusted on Him as her Lord and Saviour. Mrs. Pennington, by the way, has been ruthlessly attacked and slandered by many of the “Hephzibah Haters” for her public stands for that ministry and the church and pastors who operate it.
Hephzibah House has been accused of all sorts of things – yet the state of Indiana never seems to be able to find any evidence to confirm these accusations. There are many, many former Hephzibah girls who have supported and defended the ministry, basically saying that the abuse allegations are without any merit. None of this, however, has prevented CNN from preparing hit pieces to run, for the purpose of casting the ministry (and by extension, conservative and fundamental Christians in general) as hypocritical and dangerous. CNN doesn’t care about the facts, it just cares about its anti-God, anti-Christian, pro-socialism, pro-secular humanist agenda, and considers itself lucky to have found a few disgruntled former residents who can supply it with wild-eyed concocted stories to put in front of a television camera.
That’s the way the news media generally rolls, however.
So what can be done about this? I mean, there has to be some way to hold these liars and twisters accountable for what they do, right? After all, while these scoundrels are protected from government intervention by the first amendment (as well as the fact that they help to advance the Obama/Democrat agenda), this doesn’t mean they can’t be punished, if conservatives, libertarians, and other liberty-lovers who don’t want to see this country continue in its corruption and destruction were to get on the same page. So how to do it?
The answer is NOT to boycott – mainly because this rarely works. Most of us don’t watch ABCNNBCBS anywise, so a threat to stop watching is toothless. These media groups will still continue to get their ratings numbers for as long as there is a great, shiftless mass of “mushy-middle” people out there who are content to let the MSM tell them what to think.
Targeting their advertisers may be marginally more threatening, but is unlikely to work, either. Boycott’s always suffer from the “everyone else can pick up the slack” mentality. Take, for example, the boycott of Disney over their “Gay Day” promotions. The boycott ended up not working. Here’s why: each individual family thought, “Well, everyone else is boycotting, but my kid really wants to go to Disney World, so it won’t hurt if we go this once, since one family isn’t going to help Disney much by itself.” Problem is, everybody thought along this same line, so very few people ended up actually boycotting. The same deal would apply to going after MSM advertisers. Who is going to stop buying cars altogether, just to punish the MSM? Who is going to stop flying on the airlines altogether, just to stick it to MSNBC? Nobody will. A few, smaller or more niche companies might be susceptible, but when a whole industry buys airtime, it won’t work.
No – the ultimate answer to the question of what to do about the lying media is to get active about educating our fellow citizens. The reason most people who watch the MSM do so, and believe what they hear, is because of ignorance and apathy. They don’t know much about what is actually going on, and therefore figure they’ll just put it into the hands of “professional” reporters and broadcasters to inform them. Many people still approach the MSM as if Edward R. Murrow was still the norm.
Liberty-lovers need to gently but firmly confront our acquaintances with the evidence that the MSM is lying to them, and to provide them with the truth from actual, factual sources where the truth value of what is reported can be objectively assessed. When the media says one thing, perhaps making a false accusation against Sarah Palin, or pulling some quote from Rick Perry out of context to put a spin on it, there ought to be ten million of us ready to go with the evidence that refutes the media assertion. If this were to happen enough, a critical mass of the “mushy middle” may start to figure out that the MSM is not trustworthy, and may consider turning it off.
Which leads to the other need, which is to provide alternatives to the MSM. Blogs and sites like Free Republic do a good job at breaking the media information blockade, but we also need a real, true-to-life liberty-loving media outlet that can provide mass appeal (and, btw, Fox News isn’t really cutting it in this regard). Coordination, cooperation, dedication, and implementation. The money, time, talent, and manpower are out there, if only we’d get it together and start using them.
In short, lovers of liberty need to find a way to destroy the ability of the mainstream media to keep its monopolistic grasp on the minds of millions of Americans. Destroy its credibility, and invade its closed cartel, and we can break the informational cordon sanitaire that the MSM has managed to put around the free flow of information in this country.
