There are many ways to lie and not all of them involve purely making things up. As Tolkien wrote, some of the most devastating lies are those which are seeded with a little truth. Another effective way of lying is lying by omission. As an infamous example goes, if someone begs you for money, you can truthfully say, “I haven’t a penny in my pocket” even if your wallet is stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.
The legacy media have made lying by omission a black art. They call it “framing”: by choosing what to tell or not tell their audiences, they frame their narrative in a way which is often as deceitful as outright fabrication. “Biased or slanted news” is recognised as a type of fake news – and it is rife in the so-called “curated media”.
So the United States has “the world’s highest rate of children in detention.” Is this worth reporting? Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless, Agence France-Presse, or AFP, and Reuters did report it, attributing the information to a “United Nations study” on migrant children detained at the US-Mexico border.
Then the two agencies retracted the story. Deleted, withdrew, demolished. If they could have used one of those Men in Black memory-zappers on us, they would have. Sheepishly, the two news organizations explained that, you see, the UN data was from 2015 — part of a border crackdown that had begun years earlier.
We all know who the president was in 2015…the story was removed. Not updated or corrected, removed.
This is an important example because it tells you everything you need to know about the legacy media’s agenda.
Try to remember this one, because it’s instructive…Obama, rather than Trump, locked up a lot of children. This is what’s important: Not that AFP and Reuters deleted a story, but that the implication of the story meant everything to them.
Every time you read something from AFP and Reuters (and CNN and the Washington Post), you should be thinking not “This is fake news” but: “What’s the agenda?”
This is what I call the “bullshit filter” that everyone should have deployed, whenever they read a news story from anywhere. It doesn’t matter who it is, whether they support the same team as you do or not.
News outlets have six ways from Sunday of getting you to think what they want you to think, none of which involve making up stuff.
One is simply not reporting things…Obama’s approval ratings were mostly really low, comparable to Trump’s, typically in the low to mid-40s. Polls would come out saying this, and the Ron Burgundys would simply not report it.
Nor do they now. So, they have manufactured the narrative that Trump is uniquely unpopular. This is simply not true.
Nor can [Trump] be associated with good news. A recent Newsbusters survey found that, over a recent six-week period, not even 1 percent of network news reporting on the Trump administration even mentioned positive economic news.
Another trick is soberly reporting the policy proposals of Politician One but focusing entirely on the miscues and petty controversies of Politician Two.
Yet another trick is hyping a particular story, then dropping it like a hot potato if further facts emerge which don’t support the narrative. Consider a recent school shooting in California: as school shootings do, it attracted hysterical initial coverage. Yet, within a day, it completely vanished from the news cycle. The fact that the shooter was Asian, using, not an “assault rifle”, but a handgun, illegally possessed in heavily gun-regulated California, didn’t fit the narrative. Into the Memory Hole.
The same goes for the endless litany of fake “hate crimes”. Media breathlessly report the clock boys and allegedly ripped hijabs, but almost never bother following up with the revelation that it was all a hoax.
The impression created by a thousand stories like this — that America in 2019 is a white supremacist nightmare — will linger all the same. Using, or ignoring, facts in accordance with whether they create the desired impression is the principal agenda of today’s media.
nypost.com/2019/11/20/when-the-villain-is-obama-not-trump-news-suddenly-becomes-not-worth-reporting/
Democracy dies in the darkness of media manipulation.