The 2004 comedy Anchorman opens with a voice-over speaking of “a time when people believed everything they heard on TV”. The gag, of course, is that hardly anyone believes anything they hear on TV any more, least of all the news.
This isn’t just a cynical opinion: multiple surveys show that people regard journalists as somewhere in the muck with politicians and used-car salesmen. The damage to the mainstream media’s reputation has been entirely self-inflicted. The Washington Post can smugly proclaim that “Democracy dies in darkness”, but it’s the darkness induced by being smothered in a blanket of mainstream media lies.
Most Americans ‘find the political and ideological polarisation so extreme that they believe the US is in the midst of a cold civil war’.
Contemporary reporters crave narratives and curate facts to craft stories.
Stories that are invariably even less close to the truth than The Babylon Bee.
Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, rooted in the refusal to believe that the manifestly flawed tycoon could beat über-credentialled Hillary Clinton, proved a nothingburger despite exhaustive investigations. The mainstream media (MSM) ran the story endlessly until the Mueller report failed to substantiate it. Yet in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in 2019, 48 per cent of Americans believed the collusion narrative.
At the same time, the media purposefully buried – and still continues to hide – a very real story of collusion reaching from Eastern Europe to the Oval Office itself.
The MSM ignored compelling evidence that Joe Biden being vice president (VP) was the key to son Hunter’s lucrative consultancy earnings from a crooked Ukrainian energy company despite zero experience of Ukraine or energy. This cannot be explained other than as a bribe to gain access. Two weeks before the election, the New York Post broke a major story that corroborated many of the murky allegations and directly implicated Biden Sr., contradicting his key earlier denials. Again the rest of the MSM simply suppressed the story and Twitter even banned the NYPost’s account for a while.
The mainstream media deals with lurid and unsubstantiated sexual allegations with the same cavalier disregard for truth or ethics.
In 2018, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh was subjected to a character assassination based on evidence-free allegations of sexual assault as a school-going youth in the early 1980s. The MSM gave prominent and extensive coverage to wild and lurid allegations with no effort to first verify the claims. Last year Tara Reade alleged an assault by Biden in 1993.
Again, the media simply buried the story they didn’t like.
They have also refused to hold their political favourites to account for their blatant hypocrisy.
In the Kavanaugh case, Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams tweeted: ‘I believe women’. After the Reade allegations, she said: ‘I believe Joe Biden’. The MSM covered the story fewer times, less prominently and extensively, for a shorter period and with more attention to due process. By her own plentiful public statements and aggressive questioning of Kavanaugh during Senate confirmation hearings, Kamala Harris is now VP to ‘a serial sexual abuser’.
The mainstream media have produced a blizzard of lies about the Wuhan plague. Everything from the (non-)efficacy of lockdowns, to outright lying about anything and everything President Trump said on the subject, to heaping utterly undeserved praise on the incompetent, clueless, destructive ‘COVID Queen’ of New Zealand.
At the same time that they are lying, confabulating and propagandising, the mainstream media are relentlessly villifying any of their own who dare break ranks and tell the truth.
‘Democracy dies in darkness’ says the WaPo masthead. Maybe it should be changed to ‘Democracy Dies When the Media Lies’.
Spectator Australia
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