We hate to admit it, but we thought it would be hard for our colleagues in the already-disgraced big media to shame themselves further during this election cycle. After all, they had done such a great job of it over the past four years. But, in the last two months, they outdid themselves.
Free republics, such as our own, depend on a healthy, vibrant, independent press to survive. The free flow of information, facts and opinion is the oxygen that our republic breathes. Right now, we’re gasping for breath.
Just in recent days, the examples of the media’s (including social media) stunning irresponsibility, outright mendacity and pro-Joe Biden bias are legion:
- Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto cut off live remarks by White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany as she outlined credible evidence of widespread voter fraud.
- MSNBC talking head and “historian” Jon Meacham, a supposed “expert” on the presidency, commented favorably and at length on Biden’s Saturday night speech, without telling its audience that he, Meacham, wrote the speech.
- Both the New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) and Washington Post (“Democracy Dies In Darkness”) outright lied about Pfizer and its participation in President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” project to accelerate development of a coronavirus vaccine. Pfizer itself denied receiving any funding, obviously eager to distance itself from Trump and ingratiate itself with the vengeful leftists that now control the Democratic Party. Only problem is, a Pfizer press release from July shows it accepted an order of 100 million doses of its vaccine at a cost of $1.95 billion.
- Various media outlets “called” the election for Biden, even as credible claims of voter fraud were made and the count in key swing states continued. The New York Times even tweeted that “the role of declaring the winner of a presidential election in the U.S. falls to the news media,” which is patently absurd and wrong, both historically and legally.
- Google, now the largest news gatekeeper on the planet, “sent vote reminders to liberal users but not to conservative users,” according to PJ Media, prompting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Utah Sen. Mike Lee to demand an explanation from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Doesn’t that amount to electoral interference? “This kind of targeting, if present nationwide, could shift millions of votes, in part because Google’s home page is seen 500 million times a day in the U.S.,” said psychologist Robert Epstein, who heads a team of researchers that monitors Google.
- A just-out report from New York Magazine shows how bad things now are at the once-august New York Times. As the New York Post describes it, “The fast-falling New York Times has gone mad.” It further describes a newspaper where “the No. 1 concern is hurt feelings. No. 2 is what Twitter thinks.”
Now, let us again underscore the fact that these all happened just within recent days.
We are not including other recent media outrages, such as blatantly ignoring evidence that Joe Biden and his son Hunter have been taking money from unfriendly nations for years; or that the Communist-controlled China Daily has paid major U.S. newspapers millions to print propaganda; or that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube give foreign extreme-left propaganda sources a pass while shutting down Trump and conservatives here in the U.S.; or that, in newsrooms across America, anyone daring to deviate from far-left orthodoxy can now find themselves “canceled,” both professionally and personally, in what one foreign newspaper candidly calls the “death of free speech.”
Nor have we included the New York Times’ Orwellian and false “1619 Project,” which is even now poisoning students’ minds as part of some primary schools’ curriculum, or the botched and biased coverage of the pandemic, or the recent report on the political donations of dozens of leading journalists which found that more than 90% of their contributions went to Democrats, among them Biden, socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And the media’s impeachment lies from late 2019 and early this year? There has never been greater media irresponsibility.
We could of course go on and on because it really has no end. The media has quietly morphed from left to far left, and most of America didn’t really notice. Or maybe didn’t care. And yet the transformation was on full display during the weeks leading up to our election, especially the days just before and after.
Truth and objectivity are dead. Ideology, of the far-left variety, is all that matters. In a secular age, socialism is the media’s great god. Truth is the sacrificial victim.
Or, as Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway put it:
“When it comes to the media and conservative voters and their politicians, the media lie, they lie, they lie, and then they lie … They created false narratives, such as the Russia collusion hoax, Anonymous, the Kavanaugh situation, the Covington kid, and they lied through intentionally false polling, which said that this was going to be a blowout for Democrats.”
You won’t find a more succinct summation of the media’s recent sins.
The big media’s reckless, ideology-driven dishonesty isn’t harmless, as Epstein’s comments above suggest. They’ve influenced election after election.
Americans are catching on. A recent survey by the Knight Foundation and Gallup found that 86% of the country saw a “significant amount” of bias from the media.
That’s a start. But how do you fix it? The simple answer is, turn off the liars. Deny them an audience. Stop reading their cheap propaganda. Make them live up to the rules they supposedly espouse. Insist on proof for everything, except common sense. And by all means, reward those in the media who have at least tried to get at the truth.
It might already be happening. Fox
News is hemorrhaging viewers after its disastrous election
performance, which many thought biased.
Parler, a phone text app that many believe is more balanced than Twitter, is now one of the top app downloads.
The point is, don’t let yourself be abused, embarrassed, intimidated, or fooled by the big media. There are other choices out there. Based on the performance of recent days, they’ve never been more desperately needed.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
