With time rapidly running out for the Trump legal team to challenge the rampant election fraud that has characterized the most corrupt presidential contest of our lifetimes, it’s easy to lose sight of the other massive fraud that preceded, encouraged, enabled and excused the freakshow election Americans are being forced to endure.
And that’s the massive fraud that has been perpetrated by the American “news media,” which in reality is almost entirely a Pravda-type propaganda ministry for the Biden-Harris campaign.
That’s right. Pravda is a perfect descriptor for the American “news media.” Remember the famous joke in the dark days of the former Soviet Union? “There is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia” – Pravda meaning “truth” and Izvestia meaning “news.”
The sole purpose of those two giant propaganda mills disguised as journalism organizations was to guard, protect, lie for and defend at all costs the corrupt, elite ruling class in charge of the 20th century’s most destructive totalitarian regime.
Ironically, here in America – the nation that, under Ronald Reagan, defeated the Soviet Union – in 2020 virtually the entire “mainstream media” serves precisely the same purpose as Pravda and Izvestia once did: To protect, defend, and lie day in and day out to preserve this nation’s corrupt, elite ruling class. That includes the newly radicalized Democratic Party, the permanent government bureaucracy called the “deep state,” and even today’s often-violent neo-Marxist political and cultural juggernaut obsessed with tearing down and transforming what they all condemn as an unjust, immoral and racist country.
Thus, the hallmark of America’s establishment media has become an unwavering commitment to the increasingly radical progressive-left narrative – as diametrically opposed to truth – on every issue.
That means a refusal to report monumentally consequential news if doing so would undermine the left’s favored narrative. It means the total abandonment of basic fairness, evenhandedness and honesty in news coverage. And it means the demonization of everyone and everything that doesn’t support their progressive worldview – especially its all-out, four-year war on President Donald Trump.
Let’s quickly review a few of the main battlegrounds:
* Millions of Americans wonder aloud how it’s even possible that someone like Joe Biden – who not only is obviously disintegrating mentally, is wrong on virtually every issue, and lies continually, but also, as recent but largely suppressed evidence proves, is one of the most spectacularly corrupt politicians in modern American history – could become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, let alone become leader of the free world.
* Likewise with regard to his vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, who will soon become president if the Biden ticket ultimately wins, as Biden inevitably fades further and fails. In addition to being the most leftwing member of the U.S. Senate, as the nonpartisan GovTrack.us determined in 2019, Harris has also proven to be one of the most thoroughly unlikable, abrasive, condescending, greedy, grasping, shallow and insincere candidates in a generation.
* Many Americans who don’t pay much attention to politics rely on the candidate debates held during the election season’s homestretch to help them with their voting decisions. So, how is it that the journalist-moderators always side with the Democrat while attempting to trip up and defame the Republican? When Kamala Harris insisted during the vice-presidential debate that both she and Joe Biden favor oil and gas fracking – even though multiple current videos show them both swearing up and down that they will completely abolish it – she somehow mysteriously got away with telling a giant lie, one of many, to millions of American voters. Throughout the campaign, Joe Biden was regularly served up tenderly prepared non-confrontational questions such as one might pose to a child, never challenged with a real question about either his dismal record or his astonishing corruption. Donald Trump, meanwhile, was repeatedly hammered with defamatory accusations disguised as questions (Will you finally, tonight, denounce “white supremacy?”) Indeed, the sitting president of the United States, who rescued the nation’s economy and destroyed ISIS, has since early 2016 been repeatedly compared by major U.S. news organizations to genocidal monster Adolf Hitler.
* As openly Marxist revolutionary groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa burned, vandalized and looted America’s cities day after day, month after month, destroying businesses, assaulting and sometimes murdering people, today’s journalists routinely dismissed it all as “mostly peaceful protests” against “systemic racism” and “police brutality” – while complaining loudly that America is actually under siege by “white supremacists.” Those who dare point out that it’s really hard to find many genuine “white supremacists” in today’s America, let alone rampaging hordes of them laying waste to the nation’s cities, are of course immediately condemned as white supremacists.
* Ever since explosive documentary proof finally emerged that Hillary Clinton was the person behind the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the media have ignored the true story of the worst political scandal in American history: It was Clinton, not Trump, who actually colluded with Russia; it was she who bought Russia’s intelligence product (the fake “Trump dossier”) and then channeled the false, defamatory “intel” through cooperative American news organizations.
This, by the way, precisely mirrors the modus operandi of Soviet disinformation campaigns of yesteryear: Carefully create a false narrative to advance a secret agenda, and then induce trusted Western media to broadcast the disinformation as “news.”
Think of it: Hillary Clinton literally fomented a four-year attempted coup d’etat against Donald Trump, to whom she had lost the 2016 election, seriously interfering with and undermining his presidency. Why? To divert FBI and DOJ attention away from her own criminal wrongdoing – illegally deleting 33,000 emails after they were subpoenaed, a serious felony for which anyone else would be prosecuted and imprisoned. Yet the media, after front-paging the Trump-Russia collusion story virtually every day for years, simply moved on once their big story was proven to be the greatest political hoax in U.S. history. No apologies – none.
* Indeed, many of the top-tier deep-state conspirators that engineered the Trump-Russia collusion hoax actually joined today’s media.That’s right. In their post-Obama careers, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe became either paid cable news analysts or frequent commentators.
* As historian Victor Davis Hanson explained: “Clapper is a CNN security analyst. Brennan was hired by MSNBC for a similar role. McCabe is a CNN contributor. Comey often makes guest appearances on news programs. In the most controversial stories, Brennan, Clapper and McCabe are being paid to analyze theories, facts and findings in which they themselves are often central players. As a guest commentator, Comey has weighed in on these controversies even as he distorts his past roles in them.”
And remember disgraced FBI agent Lisa Page (who conspired against Trump with her paramour, Peter Strzok, leader of the FBI’s phony investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server and later a leading figure in the Russia-collusion hoax)? Recently Page became the new national security and legal analyst at NBC News.
* So desperate has much of today’s “news coverage” become that it often crosses the line into total drooling absurdity – like the CNN analyst who claimed that “Russian agents” were there in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with President Trump when he was being treated for COVID-19. The media also recently accused Donald Trump, the most pro-military, pro-veteran president in a generation, of hating and mocking war heroes – a slanderous allegation both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have continually repeated. A subsequent “news report” from the same source, The Atlantic, claimed that Trump secretly hates and mocks Christians too.
* Meanwhile, the promised Biden-Harris agenda – from virtual open borders and mass amnesty, to the confiscation of “assault weapons” (otherwise known as semiautomatic firearms), to the demented Green New Deal, to fundamentally altering America’s constitutional system of government by “packing” the Supreme Court, eliminating the Senate filibuster, abolishing the Electoral College and more – would rapidly lead to a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States of America.
‘Money and power’
Why has the “mainstream media” morphed into what undercover journalist James O’Keefe described in the title of his 2018 book as “American Pravda”?
The most obvious factor is ideology; the media have been overwhelmingly liberal-left for at least the last two generations. The landmark 1986 study titled “The Media Elite: America’s New Powerbrokers” by researchers S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda Lichter confirmed that the vast majority of major U.S. media personalities were far more leftwing and secular in outlook than most Americans. The trend has only become more extreme since then.
In fact, far from valuing objectivity and fairness, the media has become a magnet for activists in recent decades. In the 1990s, when the LGBT movement (then called “gay rights”) was really taking off, many young gay and lesbian college students gravitated to journalism, not so much because they were interested in the pursuit of truth or informing the public, but to champion and advance their cause.
But there’s much more than ideology and activism at play. There’s money and power.
Consider why MSNBC switched its format several years ago, from featuring both liberals and conservatives in its show line-up. After all, arch-conservatives Michael Savage and Alan Keyes both had their own MSNBC shows. Even Tucker Carlson hosted “The Situation with Tucker Carlson” on MSNBC from 2005 to 2008. (I remember being a guest on that show.) Yet today, the entire MSNBC lineup consists of hair-on-fire radical left-wingers. Why?
MSNBC’s top brass determined it would make more money if it served the far left. In a story headlined “MSNBC as Fox’s Liberal Evil Twin,” the New York Times reported in 2012: “MSNBC has pumped up its ratings by recasting itself as a left-leaning riposte to Fox.” It’s all about money.
However, the financial dynamics get much worse: U.S.-headquartered multinational corporations have come to depend on China, both for its huge retail market and the super-cheap (sometimes slave) labor it offers. This exerts a major influence on American media coverage. Remember, journalism is a business, and the “mainstream” news organizations are all owned by gigantic companies. AT&T owns CNN; Comcast owns NBC, CNBC and MSNBC; Disney owns ABC and ESPN; ViacomCBS owns CBS. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. And all have huge stakes in China.
That might help explain why, for example, media coverage of China’s role in the coronavirus pandemic is so bizarrely absent. Credible reports from courageous Chinese virologists and other experts with intimate knowledge of the origins of the 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, who claim China intentionally created the virus in a lab, are ignored or dismissed as insane “conspiracy theories” and banned from social media platforms in the U.S. News organizations cannot afford to offend their parent companies’ most important international partner – even if it is run by a brutal, soulless, communist regime obsessed with ruling the world.
When news publications are owned by giant corporations with their fingers in many pies and even links to adversary foreign governments, reporters quickly learn – explicitly or through “osmosis” – of the bias, sensibilities and financial interests of their publishers or owners. And they play their tune accordingly.
‘A massive realignment’
One final factor that makes all these various elements come together to create a biased, blind, amoral, dishonest, but yet strangely self-righteous press: Hate.
Members of the establishment media tend to revile Donald Trump for being a genuine outsider who dared to invade their beloved realm – known as “the swamp” to outsiders – and for his promise to “drain” it of the monumental corruption, self-dealing and privilege that comprise life within the swamp. The media also hate him for championing a strongly conservative-Christian agenda – for example, appointing conservative Supreme Court justices who threaten their beloved abortion-on-demand culture. And of course, they detest Trump for publicly and continually exposing them for exactly what they are.
Hate is much more than it seems. It’s a transformative emotion that almost magically enables people to be horrendously wrong, yet to feel they are right – even supremely righteous and virtuous (for example, the mobs burning down America’s cities). In that “altered state,” down appears to be up, immoral seems moral and, most basically, evil masquerades as good.
Toward the end of my 2005 book “The Marketing of Evil,” I write: “Over the past few decades no institution has been more culpable for making evil appear good and good appear evil than the media.” That is true today more than ever.
For years Sean Hannity has said, “Journalism died in 2008,” keying off the absurdly biased coverage – more like deification – of then presidential candidate Barack Obama by the fawning, star-struck news media.
That’s right, Sean, the media died. But they’ve returned as the walking dead – ghoulish parodies of living, breathing, honest journalists.
Tucker Carlson gave this prophetic warning on his Fox News show just days before the 2020 presidential election, reflecting on the news media’s atrocious pre-election bias and total abandonment of even their former pretense of objectivity:
“The good news about all of this: It is so bad and so transparent that it can’t continue. All their stupid little morning shows, and their dumb Sunday shows and their even dumber cable shows. All of that’s going away. When the smoke clears from this election, there’ll be a massive realignment in the media, no matter who wins. Because they showed who they are, and it’s so unappealing, it’s so far from journalism that it can’t continue.”