America's unreliable media pushes false liberal narratives

 Brian C. Joondeph:

Media trust is at an all-time low, a majority of Americans believing that, “Most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.” An Axios commissioned survey found that only 46 percent of Americans trusted traditional media, the lowest number ever recorded in the 20 years of this survey.

Gallup found similar distrust of the media, with only 40 percent of Americans having “a great deal” or even “a fair amount” of confidence that the media reports the news “fully accurately, and fairly”. The low point was a 32 percent level of trust in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president and he correctly labeled the media as “fake news”. 20 years ago, media trust was much higher, in the mid 50 percent range, despite Dan Rather at that time, a major network news anchor, lying about George W Bush’s National Guard service.

In other words, the media is lying to us and we are catching on to the lies.

Watch any cable news show or read any of America’s prominent “newspapers of record” today and see that they are peddling fiction, stories based on anonymous phantom sources or else totally fabricated, designed to influence elections and public policy in a manner that Joseph Goebbels would envy. Let’s look at a recent example.

U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick died in early January after the Washington, D.C. Capitol rally. Despite not knowing anything, the media was quite certain as to the cause of death.

On Jan. 9, the forensic pathology experts in the New York Times newsroom assured readers that: “He dreamed of being a police officer, then was killed by a pro-Trump mob.”

The normally sensible New York Post was certain in their headline: “Video shows Capitol rioter hit officer with fire extinguisher.” The video showed some police officer, identity unknown, being hit in the head, but the Post was quite sure the officer was Sicknick, as they reported, “Who died at a hospital Thursday after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during the melee.”

CNN, also now experts in forensic pathology, told their audience: “Brian Sicknick died after he was injured while physically engaging with pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol.” If CNN reported it, then it must be true. After all, they are the self-proclaimed “Most trusted name in news.” That’s a whopper on par with President Obama’s claims, “If you like your insurance/doctor, you can keep them.”

This reporting served as a basis for Trump’s impeachment, accusing the president of “incitement of insurrection.” In a pre-trial memo, Democrats claimed: “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

The lies worked. Trump was impeached again with the reliable assistance of a few linguini-spined Trump-hating so-called Republicans, and the accusations sent the rest of the GOP hiding under their beds rather than supporting Trump in his electoral fraud claims and standing up to fake news. They might have well just said Trump himself whacked Sicknick with the fire extinguisher.

It turns out, now revealed when it makes no difference, that Officer Sicknick died of natural causes, specifically a series of strokes the day after the attack, with zero evidence of him being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. But the damage was done, and the media is now happily driving by to the next story, having accomplished their mission of tarnishing their political nemesis, Donald Trump.

Anyone who challenged that narrative was labeled a heretic and banned from social media and polite society. Questioning the media lies was considered a “truther movement on the right.” Any mea culpa now from the media? Was anyone fired or ostracized for getting the story so wrong? Was it media incompetence or deliberate? Or did they just want the story to be true, and that was enough for the fact checkers to sign off that it was “verified news”?

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Social media appeared to back the lies and punish those who challenged the narrative.  They did this in much the same way they responded to issues about the fairness of the election.  Anyone who openly disagreed with them on this issue was banned from their sites.  The interesting thing is this censorship did not change any significant number of minds.  In a recent poll, a majority of voters still question the outcome of the 2020 election.  I suspect trust of social media also took a hit.