Thanks to our great President Donald Trump, the fake news media networks have been exposed as the scandalmongers and pamphleteers they really are. Since the beginning of our country, the press has looked upon the freedom they enjoy under the first amendment as a license to instigate and advocate partisan positions. This is exactly the way it was at the beginning of our country. In 1796, the factions that were to become political parties were evolving. The Federalists, the party of Washington, Hamilton, and Adams, and the Republicans, made of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, capitalized their own newspapers and propaganda networks. They made no excuses for underwriting the “fake news” of the day. People knew when they were reading a Republican or Federalist newspaper, and they knew up front that they were not being given just information, but propaganda.
Today, the liberal press and media networks underwritten by the likes of George Soros and others pretend they are disseminating information without a bias. I really think that we should go back to the old days, where the people who disseminate the news let the public know up front what their point of view really is. The majority of people today watch MSNBC and CNN and think they are getting an unbiased representation of what is actually going on in the world. Anyone who believes that is naive.
Full disclosure: I am a Christian, and a constitutional conservative, in case you couldn’t guess. What is Jay Tapper? What is Rachel Maddow? What is Betsy Russell? What is Idaho Public Broadcasting or the Idaho Statesman?
I find most of the people reporting on the news to be less than the cream of the crop, so to speak. Most could not survive four years in a science, technology, engineering, or math major course of study. They certainly cannot be defined as being professionals, because professionals are supposed to subscribe to a code of ethics and have principles—though watching many lawyers and more than a few doctors over the past couple of years, one must wonder if there are any professionals left in our world.
Immediately after the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman expressed a view of the media that has been shared by politicians and the public in general throughout the history of our country. His words: “The American press is a shame and a reproach to a civilized people. When a man is too lazy to work and too cowardly to steal, he becomes an editor and manufactures public opinion.”
Just like in the political world, reporting in the technical scientific literature has been tainted by opinion and a narrative not based on empirical observation or fact, but rather on exploiting a political position. How many people at the highest levels of academia receive NIH or CDC grants? Are they publicly going to disagree with the likes of Dr. Fauci or another similar government bureaucrat who may have to pass judgement on a grant request?
In reality, the press doesn’t see the log in its own eye. For the most part, news editors and journalists lack the integrity or curiosity to examine their own actions. It runs even deeper than that, however.
Unskilled people lack the skill necessary to evaluate their own skill. Or, put another way, the skills necessary to be competent at a task are the same skills necessary to evaluate the performance of the task. This is the very essence of the cognitive bias that is demonstrated to us every day by the media. I am not just talking about the national media, but the local media as well, specifically those covering the antics that happen for three months every year at our statehouse in Boise.
The biggest impact that the media has on forming public opinion is the stories that they don’t report on, or that they blackout. Think about the Biden-China story or the election fraud that just happened. Think about the contrary arguments presented in the scientific literature regarding CO2 emissions and climate change. Think about the blackout in the news when impeachment failed or when the Mueller report proved our president and his people were innocent. Or what about the news blackout about human rights abuses of Christians and Muslims in China? How many of us understand that there are more people today under conditions of slavery or who are in gulags as political prisoners than there have been at any time in the history of the world. Yet every night, we see BLM and ANTIFA thugs marching for reparations in our country, without recognizing the sacrifice of 600,000 people in our own civil war. The reason the majority of the public has lost perspective on all these issues is because of a leftward-leaning media empire, which does not believe in the principles of our founding. Worse, the media does not recognize that it is precisely because of those principles that so many people sacrificed and are still willing to sacrifice to make things right.
The marriage of individual liberty and capitalism has lifted the masses out of slavery and grinding poverty, a condition which had been the way of the world for the past 15,000 years. Unfortunately, poverty is still the way for 3 billion out of 7 billion people living in our world today, who are never reported upon. Humankind’s march from tribalism to feudalism to mercantilism to colonialism to imperialism to socialism to communism and state fascism is moving backward with crony capitalism. Our country today looks more like state-sponsored economic fascism—think Mussolini’s Italy or today’s China or Russia.
The policy of the “foot in the neck” cannot go on forever. “The ruling oligarchy will find less arduous or wasteful ways of governing and satisfying their own lust for power and can just as easily be satisfied by suggesting that people should love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley.
We are today—in our country and state—moving in the wrong direction.
It will get worse after January 20, 2021.
In order for conservatives and libertarians to stay in the game, they have to be willing to embrace the fight and believe in our hearts that we will eventually win.
Like in previous generations of Americans, losing is not an option for our children and our grandchildren.
