Yeah, you are. Every day, the news you are being spoon-fed is laced with half-truths and whole lies. Some lies are obvious and some are really pretty sneaky. The news industry is feeding you lies wholesale banking on the fact that human nature makes us readily susceptible to believing what we hear. Oh, the airplane crashes, erupting volcanoes and such are pretty much ordinary news, but anything to do with politics is laced with descriptive adjectives and misleading headlines meant to influence your thinking. And the reason why they do it is clear: The liberal mass media hates Donald Trump and will stoop to any depth to lower your opinion of him. The continued onslaught of manufactured crisises by the liberal media is the preferred method of delivery.
It's almost like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. One week it's about the children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents (a regular Obama-era practice), the next it's the Supreme Court candidate, and then back to Russia, Putin, and whatever sort of darkness they can cast on their take of the events. It's their ink, their paper, their broadcasting equipment and they get to choose the words. Never mind that they get it wrong. Never mind that the cover of Time magazine with Trump and the small child is a compete and utter 100% lie and fabrication, one that resulted in Time's apologetic retraction. They will cherry-pick what fits their agenda first and foremost and they will seek out comments from individuals friendly to their cause.
Take for example when I see President Trump is meeting with Vladimir Putin and it's presented as Trump's fondness for the Russian leader, I immediately know I've been lobbied by Trump-hating liberal news media to believe Trump actually has a fondness for Putin. Does he? Who determined that? It's an opinion, not factual news. It is a deliberate attempt to make you suspect that Trump is up to no good, and further sway your opinion against a President that the liberal media detests.
The other night, I watched Lester Holt open NBC News with the story that Trump attacked our allies. Good Lord, how awful. Did he use airplanes and bombs? But when the story got to the meat of it, we found out the President is telling these allies they are going to have to start paying more for their own military defense. This is an attack? No, it's another example of network news that hates Trump and is going to carefully and continually choose words to deliver the message that no matter what he does, they are going to do everything in their power to present it in a bad light. Let's take a careful look at how the information you base your opinions on is presented to you.
First, let's identify the majority of news presenters and how they feed you their lies. For convenience and simplicity, I've broken the news groups into subsets and I've grouped them together. I've even assigned them a weight, but let me be the first to say my numbers are just an estimate and probably vary greatly. They may be close for some and far off for others; but in any event the news we hear and how we hear it adds up to 100%. Feel free to ignore my percentages if you think they are inaccurate.
The next three groups are Local news, Internet/Social media and Print media. By these I mean your local newspaper/TV/Radio/subscription news magazines and what you read on social media such as Facebook (or other internet sites). Beware of what you read on the internet! A good deal of it is completely made up foolishness, and what is actually real is often mixed or slanted so as to make you believe it all because some of it is true.
The last two groups are entertainment and other. Entertainment would be late-night TV such as the two Jimmy's, Colbert, SNL and daytime feeds such as The View and Rush Limbaugh. I assign these such a low number because most of us are smart enough to recognize these people are bobble-heads that take news and twist it into jokes we might find funny. In the case of SNL and the View, these are off-the-chart left wingnut shows that play the same broken record over and over again, so much that many of us won't bother with them because we know they're played out by left-wingers doing the bidding of other left-wingers. Remember, when you see people clap on these shows, it's because their bosses turned on the applause sign to emphasize a point; more often than not, a liberal viewpoint.
And there are some wild cards in the mix: News sources that sell their stories (AP, Reuters) ... Off the wall liberal college campuses that brainwash students and then send them out into the world ... and some radical far-left and far-right groups that pose as legitimate news sources, but are pretty transparent. These news sources will do everything to paint themselves out as reliable and untainted, but don't be so easily fooled. They are selling the same soap with a different label. Add to this mix the opinion pages and political cartoons that have a left-bias; pretty soon you begin to see how tilted the tables are in what is called news. Let's look at another example of media bias and use the coverage of President Trump when he travels to a location to give a speech. Fox News covered it extensively, giving the President hours of prime-time TV coverage. MS-NBC covered eight minutes of his location-based speeches since April. CNN didn't give it any prime-time coverage whatsoever.
The point here is that if there is a chance that airing the President will make him look good, the liberal media will give it little or no coverage.
Have you watched any of the White House press conferences in the last year? When reporters (and I use the term loosely) ask a question, often they put an opinionated narrative into their comments before they actually ask a question. When did this begin? Just ask the questions, please. We already know what you think politically;
So, looking at 100% of where you get your news ... Based on the chart above, how would you break them down on the political spectrum? Conservative or Liberal?
Overwhelmingly, Liberal. Fox may lean Conservative, Rush Limbaugh may be a right winger, but after that, it doesn't take much to conclude the vast majority of your daily news feed is being carefully crafted to deliver a left-leaning bias in what you hear. CNN and MS-NBC are pretty much liberal organs that often can't even get their corrections right. People like Chris Mathews and Rachael Madcow are nothing more than snake-oil salespeople. They prey on weak minds that want to believe the Kool-Aid these people hash out on a regular basis. Sadly, my siblings and their families drink this Kool-Aid readily and worse, believe it. I'm the lone Republican left standing.
Is all of the Liberal viewpoint wrong? No. Is all of the Conservative viewpoint wrong? Again, no. But the sources aren't even close to being balanced. If the world were flat, many of them would have fallen off the left edge by now.
I'm going to leave you with some sage advice: Be suspicious of what you hear from the mass media organizations. Learn to question what they say. Cast a jaundiced eye on the adjectives they use and ask yourself why they would choose, out of thousands of possible words, to have carefully chosen those. Don't readily accept what you read or hear no matter how reliable you deem the source. Consider every picture as photoshopped until proven otherwise. Disregard memes posted on social media for the most part.
Or, just keep drinking the Kool-Aid. It comes in many flavors nowadays.
-Don
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