Media: Counterfeit ‘Gatekeepers of the Truth’

“The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.” – 1992 statement by Carl Bernstein, one of two reporters who broke the Watergate story.

Today, the garbage has putrefied.

A pretentious, nearly-monolithic left-wing mainstream media and Big Tech clearly consider themselves “Gatekeepers of The Truth,” when, in fact, neither are fully or, in many cases, even partially truthful.

To impose homogenous narratives, liberal media abandon distinctions between and among “reporting,” “opinion,” “speculation” and “fantasy,” and suppress information and speech with which they disagree or wish to withhold from consumers. They characterize divergent views as “disinformation” or “conspiracy theories,” among other often-baseless pejoratives.

Modest coverage of opposing viewpoints is occasionally permitted, usually only to “discredit” them. More commonly, inconvenient political, economic, social, cultural, medical truths and truth tellers are excluded from news coverage and social media platforms.

Corporate media and Big Tech have provided little, often no balance on a range of issues that reflect negatively on their favored interest groups, causes, politicians and political party. There has been scant, often zero coverage of COVID’s origins, the vaccines’ side effects, economic, social and mental health fallout from oppressive COVID policies, contrary “global warming” evidence, identity-obsessed educational initiatives, election irregularities, the 2020 Antifa riots, the illegal alien invasion, rampant crime in Democrat-run cities, President(ish) Joe Biden’s creeping dementia, Hunter Biden’s laptop, John Fetterman’s obvious unsuitability for office, and that, in less than two years, Biden and Washington Democrats have made America less prosperous, less free, and less secure.

In fact, print, on-air and Silicon Valley social media outlets block dissent on those matters. People attempting to express opinions, information and evidence competing with the left’s preferred narratives have been assiduously ignored, shadow-banned and/or had their social media “privileges” revoked.

Last January, Conrad Black wrote: “Almost no one seems to grasp the colossal irony of the current American political condition. The unique quality of it is that the country is divided between two political forces which, in the tedious hyperbole of contemporary political jargon, view each other as an ‘existential threat to democracy.’ The Democrats can’t sell the bunk that January 6 was an ‘insurrection;’ they can’t wish away concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election. All they have is the tired claim that [former-President Donald] Trump is a threat to democracy, and in their advocacy of that falsehood, they have made themselves the threat to democracy.”

Suppressing dissent is among the left’s preferred methods for avoiding the need to defend their own views, but, in doing so, media have lost public trust.

Love or hate Donald Trump (“fake news” outlets hate him), one cannot reasonably deny that his presidency was successful.

Among other accomplishments, Trump dramatically reduced illegal immigration, unemployment, and petroleum imports; he oversaw one of the most prosperous periods in American history; his administration strengthened the Western alliance, quieted antagonisms in the Middle East, and deterred North Korea, China and Iran from the provocations with which they had threatened his predecessors.

Joe Biden’s catastrophic presidency has reversed all of Trump’s progress. Nonetheless, Biden’s media and Silicon Valley enablers will not permit a man who is often unable to think or speak even semi-coherently to be seen as the corrupt, misogynistic, political lifer – the failure – he clearly is, because it reflects poorly on them, as well.

But, since they helped drag him across the finish line in 2020, left-wing media and Big Tech are as much to blame for the Biden-induced domestic problems and global unrest as the malleable husk in the Oval Office.

The left insists that media’s political censorship and suppression of opposing viewpoints does not violate Americans’ First Amendment rights, because media conglomerates and social media companies are private corporations that can set their own standards for coverage, content and participation.

But, although much of liberal media’s suppression may be voluntary, in fact, the Biden White House has colluded with print and electronic media outlets to “shape” the news.

In 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted that members of the Biden administration were colluding with Big Tech oligarchs to suppress dissent on social media platforms – the First Amendment and the American public’s right to know be damned…

https://www.pottsmerc.com/2022/10/31/jerry-shenk-counterfeit-gatekeepers-of-the-truth/