National Media in Crisis
Local media can generally be counted upon to accurately cover local events.
Most local journalists insist on objectivity. The rest have little choice, because too many people in their communities have firsthand knowledge of and/or experience in local matters to risk credibility by ignoring or misrepresenting important local issues and events.
But national media, including those on which most local media rely for national/international coverage, are far less objective.
National media have abandoned truth-seeking/telling and neutrality in favor of advocacy. Most voluntarily serve as unofficial press offices for Democrats, and promote “woke” perversions that, together, have alienated more than half of potential consumers. Today, Americans’ trust in the mass media has reached its lowest point in the Gallup organization’s polling history.
Markets always work, so national media are paying the price.
Broadcast, digital and print outlets, including NBC News, ABC News, CNN, Vice Media, National Public Radio, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, among others, laid off nearly 3000 journalists last year, 20,000+ employees in all – and the hits keep coming.
Genuine information, usually posted online by independent media, unaffiliated experts, investigators and “citizen media,” has corrected things national media intentionally misreported, and filled in blanks left by mainstream media’s refusal to cover facts and events they found “distasteful,” that is, “anything that credits conservatives, damages or embarrasses Democrats.”
Much of what corporate media reported and Democrats censored as “misinformation” or “conspiracy theories” in recent years has turned out to be true.
For months in 2016, national media assured skeptical Americans that candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russia to influence the election, an allegation ultimately discredited by the independent Durham Report. Nonetheless, media gave Hillary Clinton column inches, pixels and air time to declare the election “stolen,” even though a “Russian Dossier” slandering Trump turned out to be a paid-for Clinton campaign invention.
Then, in 2019, media reported that Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop was “Russian propaganda” or “misinformation.” Last year, the FBI reluctantly admitted that the laptop is, indeed, Hunter’s.
Score: Conspiracy theorists – 2; media – 0.
When COVID hit during a presidential election year, national media parroted the CDC’s proclamations that masking up, social isolation, lockdowns, school closures, mail-in ballots and never-tested vaccines were safe, effective, and should be mandatory. Even professionals who disagreed were ignored or dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Physicians and virologists who said ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were effective treatments were censored and/or their claims labeled “misinformation.” Ditto, anyone who alleged COVID was developed in/escaped from a Chinese chemical weapons laboratory, and, especially, who alleged 2020 voter fraud, even as evidence of voting irregularities in swing states mounted.
Today we know that, in every instance, the real misinformation peddlers were government agencies and their media transcriptionists.
Conspiracy theorists – 10; media…still zero.
Amusingly, despite being wrong about nearly everything else, media insist they know what the weather will be like in 100 years.
But, wait! There’s more…!
In effect, media ran Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign while he hid out in his Delaware basement.
National media assured voters that candidate Biden was physically fit and mentally healthy. He was – and is – neither.
Media sold Biden as a traditional, centrist Democrat who would reunite America, regain the respect of our allies, and restore America to its “rightful place in the world.” Instead, America today is more politically, racially, socially and culturally divided than ever, our allies distrust us and our enemies don’t fear us.
Today, his handlers struggle to keep Joe upright and make him appear lifelike.
On the social/cultural front, national media are trying to make “majorities” out of noisy minorities. They’re giving gender-confused people platforms from which to deliver bizarre lectures on morals and human biology, providing metaphorical megaphones though which abortionists who destroy human lives perversely explain “human rights,” and forums for “democratic” socialists to “teach economics,” even though socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried at the cumulative cost of millions of innocent lives.
Unfortunately – for them, at least – corporate media’s attempts to deceive/control/lie to the American public have backfired spectacularly.
Anyone with an elementary grasp of marketing can see where this is going.
Consumers have awakened to how the “woke,” manipulative, left-liberal national media have corrupted themselves, so they’re tuning out.
Unless mainstream media promptly change course to broaden their markets, public trust will continue to plummet.
And, trust, once lost, is unlikely to return.
https://www.pottsmerc.com/2024/02/26/jerry-shenk-national-media-are-in-crisis/
