So many members of the media refuse to acknowledge the bias that exists in their own space. This is particularly weird because a lot of prevailing left-wing theory has always been about the notion that ideas are a stand-in for power.
If you listen to any critical studies lecturer on college campuses what they say is that any system of human interaction is structured based on power hierarchies. For example, people on the left will argue that the free market in which you and I exchange goods and services is not actually free. It's a system of exploitation pressed upon other people who happen to have the power in any given society and we can just restructure that system at will.
They make this argument about free speech. The Neo-Marxist philosopher from the 1960s and 1970s, Herbert Marcuse, who made the case that essentially free speech itself was a weaponized version of power because the people who are most loud and most likely to be heard were representatives of the power hierarchy, and therefore, what would be best for the dispossessed is to shut down certain types of speech in favor of other types of speech.
The left is constantly seeing things in terms of power relationships. This is why they see every disparity as an example of discrimination. This is why people on the left look at any sort of inequality and they see its inequity. They see one group that is poorer than another group and instead of seeing it as maybe that's an outcome based on individual decision-making or historical discrimination but not current day discrimination, instead they say; this must be the result of power hierarchies in place preventing one group from rising to the level of the other group.
Now usually that's not true, but the point I'm making is the left is constantly seeing human behavior as a reflection of the need to defend some sort of power hierarchy --- except when it comes to the leftist media.
When it comes to the leftist media then it's just objectivity. That it's just; we're just speaking the truth. It is no longer a reflection of a power hierarchy in which people at the top of the media happen to be Democrats and push a Democrat point of view.
Their views that they push on the pages of The New York Times and on the airwaves of CNN, or CBS, or ABC; none of that is a reflection of a power dominance by people who are on the left, instead, that is just them telling the truth. Their opinion is not an opinion, it's fact. Their power is not power, it's a reality.
You can see this from people on the left who ignore their theories about power that applies everywhere except to them. It's really amazing. For example, Jonathan Capehart, a columnist for the Washington Post, said that the reason a lot of people believe the story about Jussie Smollett is because it fits in with reality. Well, only if you're of a certain political view.
People in the left media tend to substitute the idea that their opinions are actually facts. They believe that facts and their opinions are one and the same. Here's Jonathan Capehart commenting on the story and not saying something that was particularly true, but saying with the full confidence of fact behind it because, of course, the media is not left, and their opinions are not reflections of opinions or a reflection of their desire for power, their opinions are a reflection of reality.
The circumstances and the way [Jussie Smollett] told the story and what he said happened to him sort of fit in with a narrative, not a narrative, but a reality. For a lot of people in this country since President Trump was inaugurated, that there's an atmosphere of menace and an atmosphere of hate around the country that made it possible for people to either readily believe or want to believe Jussie Smollett. --- Jonathan Capehart
There's such an amazing Freudian slip in his comment when he said what happened to Smollette fit a narrative, but not a narrative, a reality. The conflation of a narrative with reality. The conflation of a story you want to tell about America with the reality of the situation in America is really indicative to the fact that for a lot of the people on the left; they believe their opinions are facts and they believe that facts they don't agree with are merely somebody else's opinions.
It truly is incredible. And then they have the temerity to claim that they are the objective truth-tellers when it comes to media dominance, that it is not, in fact, that they dominate a lot of the power hierarchies of the dominant media companies and that's why the opinions are what they are at a lot of media companies.
Now as it turns out, none of that is true. The reason why many mainstream media institutions are to the left is that many of the people at the top of those institutions are to the left.
Lara Logan, former chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, while interviewing retired Navy Seal Michael Ritland, slipped in a revealing comment about how this left bias exists in mainstream media when she basically said the media likes to pretend they are objective but are not objective in the slightest.
The media everywhere mostly liberal, not just in the US, but in this country [the US} 85% of journalists are registered Democrats. So that's just a fact. Because although the media has always been, historically, always been left-leaning, we've abandoned our pretext, or at least the effort, to be objective today. That means we've become political activists today and some would argue propagandists, right? And there's some merit to that. --- Lara Logan - chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News
This is nothing new nor is she the only one saying this. What passes for news today is often nothing more than a thinly veiled raw opinion piece politically skewed by its left-leaning author and dressed up to look like facts and actual news analysis.
ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, and the vast majority of news organizations in the US obviously all share the same editorial slant. And they all shared the same editorial slant on Jussie Smollett. It's pretty amazing and they all share the same editorial slant when it comes to the coverage of the 2020 presidential race.
But when Laura Logan states this obvious fact out loud the media's reaction is to treat it as if they are shocked. Again, this runs directly counter to their own prevailing critical studies theories about literally everything in life.
The left believes in the area of law that all judicial decisions are actually not based on judicial principles, they are based on what the judges preferred political outcome should be. Now what's amazing about all of this is that if you are going to accuse one side or the other of manipulating law for power purposes it would have to be the political left that does this on a more frequent basis. If you're going to accuse one side of manipulating the facts on a political basis it would have to be the left.
In fact, I think there's a lot of projection that goes on on the political left. I'm not talking about specific individuals here, I'm talking about a generalized mindset that exists in a lot of places; in the legal structure, in the media infrastructure, in the Hollywood infrastructure. There's a belief in a lot of these halls of power that it is fine to manipulate facts because again; if everything is a power relationship why would we not use our power in order to push views that are good, and true, and wonderful, and convince ourselves in the process that we are doing something positive and good and objectively necessary?
One of the reasons that President Trump exists is because the right began to feel that the left is manipulating the institutions of our public life in order to use their power to cram down certain political opinions and Trump was a giant middle finger to that. Trump was essentially saying to all those institutions you've controlled the narrative for too long and so I'm just going to ignore whatever narrative it is that you wish to choose.
Then the left accuses president Trump of being a liar and manipulating the facts and a lot of the people on the right point out that the people on the left have been participating in this deception too. The problem is when both sides tend to agree that there are no more neutral principles.
Neutral Principles refer to rules grounded in law, as opposed to rules based on personal interests or beliefs. The courts must apply neutral principles to cases. source
The left decided that there are no more neutral principles, there is just opinion which is fact, and the right decides that the left believes that so why shouldn't our opinion also be treated as fact; when there are no more neutral principles this is how a country falls apart.
Media bias in not dangerous merely because it's propaganda, media bias is not merely dangerous because it pushes a particular political point of view, media bias is dangerous because it undermines the fundamental neutral principle on which the country is based and on which western civilization is based.
Western civilization, science, politics, they're all based on the idea that reason can separate out opinion from fact, that we can all agree on a set of facts and then we can draw our opinions from those set of facts. The opinions may vary but the facts remain the same.
When the left decided in the 1960s that all human interactions were based on power relationships and that even facts themselves were subject to vagaries of these power dynamics, that you couldn't even say factual things because the factual things themselves were no longer factual, they were just a reflection of power; once the left decided that we lost all common ground.
We can't even agree on a set of facts anymore. We have one side arguing from one set of opinions and another side arguing for another set of opinions and there is no meeting of the minds.
What's fascinating about all this is you see it played out in the political sphere most and when we actually get together personally it tends to dissipate quickly. You see this played out by Democrats and Republicans alike. When you actually talk with Democratic political leaders when they are not on the mic, they actually act a lot more reasonable. They are willing to acknowledge that there's a middle ground and a common basis in principle and fact, but once they get on camera then that splits immediately because when it comes time to exercise power the exercise of power is seen as self-justifying.
That's deeply dangerous stuff. And when the right responds by saying the exercise of power is self-justifying, the left is just engaging in these cram downs anyway so we may as well engage in our own cramdowns as well, then how are we supposed to have a conversation? If every conversation is just competition in power dynamics there is no conversation at all. We're just arm wrestling for who gets to control the government and levers of power in the United States.
Why is this so dangerous? Because the polarization caused by this default defensiveness of a strongly held opinion, whether it's based on facts or not, can push people to blindly support things that are completely wrong or remain silent when they should speak out against true oppression, all in the name of siding with your side and avoiding the push back of thinking different than your side.
For example, President Trump has been continuing to put the pressure on Nicholas Maduro who is the socialist dictator of Venezuela who has still not left.
Incredibly there are members of the Venezuelan military barely supporting this failed dictatorship. They are risking their future, they are risking their lives, for a man controlled by the Cuban military and protected by a private army of Cuban soldiers. Maduro is no a Venezuelan patriot, he is a Cuban puppet. --- President Trump
President Trump is, of course, right to push this, but it just shows the polarity in our politics that this is controversial. Maduro is one of the world's worst dictators on planet earth and yet we see a lot of the members from the left coming out to defend him just because Trump spoke out against him. It's pretty astonishing and yet the media will cover for these members. Ilhan Omar is still being covered for while she is out there full-scale defending for Maduro and we're supposed to pretend that she should sit on a house foreign affairs committee and that's totally normal?
Another example is perfectly illustrated in the recent media coverage of the Jussie Smollette story. Jussie Smollette is an openly gay actor in the HBO hit series Empire who recently filed a report with Chicago police that he was the victim of a hate crime perpetrated by two MAGA-wearing white attackers. The media jumped on the story claiming they covered the story critically only to later find out that he made the whole thing up and is now facing criminal charges for reporting a fake crime which is a federal offense.
Almost all of the most left leaning media parroted something along the lines of;
Empire star Jussie Smollette was the victim of a vicious, racist, and homophobic attack. His attacker hurled racist and homophobic slurs and him, tied a noose around his neck and poured bleach on him while stating this is MAGA Country. This is America in 2019
Do you know what America is in 2019? The media uncritically reporting a completely implausible story and then when caught in their own garbage coverage immediately turning around and saying they didn't do anything wrong, it's that the people on the right keep weaponizing these stories. They keep pouncing. Um, isn't that exactly what the media did? They pounced on the story to weaponize it against Trump regardless of the facts and once they are caught and called out they accuse the right of weaponizing the story.
When all the people gathered to show support for Jussie, as they should if these incidents were true, holding signs that read Justice For Jussie, where are they now and why aren't they holding those same signs, Justice For Jussie* now that we know he created the whole fake story?
How hypocritical can you get? Apparently there's no end to the hypocrisy because even though the media reported the story as fact that paints the racist narrative that appears to be their opinion without really checking to see if the story was real, once the story was discovered to be a complete fabrication, the same media mouthpieces, and political leaders like Kamala Harris and Corey Booker when pressed for a comment said they have to wait for the story to unfold. Yes, exactly! Why didn't they wait for the story to unfold before responding to the unacceptable racism they attributed to coming from Trump supporters? Now they want to wait for the story to unfold while accusing the right of weaponizing the story? It's hypocrisy of the highest order.
So, we're supposed to believe that the media didn't jump on the story? Of course, they jumped on the story because it's important to their narrative. Not only did they jump on the story but so did the entire left because the media and the left desperately wanted this story to be true. The entire left bought into not only the Jussie Smollete story but that it was president Trump's fault.
In December 2016 a Muslim woman said she was attacked by three white Trump supporters in New York City on the subway. She said they tried to rip off her hijab. Well, it never happened.
One day after the 2016 election a student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio said that white males wearing Trump shirts threw rocks at her and hurled racial slurs. Protests at a university town hall ensued. The student made up the entire incident.
In September of last year a woman told police in Long Island she was driving home when four teens confronted her and yelled Trump 2020 and they told her she didn't belong here. That too was made up.
In each case, the story was reported all over the media before the facts were known and always somehow pointing the blame back to Trump.
These fake racial incidences have become normalized. When the Tawana Brawley broke a generation ago, this was a bogus racial incident involving an African-American woman who had claimed to have been raped, abused, and battered, it was anomalous. People really had to scratch their heads because this was such a freak episode, but now there's a procession of these bogus incidents of which the Jussie Smollette case is only the latest.
What kind of dementia causes someone to do this> Why would somebody fabricate this kind of incident? I think we're dealing with not so much personal dementia but what could be called ideological dementia.
I think the first reason is there's a narrative here that they are trying to advance. The narrative is that the MAGA supporters, the Trump people, are a bunch of racists.
Now, it's obviously a tribute to the Trumpsters that they are not racists because the Jussie Smollette's despite being black, despite being flamboyantly gay, are actively going out there and looking for people to pick on them and nobody is. So the facts are not supporting the narrative at all so they figure why not make up the facts? Why not adapt the facts to the narrative rather than the other way around?
I think this is the demented progressive psychology that drives these racial faked incidents. And I think the second reason is that they get away with it.
So the Chicago police are demonized for having the audacity of doing their jobs to investigate this incident and Trump supporters are made out to be these terribly horrible people because they did this terrible thing to this poor actor. Then when the facts reveal that he paid $3,500 to two black Nigerian friends who worked on the Empire set with him to stage this fake attack, gave interviews to dozens of shows that ran the story, now we need to wait for the facts to come out?
If there's ever a time to call bullshit this would be it and if they had, in fact, initially waited for the facts to come out none of this would have happened. Why are those reporters not apologizing for wrongfully accusing Trump supporters of such horrible things without checking the facts first? Why is there no accountability?
You know, I'm not a Trump supporter but I also don't like having bullshit fed to me every day. My suspicions of how the media was covering Trump and forcing a racist narrative on us began when I went to a Trump rally, not to support him, but to see with my own eyes if everything I was hearing in the news about his rallies were true. After all, televisions seemed to like Trump a lot prior to him announcing his bid for the office. What had changed so fast?
So went and saw with my own eyes that the only people who were causing any trouble were Democrats. They were acting very racist, angry, and threatening while every Trump supporter as acting, well, nice. The place was packed and it took me 6=hours standing in line to get in. What did the papers say about the event the next day? Picture of empty seats and narratives of just the opposite of what I saw for myself.
Fucking media. I don't believe a word they say especially if they keep saying it over and over again. Why are they getting caught more often driving these false racial narratives? Perhaps because they are doing it more often and more unapologetically thinking they can get away with it because the media's hate for Trump will cover them. But where is this hate really coming from? Not from Trump or the right. When I stood in line at that rally I saw a lot of hate and can sadly say for sure I only saw it coming from the media, from my people, the left.
The Jussie Smollette incident is a hate crime. It's a hate crime but in the opposite direction. Remember, if Jussie Smollette wanted to beat himself up that's not against the law. The real crime here was attempting to pin this blame on innocent people who did nothing and it;s this idea of ultimately trying to frame Trump supporters for something that Smollette himself perpetrated, so he's the perpetrator masquerading as the victim, it's very important that he be held accountable for that otherwise the left just think let's keep trying this stuff. When it works it works and when it doesn't we get away with it.
I wouldn't be surprised at this point to discover that U.S. Senators Kamala D. Harris (D-CA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) put Smollette up to the stunt. Is it coincidental that Smollette waited for police to arrive for four hours while wearing a nook around his neck that he falsely claimed was tied there by the non-existent perpetrators and on the same day Senators Harris and Booker asked for unanimous consent on the Senate floor to pass the bipartisan Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. Even more ironic is the fact that lynchings were historically endorsed and carried out by Democrats who opposed every reform aimed at helping Black Americans that Republicans tried to enact.
Did Kamala and Booker put Smollette up to is to gather publicity for their legislation? And if the truth unfold further to show they did how with they backtrack their statements made about the case?
One last final note. Nothing in this post is meant to excuse or make light of anyone who has experienced racism, oppression, or hatred by or towards any group or individual, nor is it saying that these things don't happen or exist. Anyone who does these kinds of things should be held accountable. But when a story that is widely reported involving hate crimes turns out to be proven false we need to call that out as well, put a stop to it, and hold those responsible accountable. A fake hate crime is a hate crime too.
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