The Undeniable, Glaring Bias of the Mainstream Media

The bombshell was reported once more by the National Enquirer, and it was given immediate, massive exposure by being featured as the lead story on the Drudge Report, read by millions of people each day.

But of course. The mainstream media doesn’t think you should hear about it, just like they don’t think you hear about the WikiLeaks revelations or other stories that could help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

Yet it was nothing more than an Enquirer story that launched the non-stop attacks on Ted Cruz, and from the initial reports, it appears that the witness indicting the Clintons is far more credible than those attacking Cruz. Yet thus far, the mainstream media is largely silent on the matter.

As I scanned the online news sites of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, along with the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek, not one of them had one syllable about these charges against Hillary Clinton – and I searched these sites 8 hours after the Drudge headline went live.

At the same time, almost all of them had one or more article about Trump’s alleged sexual sins. (But wait. I stand corrected. The Washington Post website really did have much more important news to cover, giving pride of place to this story: First lady shimmers in Versace at the Obamas’ final state dinner. Yes, this is far more important than the other, national news.)

Why the ridiculously obvious double standard? Why the frenzied reporting of a National Enquirer report accusing Cruz of sexual infidelities but such studious silence when the same publication accuses Hillary? Did this notorious tabloid suddenly become reputable when it targeted the staunchly conservative Cruz but again became disreputable when it targeted Hillary?

Worse still, as others have pointed out, the mainstream media has all but ignored the WikiLeaks email dumps, although the information contained in them so far would be enough to sink most campaigns. The coverage has been minimal, at best, and quite understated at that, giving the viewer the feeling that the news is marginal, while what really matters is whether Trump touched a woman on a plane 30 years ago (or, more recently, in other settings).

To further underscore this glaring double standard, if the current batch of WikiLeaks emails had come from the Trump campaign rather than the Clinton campaign, with his people insulting Catholics and with his right-hand man expressing disappointment that it was a Muslim, not a white American, who was one of the San Bernardino murderers, the media would virtually crucify Trump, with shrill calls across the nation demanding that he step down and that he fire his campaign manager immediately.

But when it is Hillary Clinton and John Podesta at the center of the firestorm, the email scandals take a very distant back seat to the sex charges against Trump. (Which, to repeat, I absolutely do not minimize, if true.)

And what if Trump had been guilty of using a private email server for classified government correspondence, as Hillary was? What if his staff had destroyed his laptops and cellphones, refused to answer more than 100 incriminating questions from Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment, and then were granted immunity? The media would be shouting hysterically, “Cover up! Expose the dirty rascals!”

Instead, when it is Hillary at the center of these very serious charges, they join in the cover-up.

But should this surprise when recently released reports indicate that political donations from the media are 27-1 in favor of Hillary over Trump? And should it surprise us when off-the-record meetings are set up with media elites and the Clinton campaign?

As if further evidence of the media’s extreme bias was needed, just look at the mainstream media’s virtual blackout of two damning videos (see here and here) produced by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, apparently documenting serious campaign abuses by operatives allegedly working directly with the Clinton campaign.

You didn’t hear about those either? No surprise. The media doesn’t seem to think you should hear about them either.

Recently, conservative pundits Pat Buchanan and George Will have agreed with Trump that, on some level, “the system” is rigged, with Buchanan claiming that, “Big Media is the power that sustains the forces of globalism.”

As I noted in Outlasting the Gay Revolution, liberal media bias “has been documented for several decades, beginning in 1981, when professors S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman ‘released a groundbreaking survey of 240 journalists at the most influential national media outlets — including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS — on their political attitudes and voting patterns.’ The survey found these ‘media elites’ to be shockingly liberal, to the point that ‘54 percent did not regard adultery as wrong, compared to only 15 percent [of the general public] who regarded it as wrong,’ while, ‘Ninety percent agree that a woman has the right to decide for herself whether to have an abortion; 79 percent agree strongly with this pro-choice position.’”

I say it’s high time for a media revolution and a listener-viewer-reader revolt, which would mean that the media leaders report the news in an unbiased way, and if that is not possible, they then clearly declare their biases.

And if they won’t do either (or if their biases are too offensive), we take our business elsewhere.

The “Mainstream Media” is the Democrat Party’s Ministry of Propaganda.

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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