Other viewers, however, decided enough was enough, and the ratings began to collapse. After all, being a Democrat doesn’t automatically mean you want to be lied to, manipulated, and deliberately made afraid. Grassroots Democrats, the classical liberals we remember being the heart of the party, are also concerned about personal freedom, national security, inflation, illegal immigration, crime, and a better future for their children. The first victims of progressive grifters masquerading as advocates and politicians? Average Americans who happen to be Democrats.
DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall told Fox News: “CNN and MSNBC are particularly aggressive in their progressive approaches to news, and only true believers want news solely from an ideological standpoint. There still needs to be some intellectual honesty in the approach to journalism, and audiences are sensing that CNN and MSNBC have become too shrill for measured reporting.”21
A Titanic Result
The numbers don’t lie; millions of Americans want something different than the slanted news stories the left-wing media are feeding them. We also aren’t the mindless, drooling infants the liberal media presumes us to be. The years the media spent smearing Donald Trump exposed how deep the bias went. Axios reported on January 21, 2021, just after Biden was inaugurated:
For first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media . . . 56% of Americans agree with the statement that “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.” 58% think that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.” When Edelman re-polled Americans after the election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57% of Democrats trusting the media and only 18% of Republicans.22
The collapse of trust in the media accelerated during Biden’s first and second years in the White House. The silver lining of this is that it confirms that millions of Americans clearly see how the liberal media are intellectually bankrupt propagandists. In July 2022, Gallup reported that only “16% of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers,” while “11% have some degree of confidence in television news.”
In 2023, the mood of Americans about its national news organizations continued its ignominious decline, with respondents confirming what they made clear in 2021—they remain intensely suspicious of the intentions and goals of media. “Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting. The survey . . . goes beyond others that have shown a low level of trust in the media to the startling point where many believe there is an intent to deceive.”23
How this revulsion is manifesting itself is epic. CNN, which lost massive numbers of viewers as its absurd programming devolved into a steady and pathetic stream of Trump-hatred and an unhinged obsession with attacks on Fox News, got new bosses in 2022. Viewers were abandoning CNN as though it had hit an iceberg and was rapidly taking on water, as it listed to the left. Forbes reported:
[A] review of ratings data compiled by Nielsen shows the internal chaos at the network [CNN] is mirrored by deep declines in viewership across all day parts. . . . Through February 15, CNN . . . a 69% drop from the same period one year ago. Among total viewers . . . a decline of 68% from 2021. . . . MSNBC saw a 62% drop among viewers 25–54 year-over-year, and a 47% decline among all viewers. Fox News Channel was the only cable news network to increase its viewership—up 6% in the key demo and up 2% among total viewers—compared to the same period in 2021.24
As they were running out of lifeboats, an epiphany! “CNN’s corporate boss David Zaslav wants network for ‘Republicans, Democrats’ as ratings sink.” That’s a good sign, and a reminder that choices matter, especially as consumers.
Fake News and Pseudo-Events
When it comes to propagating fear, leftists must do more than determine who is heard and who is not. They also must create events furthering their narrative and the suppressive environment they require and crave.
Historian Daniel Boorstin prophetically warned Americans in his 1962 book The Image that the media were replacing what was real with propaganda and what he termed “pseudo-events.”25 This Boorstin classic is an indictment of what he saw as the media creating news instead of reporting it.
Boorstin worried that Americans were becoming inured to fabricated events and accepting the media’s increasingly false environment too easily as an attractive, more dramatic replacement of reality. Boorstin’s prescient concern and description is widely described today as “fake news.” He explains these pseudo-events, in part, as “a happening that possesses the following characteristics:
It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.
It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media. Its success is measured by how widely it is reported. . . . The question, “Is it real?” is less important than, “Is it newsworthy?”26
Additionally, the event or assertion must be ambiguous, creating more interest and allowing the readers and viewers to expand on it with their own imaginations. It is also “usually intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy,” with some of the best examples being the fabricated anti-Trump Russia dossier and the attempted character assassinations of Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Brett Kavanaugh that we discussed earlier. Outrage porn had been constructed, accusations flew, and the ensuing breathless coverage by the media is what made it all seem real.
Sixty years ago, Boorstin had a perfect grip on the trajectory of the legacy media and their unprincipled inclinations. He wrote that the media would increasingly bring out the best and worst in people. This makes the media a powerful and necessary weapon for those who want power and control over the citizenry.
When we think about media victims like 1996 Atlanta Olympic Park bombing hero Richard Jewell, Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and Nick Sandmann, to name just a few, all of them endured “counterfeit happenings,” as Boorstin would put it, inflicted upon them by the media. The media, usually in league with a government agency or propelled by their own liberal agenda, perpetuated completely false or absurd narratives on their targets.
Richard Jewell was falsely accused of being the bomber even though he had actually saved lives by noticing the bomb backpack and moving people to safety. Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh faced uncorroborated and unproven accusations promoted by the media as though unquestionably true. President Trump was painted 24/7 by the media as a Russian agent doing the bidding of President Vladimir Putin. The media smeared teenager Nick Sandmann as a racist bully by using a false narrative about an out-of-context photograph and video. His real crime? Wearing a Trump-supporting MAGA cap while on a field trip with his school.
Pseudo-events, like accusations a judge committed sexual assault, another judge drugged women and participated in a gang rape, a hero security guard was actually a mad bomber, or an American billionaire president was a Russian spy and traitor, succeed in part because they’re dramatic. Boorstin explains that the elements of counterfeit happenings and pseudo-events are “planned for dissemination, are easier to disseminate and to make vivid. Participants are selected for their newsworthy and dramatic interest. . . . Pseudo-events cost money to create; hence somebody has an interest in disseminating, magnifying, advertising, and extolling them as events worth watching or worth believing.”27
The “somebody” in our examples is made up of the agents of the establishment itself—the FBI and the Democratic Party, both of which must rely on the media to move their propaganda and “counterfeit happenings.”
Considering the danger we are facing with the liberal media throwing its lot in with the corrupt Democratic establishment, Boorstin’s warning about the use of propaganda and pseudo-events in totalitarian societies is a valuable touchstone:
In a totalitarian society, where people are flooded by purposeful lies, the real facts are of course misrepresented, but the representation itself is not ambiguous. The propaganda lie is asserted as if it were true. Its object is to lead people to believe that the truth is simpler, more intelligible, than it really is. “Now the purpose of propaganda,” Hitler explained, “is not continually to produce interesting changes for a few blasé little masters, but to convince; that means, to convince the masses. The masses, however, with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousandfold repetition of the most simple ideas.” But in our society, pseudo-events make simple facts seem more subtle, more ambiguous, and more speculative than they really are. Propaganda oversimplifies experience, pseudo-events overcomplicate it.28
It is imperative to understand that every progressive attack on a high-profile person is a message to the average person that if they are willing to destroy the life and reputation of someone, a prominent person with significant resources, then no one is safe. Destroying someone by example is the ultimate mechanism of using fear to crush the will of others. Especially that of the masses of unwashed rubes as we dare to continue to think that we, our opinions, and our dreams matter.
The liberal media regularly attacks the reputations and careers of prominent people who dare to stay true to their classically liberal or conservative values. These people are genuine iconoclasts who refuse to cave to the left’s ugly, bizarre, and catastrophic Marxist cultural and political worldview. Ergo, they are to be smashed. In public. With as much vitriol and condemnation as possible. The goal of the leftist media is to leave Americans with one thought, courtesy of their new woke religion cult masters: “There, but for the grace of Marxists and media, go I.”
Hitler!
Few journalists could argue with a straight face that the elderly, often-confused, and bumbling Joe “I’m not kidding, folks” Biden—campaigning primarily from his home, ostensibly because of the COVID-19 pandemic—was up to the task of leading America. Instead, the media fearmongers pulled out all the stops to warn of doom and gloom should President Trump be reelected. Trump was portrayed in heavily opinionated news stories as an incompetent, racist, corrupt, criminal, insane, dictatorial sex offender. Outrageously, Trump—the most pro-Israel president in US history, whose daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism when marrying Jared Kushner and whose grandchildren are Jewish—was even absurdly compared in the media to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
A post on Medium was headlined “Thirteen Similarities between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.”29 An op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer was headlined, “Is It Wrong to Compare Trump to Hitler? No.”30 A CNN.com news story was headlined, “Top House Democrats Compare Trump’s Rise to Hitler’s.”31 These are just a few of the many examples of this slur in the service of media fearmongering.
The campaign to generate fear of Trump worked. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in August 2020 found that “58% of registered voters who support Joe Biden in the 2020 election say their vote is more in opposition to President Trump than in support of Biden,” Axios reported.32 The Democrats were still relying on that Hitler! playbook leading up to the 2024 election.
We shouldn’t be surprised that most broadcast, online, and print journalists—except for the hosts of opinion shows and writers of columns and editorials, whose job it is to express their opinions—deny they are biased as they work to stoke fear. They would like us to believe they are like Superman, whose secret identity is reporter Clark Kent, and whose motto beginning in 1942 was fighting for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” As a woke aside, this motto was ridiculously changed to fighting for “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow” in 2021, pandering in part to the anti-US woke crowd. And they wonder why Americans are tuning out Hollywood.33
Fairness and relative objectivity in mainstream news media reports are increasingly rare, as journalists express opinions in the guise of facts ever more frequently. This is because the basic assumptions that most journalists embrace, and that determine what they cover and how they cover it, are the worldview of the left.
Part of the legacy media’s process, consciously and subconsciously, has become making sure fear overwhelms reality. Some excuse this as a public service, saying it’s “for their own good” to frighten people into what the cosmopolitan set decides is “the right thing,” like accepting mask and vaccine mandates. This involves targeting individuals, as we’ve discussed, but it also requires swamping the environment with narratives promoting fear itself.
There are serious and, yes, frightening events worthy of our concern taking place in the world that must be reported by the news media, such as a new virus impacting society, crime, drug abuse, natural disasters, and unvetted illegal immigrants pouring over our border. These discussions and reports add important information to the choices we need to make about our futures. But there’s a difference between being informed and naturally concerned about a serious issue and drowning in liquid fear constructed by the liberal media. As social researcher David Altheide explains:
[T]he constant coupling of crime and other aspects of urban living with fear have produced a unique perspective about our effective environment. While crime is certainly something to be concerned about, as is any potentially dangerous situation, the danger, per se, does not make one fearful, just cautious. Fear is not a thing but a characteristic attributed by someone (e.g. a journalist) to something.34
Moreover, beyond conventional reports about discrete events that may elicit concern (and then action), Altheide describes what he terms as media constructing an overall “discourse of fear,” constituting a
[m]ajor public discourse through which numerous problems and issues are framed. A discourse of fear may be defined as the pervasive form of communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective environment of the physical and symbolic environments as people define and experience them in everyday life.35
Both climate change and the COVID-19 narratives are perfect examples of manipulating valid news to construct a pervasive message of existential, looming doom. Perpetuating an “expectation of danger and risk” with the primary purpose of establishing fear itself and mass anxiety is a tiny tyrant dream as, they imagine, taking more power as they frighten us out of our desire to live free lives.
An overall political narrative of victimhood and victimizers undermines America’s brilliant contribution to humanity, which was the idea that we do not need a common history, race, ethnicity, religion, or other characteristics to become united as a people. Identity politics exists exclusively to divide and set Americans upon each other through a false construct of perpetual victimhood through racism and bigotry. This political correctness strategy has since been massaged into Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, a considerably more official-sounding mission to normalize bigotry. Fear is at the center of all the left relies upon, and the mass media provide the mechanism with which victimhood becomes the discourse controlling how we view ourselves and others.
To this point, Altheide notes: “It is not easy to make people afraid. The word fear shows up in a lot of news reports and popular culture. I do not think that this is part of a natural general trend, nor do I think that it is an accident of inconsequential. Fear is the groundwork for the emergence of victimization and the victim identity that is now quite commonplace . . . the prevalence of fear in public discourse can contribute to stances and reactive social policies that promote state control and surveillance” [emphasis mine].36