Agenda Driven Media Drives False News

By

       M. Richard Maxson

      We live in a society where mainstream news is often preached. Many people don’t think to exercise skepticism when watching the news because they don’t realize that the very organizations that claim to be reporting world events objectively are actually just misinforming people by spreading propaganda and fake news.

      What you’ve got are prominent media figures, political operatives, scholars, and even US senators being taken in by this slanted bias, in addition to the millions of ordinary people consuming it on Twitter and Facebook. This is the key danger: that this sort of thing becomes routine, repeated over and over again in the numerous left-leaning media outlets, to the point where accepting their fact-free claims becomes a core and important part of what Democrats and gullible Americas believe. A recent Gallup poll on the media found that just 14 percent of Republicans think the media “get the facts straight” compared to 62 percent of Democrats!

      Since taking office, President Trump has claimed that he has been “treated more unfairly” than any politician in history. A report released recently by the Harvard

Kennedy School supported that charge. The study found that eighty percent of the news coverage in Trump’s first 100 days was negative. Thomas Patterson, the author of the report, noted: “In no week did the coverage drop below 70 percent negative, and it reached 90 percent negative at its peak…. CNN and NBC’s coverage was the most unrelenting—negative stories about Trump outpaced positive ones by 13-to-1 on the two networks.” These two corporations have been called out by the President for spewing “fake news” and the facts back him up. Only Fox News, whose claim of “fair and balanced news” may be more accurate than many would believe, were the the only ones covering Trump positively half (48 percent) of the time.

      Reporters are expected to report the relevant facts in every story they cover. As citizens, we need sources that provide both sides on stories about what is happening in our national and state capitals. Instead, too many news stories are one-sided opinion pieces. It is not just what is shared; it’s what is left out – the positive coverage. Media bias is there so it’s up to every citizen to ask the question—am I getting both sides of this story? If not – why not?

Here are a few comments from a variety of concerned Americans:

• “After you’ve had somebody say to you for the thousandth time, ‘How come we never hear about these issues in the media,’ you start to realize that the media itself is an issue.” – Svend Robinson
  

• “For years now, talk show hosts, people on television, people in sitcoms have been, hired by the government to throw you off the tracks, to distract you, to make you laugh and stuff like that, make you happy and docile so you don’t know what’s really going on.” - Jim Carrey
  

• "I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions… Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a sceptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.” - Noam Chomsky

• "You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts." 
   - Daniel Moynihan to a reporter

• "The United States of America has to start to focus on policy which is good for all Americans, and that is infrastructure, regulation, taxation, education. Why you guys (the press) don’t write about it every day is completely beyond me." 
   - JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon

• "The problem of fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee, but rather because we as citizens, we as users of these services, help each other. We talk and we share and we point out what is fake. We point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.” - Edward Snowden

       It’s up to you, as Patriots, to find the truth. It’s important to be skeptical of the information that’s being presented to you because there’s just so much deliberate misinformation out there and it's repeated endlessly.