The mainstream media disgusts, infuriates, and leaves the sour taste of being cheated.
Donald Trump was not the first to discover that the “news” is fake. That realization goes back decades. Perhaps the best messenger of this truth in the past half century, sadly, set us back the most. Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, who was Richard Nixon’s first vice president, was also his attack dog, and he employed the great William Safire, more famously of the New York Times, as his speechwriter. Safire was a wonder with words as he savaged the fake news mainstream media, and his sponsor, Agnew, enjoyed the ostensible gravitas of the vice presidency to amplify those words throughout the country.
The only darned shame was that, as we all eventually learned, Agnew was a common crook. As he receded into the depths of pleading “nolo contendre,” the Truth of Fake News was the main loser. There would not be another like him — blessed with a fearless forthrightness to take on the lying news media and enjoying a public megaphone, until Donald Trump, to proclaim the truth of their lies. (President Reagan tried working more gently in his conflicts with the lying media. It was strategic. They still did all they could to tear him down, but he had a congeniality that empowered him to remain above them.)
They lie in so many ways. More of the lies are subtle than overt, and even sharp-witted conservatives often fail to realize how they are being deceived. A pro-left story is put on page one, and a similar pro-right story gets buried in the middle of the newspaper or left out altogether. An “expert” on a subject is quoted. The media pick whom they deem their experts. I remember when Trump was running for Number 45, and the media consolidated around their myth that Trump is an antisemitic Nazi. Yes, his daughter and his grandchildren through her are Orthodox Jews. Yes, he was already known as a lifelong supporter of Israel who chose to surround himself with many Jews as close friends. But the media dug in their claws: Trump = Hitler. Since the claim was so absurd, they needed an “expert” to quote. So they found a Nobody, an activist for homosexual causes in New Jersey who happened to be Jewish and very temporarily worked at something rather insignificant but named for Anne Frank (as hundreds of things are), and the Left coronated this clown as “Mister Anne Frank, Defender of the Jews.” Suddenly, he was on CNN and in the New York Times, presented as an authoritative American Jewish leader, expert at combating antisemitism, and he was ranting about Trump and Hitler.
I watched the TV interviews with Mister Anne Frank. I have not watched CNN for the past 6 or so years at all, except on election nights, because they really do better precinct maps and pinpointed coverage. (Figures don’t lie, even though those liars often figure.) My wife Ellen, of blessed memory, said to me at one point: “Dov, are you aware you’ve been yelling at the TV for the last 15 minutes?” It was disheartening, the way they lie. So they dig up non-experts, Nobodies, homosexual activists who double as Mister Anne Frank, and coronate them. Then, having extracted nonsense, they make that the story to be quoted in all other media.
They falsify by the adjectives and adverbs they use. They lie by the way they edit. Thanks to Trump, we all now know about the infamous way CBS edited their Kamala Harris pre-election 60 Minutes interview to make her babble sound almost coherent. We saw how NBC gave Kamala a gigantic electoral boost by sneakingly casting her as the guest star for the Saturday Night Live episode immediately before last November’s election.
So they not only lie overtly about facts. It is editing and adjectives and designating pseudo-experts and adverbs and deciding where to place a story or even whether to cover it. Which press release is publicized by the media, and which gets trashed before the postal envelope is even opened?
Suddenly, the foci change. So much about whether Trump 45 was mentally stable or should have been wrapped in a straitjacket under the 25th Amendment. And then, the very next guy really was completely off the planet, flying with Jeff Bezos’s girlfriend and Gayle King and a few other lefties on the greatest heroic space adventure since Captain Kirk saved us from Klingons and Romulans. Or at least in his mind, mentored by a large woolly Easter Rabbit. How did the 25th Amendment disappear from CNN and MSNBC the moment Joe Biden arrived with everything but an active mind? Look how they falsified and lied without technically lying and falsifying by choosing to aim the 25th at Trump 45 and not at Biden and his Easter Rabbit. And perhaps CNN really is hoping that Biden will report at some point where indeed Malaysia Airlines 370, with its 239 aboard, actually landed.
So they lie in so many ways. Every time Trump accomplishes anything, they report in sneering tones and search for the bad side. He deports a dirtbag found guilty of gang membership by two judges, and the lying “journalists” go running, unpacking an angle that his poor wife is being separated from her gently loving husband, a “Maryland man,” depicted as even more refined than the Marlboro man because he does not smoke. And then it takes alternative truthseekers to uncover that this dirtbag used to beat up his wife so badly that she would call the cops to rescue her. Meanwhile, Chris Van Hollen, deaf to all the Maryland women in his state whom Illegal Aliens have raped and murdered on his watch, flies off to South America (on our dime) to win sympathy for this piece of dirt. (Conclusion: Van Hollen is running for president in 2028. Then Cory Booker wanted to go. Suddenly, Venezuela has become the Democrats’ Iowa and New Hampshire. They will be replacing Iowa ham balls and corn dogs with Venezuelan arepas and cachapas before long!)
Finally, it is noteworthy how general-purpose public opinion polling is manipulated to skew reality. With Trump achieving more in 100 days than most American presidents achieved in one, two, or more years, they turn to opinion polling to show that “Independents” who voted for Trump in 2024 now are deeply in buyer’s remorse. The polling is such a scam. Here is why:
- First, who knows whether the surveys are even accurate? The Democrats built their November 2024 election campaign on the opinion polls that told readers what really mattered to voters. Not crime. Not the border. What people really cared about was the climate and a woman’s right to have an abortion in Oklahoma. Thankfully, by lying to themselves and then convincing themselves to believe their own lies, they ran the wrong campaign.
- Harris has been in denial for the past six months. Media keep asking: How could you possibly have lost with such great polls, such great crowds, when so many Americans saw Trump as a Nazi, an outright Hitler, as confirmed by their polls? Harris has fabricated a perfect explanation: “Biden did not step out soon enough, so I did not have enough time to get out with my message.” Really? She did not have enough time to present herself to the voters? The truth is exactly the opposite: she had too much time. When Biden stepped out, the reaction was lightning for her. Her polls zoomed through the roof. Her fundraising set every imaginable record: most cash donated in a day, in a week, a fortnight, a month. The money blew the lid off. The polls declared her lead insurmountable. Then came the Democratic National Convention, and she was declared for four days a living saint, as perfect a candidate as ever breathed American air. The perfect this. The perfect that. Her putz of a husband, who had knocked up the family babysitter — but no worries, Democrats, because he and his former wife get along fine now — crowed at the DNC that Harris cooks him “a mean” brisket on Passover, in return for which he attends Easter church services with her. Disgusting. By September, after that convention and that fundraising, they could have coronated her right then and there, calling the election off. “She did not have enough time to get out her message?” Au contraire, she had too much time, just enough to sink herself — just as she did during the 2020 Democrat primaries. She had relied on the false polls. The only winners? Oprah, Beyoncé, Cardi B, Eminem, Al Sharpton, and the others, some of whom sent her invoices for as much as $1 million here, $1 million there. It is they who ultimately mourn that she did not have more time — to buy more endorsements like a Nike or Coke campaign.
- And, finally, an important reason the regular ongoing polling always is worse for Republicans than on the night of the quadrennial presidential election is most subtle: Voters on the left and right are pretty much locked in. The ones in play are the “Independents” (a self-aggrandizing way to say “I have no idea because I never follow any news except about serial killers and new diet pills that will replace injections. And, by the way, who’s running for what this time?”) Those “Independents” predictably lean sharply to the left for three years and nine months after a presidential election, as the mainstream lying and fake media bombard them with a one-sided narrative. Those people just don’t know what’s going on except for what ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post tell them. It’s too much to follow to inquire independently. Suddenly, they cannot afford their grocery bills, and no one in Biden-Kamala America can find baby formula in the 50 States while Biden and the European Union are forcing Israel to drown Hamas in Gaza with baby formula in “humanitarian” trucks. “No Baby Formula” is something “Independents” understand, so they abandon the Fake News and Biden, telling pollsters they are for Trump. But then, somehow, baby formula shows up as elections draw nigh, and the Democrats are back on the road to a landslide. So what ultimately changes the tide and elects the Republicans? Why do the polls typically shift rightward during the last three months of the 48-month cycle between elections? Simple. That’s when the GOP balances public information by getting out its message with massive advertising. No one — not even Elon Musk — can afford to advertise the truth and facts that heavily all the time. So the right has to live with the lies, slanders, and defamations until pre-election August. Then, three months of heavy advertising get out just enough truth and information to counter the impact of the prior 45 months. If it takes only one month of baby formula to win hearts and minds, three months of advertising is forever — especially when the other side helps out by running Kamala Harris and forking over millions for purchasing celebrity endorsements as Nike and auto companies do.
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