Commentary: The American Media Has Betrayed America

by Edward Ring

There aren’t enough disparaging epithets in the English language to adequately describe “journalists” such as ABC Nightly News anchorman David Muir, the dashing 40-something actor who pretends to share important national news with America. Five days a week, Muir recites agenda-driven propaganda as if it were truth, while his allies who run the social media monopolies throttle down, demonetize, shadowban, or flat out censor reports that conflict with his narrative.

One of Muir’s biggest crimes is his façade of objectivity. Unlike the hosts of the cable news networks, such as CNN’s rabid Don Lemon, or MSNBC’s smirking Rachel Maddow, Muir isn’t obvious. He spreads his phony lies and distortions with a straight face, never breaking character. If you aren’t exposed to the other side of his stories, it works.

It isn’t just Muir, of course. Other pretenders include CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, who along with her reporters never saw a Spanish consonant that didn’t require a hard roll and NBC’s Lester Holt, who made it his business to debate candidate Trump in the 2016 presidential debates, instead of leaving that job to hapless Hillary. Then there is the mediocrity who reports from the White House for NPR, who thinks everything has to do with race and gender, because flogging that obsession takes no work and reliably builds a career.

For over three years, and only with the occasional exception of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, the entire American media establishment, online and offline, has been complicit in spreading lies; despicable, anti-American lies. They spread the Russian collusion hoax for nearly three years, shamelessly exaggerating every smug utterance from the loathsome House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Again and again, they predicted that this time, Trump’s presidency was done for, and when Trump finally was exonerated, they just moved on to the next hoax.

The catalog of malpractice committed by these malicious partisan hacks who call themselves journalists in America is too vast to summarize. The terrifying “white nationalists” who, they insist, are a serious threat to the Republic and of whom we must live in perpetual fear. The baseless smears of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The Ukraine impeachment. The perennial “climate crisis,” which can always fill in whenever there isn’t some more useful phony story to spread. And all of it, every single bit of it, was calculated to take down President Trump and stigmatize anyone and everyone who ever supported him or even just defended some of his actions.

The Capital Media Crime

The media’s capital crime, however, is their coverage of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. And if the national media establishment had not already demonstrated repeatedly that they are nothing more than a political action committee attached to the Democratic Party, more people would be fooled.

But as it is, the timing of the virus, the response to the virus, and the reporting on the virus: all of it is suspect. The repercussions of media malpractice are more deaths, destruction of the constitution, and quite possibly an economic depression.

This is not overstating the case. Imagine if the media covered this crisis with honesty. Sure, in the early stages, nobody knew what to make of it. But why were the only voices accorded credibility by the media those who called for a lockdown? Why were virologists and epidemiologists ignored if they suggested that maybe we should quarantine the sick and the at-risk, and allow healthy Americans to acquire herd immunity? Look to Sweden’s experience. That approach is working there.

Worse, why has the media ignored every report or study or journal article or clinical abstract that finds treatment with hydroxychloroquine, zinc sulfate, and azithromycin to be effective? Why have they persistently spread the lie that a seven-day course of hydroxychloroquine is dangerous, when millions of people have used it safely for years on end to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis? Why don’t we ever hear about doctors around the world who are successfully using this treatment to prevent COVID-19 in exposed patients and to cure it in patients who’ve tested positive? Why?

Who is pulling the strings of mainstream media in the United States? Why is the media circus focused on vaccines that may be available sometime next year, and probably will only be partially effective, without offering the slightest concern that vaccines may already be over-prescribed? Everybody knows vaccines are an important tool for maintaining public health, but why has the media painted the issue black and white? Maybe getting as many as 90 vaccines before the age of 18 is too many. Maybe vaccines should be used more judiciously. Maybe people don’t want to be forced into getting a vaccine in order to have an “immunity passport.”

A Convergence of Special Interests

The horrifying constitutional implications of where we’re headed as a nation during this dress rehearsal for martial law are not of interest to the media.

Along with the nauseating, infantile, feel-good, “we’re all in this together” corporate commercials that have rolled out in between the useless television newscasts, the only news coverage available paints people who object to the lockdown as, that’s right, Trump supporters. Or white nationalists. Or “conspiracy theorists.”

And why wouldn’t all of this be a conspiracy? Why wouldn’t a rational person at least consider that possibility, when this false, destructive news coverage is just the latest movement in a symphony the media has been performing for years, where the repetitive theme is that conservatives are bad, nationalists are bad, patriots are bad, liberals are good, globalists are good, and the Trump “resistance” is noble? It’s far too coordinated, too well-timed, too relentless, to not maybe be more than just the spontaneous product of independent deep thinkers like David Muir.

We are trained to think of conspiracies as though they are inherently impossible, something that only a deranged individual would seriously consider as a possible explanation for events. That’s fine. Don’t call it a conspiracy. Call it a convergence of special interests that are smart enough to see where they want events to go, and therefore don’t require a score or a conductor. The instrumentalists who play in this elite orchestra are smart enough to know what they’ve done.

They didn’t choose the Swedish approach, and because they didn’t, every small business, every small landlord, every single propertied interest that lacks massive reserves of cash and capital, is now going to get gobbled up by multinationals. That’s a fact. And as millions wait in the unemployment lines—spaced six feet apart, wearing stupid masks of dubious value—they will depend on government to pay their bills, and they will not expect any Chinese coronavirus cure of which big pharma does not approve.

The media has always been powerful. With the advent of social media, today they are more powerful than ever. And they don’t care about Americans. They don’t care about America. They do the bidding of a global elite that wants to stamp out populist dissent around the world. It wants to consolidate economic power in the hands of billionaires and corporations. It wants to erase borders and nationalities. It wants to drive billions of people out of rural areas and into megacities. For these elites, the Chinese coronavirus pandemic is a golden opportunity.

It’s not a conspiracy, though. It’s just the conventional wisdom of the super-rich. The media, if they cared, now more than ever would do their historic job, questioning this conventional wisdom. Instead, they are tools. It is unforgivable.

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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness and co-founder of the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013.

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