 Three-fourths of Americans have no trust in the MSM Back in the good old days – for the news business and government, at least – three television networks and a handful of national daily newspapers controlled the flow of information. There was NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report, CBS's Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and ABC's lesser "titans" John Daly, Peter Jennings, Harry Reasoner and a host of lesser lessers. They joined America at supper time and dished out whatever pabulum the Deep State wanted you to know, couching it in ways the Deep State wanted you to perceive it. Americans were none the wiser. So deceived were they they even gave Cronkite the moniker, "the most trusted man in America" in an opinion poll. It was a classic case of unknown unknowns. Americans didn't know any better. And what's worse, they didn't know they didn't know any better.
Even the occasional blip – such as when NBC was caught rigging a General Motors pickup truck with an incendiary device in order to make its fuel tank explode on demand – didn't dent the psyche of Americans propagandized to believe that the networks were objectively reporting the news. Sadly, many still believe that to be the goal of the MSM. But then the internet happened. The old walls were broken down and the gate keepers were kicked aside. Suddenly, citizen journalists found their voices and had an inexpensive platform from which to tell the truth and show that the MSM were lying and dissembling more often than not. And when they weren't, the MSM were selectively editing and parsing what you saw and heard in order to control how you perceived world events. Which brings us to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll on the traditional media. When asked the question, "How often do you think news sources report news they know to be fake, false or purposely misleading," 72 percent of respondents said a lot or sometimes. On 25 percent said rarely or never. Two-thirds of respondents (65 percent) said fake news is reported because the "people have an agenda." About one-third (30 percent) blame fake news on laziness or "poor fact-checking." Only 3 percent believe it's accidental. But in reporting on its poll, Axios resorted to a bit of dissembling of its own. The headline for the story, "92% of Republicans think media intentionally reports fake news," while true was a deliberate effort to deceive. It was a blatant attempt to hide the fact that almost three-fourths of all Americans have no faith in the media and shift the blame on Republicans… and Donald Trump. From the article:
So is Axios saying 72 percent of Americans are "hardline conservatives?" We wish that it were true, but we know that it's not. Sadly, the poll found nearly half of Democrats (43 percent) say they use a fact-checking website (e.g. FactCheck.org or Snopes.com) to verify facts compared to 30 percent of Republicans and 29 percent of independents. This means that 43 percent of Democrats, 30 percent of Republicans and 29 percent of independents remain on the Animal Farm and are having their fake news confirmed by agenda-driven fake fact-checkers. A Chick-fil-A employee goes rogue This week a Chick-Fil-A employee was said to have stepped off the reservation and performed an act of kindness that went so far as helping to save a customer's life. Given that the left often tells us that Chick-Fil-A is such a bad gay- and transgender-hating actor that its employees should be shouted at through drive-through windows and its stores boycotted and banned from college campuses and blocked from moving into leftist-governed cities like New York, this has to be fake news. But there it is at MSM.com. Seems an employee at a store in Austin, Texas was notified that a customer was choking and in distress and ran to him to perform the Heimlich maneuver, taking over for a customer who had tried but failed to help dislodge the stuck food. No word on whether the employee confirmed that the man was neither a tranny or a homo before saving his life. And the media wonder why 72 percent don't trust them to be fair Take a look at these covers from Time magazine, which now has about 16 subscribers. It tells you all you need to know about why three-fourths of Americans don't believe the MSM is a fair arbiter of news. 
Hey Axios, you paying attention? And speaking of Time… See the Time cover in the bottom row, second from the right in the above image; the one with Trump looking down at a sobbing immigrant girl? Guess what, it's (gasp) fake news. That girl was not – as the created image and accompanying story implied – separated from her mother at the U.S. border. The image of the girl became one of the most iconic images that stemmed from the mass media coverage of the media-manufactured "separation" crisis last week. Taken by Getty Images photographer John Moore, the image, was published by dozens of newspapers and magazines around the world and went viral on social media. Business Insider reports the photo was used on a Facebook fundraiser that drew more than $17 million in donations from close to half a million people for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas-based nonprofit that provides legal defense services to immigrants and refugees. But the girl's father, Denis Valera, said the girl and her mother, Sandra Sanchez, have been detained together in the Texas border town of McAllen, where Sanchez has applied for asylum, and they were not separated after being detained near the border. The Honduran deputy foreign minister confirmed Valera's version of the story. And speaking of those "unbiased" fact-checkers… Politifact has determined that a statement by Senator Ted Cruz on the separation crisis was "Mostly False" while at the same time admitting it was technically correct. What did Cruz say that caused Politifact to resort to such linguistic legerdemain? Here's his entire quote:
In its fact-check, Politifact edited out select portions of Cruz's statements. It looked only at these lines:
It then turned to several leftist immigration lawyers to decipher, and they focused on this single point from Cruz's statement:
Of course, we all know what happens when lawyers gather around a law – or even a word. As Bill Clinton famously informed us, even the word "is" has multiple definitions for lawyers. Muzaffar Chishti, a New York lawyer for the Migration Policy Institute, called Cruz's claim an "inverse interpretation" of the Flores agreement. Rick Su of the University of Buffalo School of Law told Politifact that the Trump administration made clear it wasn't in favor of releasing parents and children – which left it with the options of sending parents to prison and releasing children or sending parents to prison and sending children to child detention facilities overseen by the government. But he admitted the Cruz statement was technically correct but misleading in that it leaves the inaccurate impression that the government, by policy and law, has no choice but to separate children from parents. But of course, that's exactly what the law requires, as Cruz aid Maria Jeffrey noted to Politifact:
But Trump did have another option. It's the one used by Barack Obama. It involves keeping the "family" together by releasing them into the U.S. with an order to appear in court at a later date. But it's an order none ever followed. Newsbusters rated this PolitiFact "fact-check" as Deeply Distorted. We rate it Deeply Disturbing that so many Americans believe anything PolitiFact publishes. — Jay Baker To voice your opinion, or read more on personalliberty.com, go here. |
