By Eh?Nonymous
In decades past when traditional media was far more prestigious, many political reporters chose not to register to vote. This had nothing to do with the unpleasantness of the whole process or a state of apathy, but because they reasoned that having any kind of dog in the race would affect their impartiality in reporting. The most notable example of this was CBS’ Walter Cronkite, the man who famously covered the Kennedy assassination as it unfolded with grace and decorum, and became widely regarded as ‘the most trusted man in America’ due to his straight-down-the-middle approach.
Sadly, things have changed. Many of us have realised it for some time, but the inherent bias and active participation in politics instead of mere reporting of traditional media had always been at least relatively subtle enough to slip past most people. The case for heavy media bias was strong, but we had never seen that obvious moment in history that would make the lopsided coverage of traditional media glaringly apparent to even the casual observer.
It seems obvious in hindsight, but it was always going to take a very loud and bombastic figure being reported on to drag the very clear socio-political agenda of traditional media outlets kicking and screaming into the sunlight like exposed vampires.
Donald Trump is of course this loud and bombastic figure. There was never going to be a subtle way for any media outlet to report on his presidential run due to his larger than life persona. This persona seemingly forced their hand, and would soon serve as a UV light exposing the previously invisible plasma of traditional media bias, king-making, vested interests, social engineering, servitude to political factions, sins of omission, and general socio-political destabilisation to millions of people all around the world who had never even given much thought to such things.
When Trump announced his presidential campaign, the average person gave him a reasonable chance of making some kind of impact. Before a single policy was announced, I think that it’s safe to say that most of us assumed that our obsession with celebrity, and the cult of personality, would at very least put Trump in a position to make a strong showing in the race for the nomination. Traditional media saw things quite differently. CNN (who still expect us to swallow their ‘expert analysis’ on the Presidential race) reported on the 9th of July 2015 that Donald Trump had less than a 1% chance of becoming president).
How did they get it so wrong? Quite simply, they didn’t. They reported what THEY wanted to eventuate. It was propaganda plain and simple in order to achieve a desired result.
Trump was a well-connected successful businessman who was making a serious run at the White House, yet he was universally ridiculed and discredited by traditional media before the first primary vote had been cast. Part of the reason for this was that Trump didn’t believe in pay for play. He bankrolled his own campaign early on. Others did not, and took sizeable donations from unusual patrons with a vested interest in them.
AOL Time Warner, the parent company of CNN donated $447,521 to the Obama campaign in 2012. They have donated over $722,416 to the Clinton campaign to date. They clearly ‘stand with her’ in anyone’s language. AOL Time Warner made no donations to any Republican candidates in either of these election cycles.
All of this stuff is out there if anyone cares to research it, but this damning political donation data isn’t what outed traditional media outlets like CNN and others as being a sinister manipulative force in the democratic process as opposed to merely reporting on it. It was their early aggressive attempts to ridicule and discredit Donald Trump that let the average American voter in on the racket. The Huffington Post refused to cover the Trump campaign in their Political section, and instead relegated coverage to the Entertainment section. Here’s what they said in their release:
“After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for President, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of the Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our entertainment section. Our reason is simple. Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”
The public went along with the jokes for a while until it became uncomfortable, and clear that genuine electoral interference by media stealth was in the works.
Then a funny thing happened. Even those who didn’t necessarily like or agree with Trump began to support him due to his anti-establishment status. He even appealed to much of the same base who were initially drawn to Bernie Sanders until it became clear that the Vermont senator had been thrown beneath the Clinton bus.
When they realised that Trump could well become President, The Huffington Post didn’t admit that they were wrong or had miscalculated. They moved the Trump coverage back into their White House 2016 section with this child-like tantrum of a postscript beneath every article about him:
“Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.”
Quite an obvious and calculated manipulation of the democracy by the Huffington Post. XYZ have added their own below to give left leaning visitors a taste of how outrageous it looks.
And surprise, surprise… who should own the Huffington Post? Their parent company just happens to be AOL Time Warner, who once again have donated a whopping $722 416 to the Clinton campaign to date.
Huff Po is essentially a faux new media arm of a very traditional big media conglomerate, which makes it even more insidious than AOL Time Warner’s other more conventional outlets. A Trojan horse into the minds of those on the left who think they’re absorbing an independent media source.
So does Huffington Post also hold Hillary to account in their reporting? I just had a look to try and find any stories on the current DNC scandal that scuttled the Sanders campaign in favour of Clinton and is so damning that DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz step down in disgrace.
It’s a big story. Potentially election-changing. Cut-and-dried nefarious House-of-Cards-type shenanigans. But no mention whatsoever of this “yuge” (to quote the Donald) political scandal on Huff Po. Just an incredibly vague piece on Sarah Silverman addressing Bernie or Bust voters dismissing them as ‘ridiculous’. The Clinton campaign remains squeaky clean at The Huffington Post. Any questions???
When framing Trump as a joke failed spectacularly for traditional media, things became serious and all the more obvious to the average Joe. It’s hard to be subtle or elegant when you’re spewing bile. Just ask any drunk girl in an expensive dress and fascinator vomiting in the ladies restroom at Randwick, or an intoxicated guy in a Hugo Boss suit regurgitating in the gents next door.
News outlets lamented that nobody was talking about this or that particular Trump scandal, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the real reason was that they were too busy filling up social media news feeds with even more dubious hit pieces on him and just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Allegations of a media conspiracy to propel Trump to the White House were perhaps the most ridiculous traditional media claims.
They were outraged that the world wasn’t making a big enough deal about the quality of Trump wines, but Hillary’s aspirations to invade Iran or guys consistently winding up dead in suspicious circumstances after dealings with the Clintons were not even on the radar for them.
To their credit, a few traditional news outlets balanced their #NEVERTRUMP hit-pieces with minor critical stories about Clinton’s handling of Benghazi and her criminally negligent e-mail scandal, but the disparity between fair or positive stories about each candidate has been astounding.
There are many traditional media news articles telegraphing Clinton’s positive attributes, but I’m still yet to read an article that has anything nice to say about Trump without taking a backhanded swipe at the nominee at some point. If you are able to find a positive Trump piece from a traditional media news source without some kind of smug angle to it, I’d encourage you to post a link below and I’ll stand corrected. I’d also encourage you to hang on to any four-leafed clovers you find while looking for it.
Fox and other conservative traditional media outlets swung conservatively toward the Republicans as expected, but Kasich and Rubio seemed to be their guys regardless of numbers. They were #NEVERTRUMP until the eleventh hour when it became obvious that Bush, Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio were lame ducks. Their coverage since has been coldly civil at best, like somebody straining to find something nice to say about someone who slept with their wife and is now their boss. They seem to be lukewarm at best in their reporting about the Republican nominee.
The reporting of both liberal and conservative leaning traditional news outlets on Trump became so blatantly venomous, disconnected from reality, and out-of-step with the silent majority that something unexpected happened. People began to get their election news from alternate online media who were prepared to give the Republican nominee fair coverage, and weren’t afraid to go digging for skeletons in the Clinton closet.
The clear illegitimacy of traditional media legitimised new media websites, podcasts, and online channels who were prepared to offer more even-handed coverage almost overnight. Even websites with an obvious man-crush on the Donald still offered a clearer picture of what was going on than traditional media, who still seemed hesitant to accept reality as it stood even after Trump had clinched the nomination.
Most interesting were the user comments below stories about Trump on the websites and Facebook pages of traditional media outlets. In the first few months the comments predictably parroted the gist of these articles as intended. But now the majority of commenters seem to be calling these outlets on their blatant bias.
These aren’t all Trump tragics. Far from it. Many are disenfranchised Sanders supporters, or garden-variety s***stirrers. But the traditional media axe to grind against the Republican nominee has become so overt, so obvious, that it begs to be trolled. So troll they do.
It’s now clear that traditional media isn’t merely misinformed or out of touch. More insidiously, it’s now abundantly clear that the role of traditional media is not to impartially report on politics, but to be politically active and highly influential in the democratic process. They have proven in no uncertain terms their power to lobby both financially and in their selective reporting for a desired result.
The public however, have woken up and are on to them. Trump-friendly sites like Breitbart are seeing unprecedented growth, while confidence in traditional media is in decline. People are more suspicious about what they see, read, and hear from traditional media than ever. The very fact that you are looking at an article on XYZ is proof of this.
History may well remember Donald Trump as the catalyst that heralded the real beginning of the end for the way traditional media operates, and the contempt that it shows for those that consume it.
It took a man with all of the subtlety of a bull in a china shop to expose the corrupt stranglehold of traditional media. Trump has exposed the true colours of less-than-transparent left- and right-wing traditional media power brokers alike, and proved that he didn’t need them or their political donations.
The canary of traditional media integrity has died, and everybody has seen it. The strongest evidence that traditional media is in danger of dying out is that this larger-than-life character looks set to become the first President in U.S. history to get there without their blessing or even their tolerance.
The “sky is falling” approach has backfired spectacularly. The average person is no longer inclined to believe anything negative they read about Trump, even if it’s true. Traditional media have unwittingly Teflon-coated the Republican candidate by crying wolf a few thousand times too often.
A genuine career-ending political scandal could fall into the laps of traditional media tomorrow, and a jaded public would simply dismiss it as just another tired hit piece on Donald Trump.
The candidate has proven that he no longer has use for traditional media. Nowadays you’re more likely to see Trump interviewed on Infowars than CNN or Fox News. And unless it begins to morally channel the spirit of Walter Cronkite, we’ll no longer have much use for traditional media either.
XYZ Editor’s note: Hillary Clinton is an architect of the catastrophic destabilisation of several sovereign nations and the founding mother of ISIS, and has openly expressed her ambition to invade Iran. She is also a racist who recently made jokes about ‘Coloured People Time’ and calls Jews ‘Stupid Kikes’ while her staffers refer to the Mexican electorate as the ‘Taco Bowl’.
Eh?nonymous was a thoroughly repellent unemployed social justice warrior until a one in a million glitch in his Facebook account affected the algorithms in his news feed, omitting posts from his much loved left leaning Huffington Post and I F**king Love Science, and inexplicably replacing them with centrist and conservative newsfeed items that slowly dragged him kicking and screaming into the light beyond the safe space that Mr. Zuckerberg had so carefully constructed for him. It’s a long road to recovery, but every Mark Steyn share he sees in his newsfeed is like another day clean from social justice addiction.
Photo by Gage Skidmore 