America has barely put a toe into the swirling waters of the 2024 campaign for President of the United States, but already the red flashing lights are signaling trouble ahead for voters seeking facts about the race for November.
Exhibit A: Donald J. Trump wins the multi-candidate Iowa caucuses with 51% of the vote, as Ron DeSantis placed 2nd with 21% and Nikki Haley trailed in 3rd place with just 19%. Mainstream media spin? Trump’s historic margin was a yawn…Haley was “surging.” Reminds one of the 1972 “surge” of South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in Richard Nixon’s landslide victory.
Exhibit B: Trump wins New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary with 54% of the Granite State’s vote to Haley’s 43%. (This despite Haley being strongly endorsed by N.H. Governor Chris Sununu, as hype that former Chris Christie supporters would swing her way, along with the many Democrats—er, I mean, “undeclared” voters—allowed to vote in the Republican primary. Oh, and don’t forget Haley’s big money supporters like Americans for Prosperity outspending Trump 2-to-1 in TV and radio ads.) Mainstream media spin? Haley “almost” got 50% of the vote (fuzzy math: in the real world, 43% is not “almost 50%” but I digress) and besides, Trump’s victory speech was “mean.”
That, of course, presumes viewers of TV’s “news channels” actually got to see Donald Trump surrounded by jubilant supporters including Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (who was branded an “Uncle Tom” for endorsing Trump instead of Haley, who appointed him to the Senate during her term as governor).
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National news (or are they comedy) channels CNN and MSNBC both cut off coverage of Donald Trump’s victory speech midway, with smarmy suggestions that they were “protecting” viewers from Trump’s “lies”…and fact-checking his distortions about Haley, the 2020 campaign, and other issues they felt Americans needed to avoid hearing. Jake Tapper at CNN and the insufferable Rachel Maddow on MSNBC thus are the new self-appointed arbiters of what voters may or may not see as the curtain goes up on Campaign 2024. To quote the famous Cuban philosopher Ricky Riccardo, “Lucy, we in a heap o’ trouble now.”
Could dwindling subscriptions and anemic ad sales be the culprits here? Possibly. But I believe the reason for plummeting advertising and paid newspaper subscriptions can be laid squarely at the feet of left-slanted writers cranking out drivel such as the Times “news” article titled “How white and affluent drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color” or Times columnist Erika Smith who labeled my friend Larry Elder as “the black face of white supremacy” during his 2021 gubernatorial campaign in California. She added the ominous note: “You’ve been warned.”
Call me old-fashioned if you wish, but I always thought American media was supposed to present fact-based stories without progressive/leftist “advocacy journalism” censoring what we could read, hear, or view on TV. I always believed—and I still do—that average citizens should expect the truth from media outlets, rather than what is being foisted on us today.
They squeal like stuck pigs when Donald Trump calls them “fake news” but these days there’s literally not a dime’s worth of difference between The Washington Post and Pravda or between MSNBC and the Hamas short-wave broadcasts from Gaza.
So what’s a fact-thirsty news consumer to do? One answer to seek out objective news outlets like (in all modesty) the Salem Radio Network’s 24/7 SRN News broadcasts. Unlike SRN’s opinionated talk hosts, SRN News strives to present coverage that leans neither right nor left politically. And that news is 100% free to consume.
Media observer Perry Michael Simon offers another option: “It’s not like all media is unprofitable…Some newspapers and magazines have been able to maintain economic viability in the transition to digital. Some new content companies have found a receptive audience for what they do.” He adds, “the common denominator is that they offer content that enough people want, for which they are willing to pay.
But whether or not you choose to seek out news that’s free or hidden behind a paywall, 2024 is the year we all will need to accept the fact that if we want to make informed choices for President or down-ballot offices, we’re each going to need to do some heavy lifting.
Trusting MSNBC or the LA Times or Associated Press for facts is going to be the equivalent of being a chicken trusting the late Colonel Sanders to keep it informed and safe. To quote Erika Smith, “You’ve been warned.”
Tom Tradup is V.P./News & Talk Programming for Dallas-based Salem Radio Network. He can be reached at ttradup@srnradio.com
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