Sometimes you have to get away from home to get a whiff of fresh air and do some unconventional thinking. I took a month off recently and fled the oppressive Florida heat and humidity for Wyoming and Montana where nighttime lows were mostly in the 40’s and daytime highs in the high 70’s-low 80’s.
Equally impressive was the natural rocky mountain natural beauty and the fact that when I had to socially distance myself by donning a face covering (mine was a red/white/blue “Keep America Great” garment), friendly people would come up, smile and give me a thumbs up or tell me they loved my mask. Some GenZers and younger Millennials gave me the evil eye, but that is what their college education has taught them to do to anything that smacks of conservativism. I had a neighbor across from me who, when she saw my KAG mask, went inside and reappeared wearing a head-to-toe “Trump-2020” outfit. More American flags were proudly displayed from homes than I has ever seen before.
Despite this conservative breath of fresh air during my four weeks in the upper Rockies, the media was conducting a relentless, full-frontal assault on Trump and conservative ideals. Like you, I was barraged with MSM pronouncements of the unstoppable Biden and his new, divine vice-presidential running mate, Kamala “I’ve single-handedly made California the @#*thole it is today” Harris. People went out of their way to display their support and approval of my KAG mask despite Trump’s media-manufactured and spun presidential approval ratings hovering in the high 30’s and equally misleading public opinion polling allegedly proving the demise of our President and our conservative government falling way behind soporific Joe Biden.
My Montana respite permitted me to complete a close reading of Tim Groseclose’s stunning book, “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.” He was the featured guest on the June 22, 2020 edition of Mark Levin’s “Life, Liberty and Levin” show back in July. Groseclose boldly states, then backs up with strong empirical data the fact that journalists fail to give us a representative sample of viewpoints in day-to-day their reporting. Because of their own leftist beliefs and the corrupt industry in which they ply their trade, journalists are more likely to report facts and statistics that liberals want you to learn and less likely to report facts and statistics that conservatives want you to learn. This is his “distortion theory of media bias” wherein a typical presidential election, only about 7 percent of D.C. news correspondents vote for Republicans.
We have seen prima facia evidence of this progressive media step too far with the recent resignation of New Yawk Times opinion editor James Bennet and the subsequent resignation of the Times’ Bari Weiss, where she stated, “But the lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially in this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
The sad state of journalism today is that they don’t give Putz-litzer Prizes to writers of stories that represent anything with a whiff of conservativism. Instead, radical excrement like the Times’ 1619 Project is elevated to journalism’s lofty pinnacle for every newsroom and news jerk to emulate. It is not unlike awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. Will the last conservative journalist kindly turn off the lights when (s)he is finally given the boot out the newsroom door?
Even well-respected former news executives abhor journalism’s hard left turn. As Van Gordon Sauter, president of CBS News back in 1982-83 and 1986, opined recently in the Wall Street Journal, “The highly influential daily newspapers in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Boston are now decidedly liberal. On the home screen, the three broadcast network divisions still have their liberal tilt. Two of the three leading cable news sources are unrelentingly liberal in their fear and loathing of President Trump.” I suspect Sauter was being somewhat politic with his remarks.
Two years ago, Pew Research did a study of the partisan divide in the news media and found that a 44-percentage-point gap between Democrat and Republican support for the watchdog role of the media (82% vs. 38% respectively), along with a 47-point difference last year, was the largest measured by Pew Research Center in the more than three decades the question has been asked. This partisan divide is palpable and the MSM is overwhelmingly responsible for it.
My recent correspondence with Tim Groseclose, confirms his agreement with my assessment that the mainstream media if that is possible, have become even more leftist since the data for his book were collected more than a decade ago. He ends with the conclusion that “My results show that if the media weren’t so successful at distorting political values, then the average American would hold similar views.” This consequence mirrors what Bruce Thornton in Frontpage alliteratively terms the “lunge to the lunatic left.”
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