Media Bias - A Rumination On Ruination

 Media bias is real.  It has been measured in the past and it continues to be proven on a regular basis.  Project Veritas, in a tremendous bit of undercover reporting, got a CNN producer to admit that they had altered their news coverage to make Donald Trump look worse and Joe Biden look better.  Their intent was to alter the results of the 2020 Presidential election.  

It looks to me like they were successful.

A few weeks before that, CBS's 60 Minutes program offered some fake news as real news by attempting to paint Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as being in some way corrupt in his administration's deployment of the Covid vaccines.  60 Minutes lied.

What brings me to this topic today is how the illicit bias of our mainstream media is helping to undermine American civilization.

I watched it for years.  My dad would frequently go off on a rant about Donald Trump.  Sometimes he was right.  But more often than not he was basing his thoughts on his continual media diet of CNN along with occasional pieces from CBS, NBC, etc.  At no point did he encounter any media personality offering a dissenting opinion.

I'm not sure if it makes me sad or glad that dad wasn't around to find out that he was sold the fiction of the Trump/Russia allegations.

I am sad to see that it never ends.  The policies of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo undeniably resulted in tens of thousands of senior citizens dying due to Covid-19.  His administration lied about those deaths for months.  Yet the mainstream media lionizes Gov. Cuomo as being a marvelously successful governor.  Parenthetically, the administration of Michigan's Governor Gretchen Whitmer followed similar regulatory policies with reasonably similar results.

The same media portrays Ron DeSantis as being an absolute failure with respect to Covid-19.

The data tells a much different story.  As of February 15th, Florida's deaths due to Covid on a per capita basis were below the national average.  At the very least, in the middle of the pack.  Michigan ranked a bit higher.  A bunch of northeastern, high-density states had the worst outcomes.

But this isn't the story that you get from our mainstream media.  Instead, we get a highly distorted narrative where reporters commit verbal contortionism to create the impression that Democrat governors have all the correct policies while Republican governors have all the wrong policies.  So-called "red" states are presented as if people are dying in the streets.

The truth is more complex and a bit nuanced.  It is also true that attempting to fit any reporting on Covid into a strictly "Democrat vs. Republican" narrative is impossible if the media is committed to reporting the facts.  Some Democrats had good policies and some had bad ones.  The same is true for Republicans. 

If they are instead committed to acting as agents of propaganda, if they have taken a political side within the American culture, then the reporting of facts is no longer of concern.

And the ruination of American civilization lies dead ahead like the iceberg waiting on the Titanic.