by Paul Gottfried
After reading my commentary about my self-inflicted ordeal of listening to NPR for a month, a friend noted this station’s “reports” bear no resemblance to “objective reality.” Can so many Americans, asked my correspondent, believe that the U.S. is full of oppressed transgendered who must take up arms to protect themselves against “anti-trans rhetoric?” Do NPR listeners really think American blacks are suffering from “systemic white racism,” and that only increased government control can protect them from being shot on the streets by white racists?
Apparently, some people are convinced by what the MSM is feeding them. About half of those surveyed in a recent Reuter/Ipsos poll, including 25% of self-identified Republicans, think, for instance, that Hunter Biden was appropriately charged by our Department of Justice. These respondents have announced that neither Hunter’s sinister behavior nor his father’s possible involvement in his business deals will influence their vote in next year’s presidential race.
According to about half these respondents, the deal Hunter reached with prosecutors for his “two misdemeanors,” was presumably no big deal. These voters may also think that “the Big Guy” was not entangled in his son’s money laundering or in his shakedown of foreign governments. The same respondents may also doubt that there was anything incriminating on Hunter’s laptop or that the FBI did anything wrong by not treating its contents seriously.
Despite what looks like a disastrous presidency and his failing cognitive abilities, Biden is still running neck and neck with his main Republican rivals for the presidency. According to the latest NBC poll, Biden enjoys a four-point lead over Trump and the Democrats hold a two-point generic lead over the GOP for Congress. This leads me to ask: Is roughly half the country disregarding the information that I have been listening to about Hunter’s felonies and Joe’s patent involvement in his son’s misdeeds? Do people honestly think that neither Hunter’s laptop nor the whistleblowers’ testimony should be considered when measuring the Biden family’s transgressions? And were all the efforts to show that Joe had a hand in his son’s criminality just driven by Republican hysteria?
I don’t dismiss the presence of committed woke leftists among those who are rallying to the administration. Nor would I deny that there are people (and I have known such types) who imagine this country, outside of certain coastal areas, is inhabited by psychopathic bigots and violent Christian fanatics. Flyover country is putatively teeming with future recruits for an American Nazi Party or an American version of the Spanish Inquisition. Some voting blocs are, moreover in near perfect sync with the Left, e.g., unmarried college-educated women, who tend to repeat whatever the MSM is featuring on any given day.
But there are lots of apparently normal Americans who continue to say that Donald Trump is a “Russian stooge,” that tens of millions of transgendered children are afraid of discussing their need for a sex change operation, and that Hunter Biden is being framed by Republican congressmen. These apparent normies also insist that Ron DeSantis is censoring books in Florida, as I learned from an elderly lady at a retirement village who had “fled” DeSantis’s fascist-ruled state. Many who support the Left may not fit our conservative stereotype about leftist nutjobs and snobbish elitists. But these folks do listen to the MSM version of reality, and it is hard to understate the effect of this brain-laundering.
I doubt that I’m the only one who has noticed that TV movies and TV advertisements feature blacks and gays in vast disproportion to their actual representation in the country. We are also bombarded by movies that depict identifiable Christians, who are shown to be white and who speak with drawls as loathsome beings. In what now passes for TV entertainment, white male heterosexuals are typically shown in an inferior social, and/or cognitive relationship to members of other groups.
From this bogus entertainment the viewer can then flick over to the MSM, where the major news stories are Donald Trump’s indictments and the ongoing investigations of the former president’s financial holdings – somewhere. No mention of issues from these sources about the Hunter Biden investigation, which now involves his father, Merrick Garland, the FBI, and IRS. Those things are not happening for major networks or the national press, except as examples of “Republican retribution” against innocent public servants and a former cocaine addict who is still bravely fighting his addiction. It is ridiculous to pretend that such coordinated leftist propaganda doesn’t shape public perceptions.
The media has massaged reality so cleverly that our corrupt, inept chief executive has not gone down in the polls since the onset of the present congressional investigations. But the Republican Speaker who authorized them is languishing at a 27% approval rating. If we’re now seeing examples of media control of reality, just wait for the presidential campaign to really get going. Then “fake news” will be drowning us every time we turn on the boob tube or open up the Washington Post.
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Paul Gottfried is a contributor to American Greatness.
Photo “Hunter Biden” by Ben Stanfield. CC BY-SA 2.0.
