America has a “Fact”, “Reality” and “Media” problem

We’ve seen the clips.  We know these people.  Some are in our own families. They are thoroughly disinformed. They know literally nothing about anything.

And they vote.

I constantly ask myself 1) How did people get this way and 2) What in the world can we do about it?

The one thing these people have in common — is that they’ve completely lost all trust in the Mainstream Media.  You can’t argue with them using facts — because most of those actual facts come from the Mainstream Media.  So those facts are automatically suspect.  They are automatically uncredible.  They can’t be trusted.

Arguing is pointless because they won’t accept anything you have to say.  They don’t care how many courts have thrown out their ridiculous ideas about the 2020 election.  They don’t care how many court cases — civil or criminal — that Donald Trump loses. He lost Trump U, he lost the Trump Charities, he lost the E. Jean Carroll rape case, he’s going to lose the Business Fraud case, he going to lose all of them.

It doesn’t matter.

They don’t care about all the verified evidence that — yes — Russia did attack and influence the 2016 election and the investigation into all that was totally legitimate. “Russia Russia Russia” wasn’t a hoax and it wasn’t a “witchhunt.”

They’re living in an alternate reality. A world of delusions. And it’s exactly where certain people want them to be.

Mainstream media has its problems.  They have giant blind spots.  They are very haughty about what they think you ought to know.  They engage in far too much “analysis” and “opinion” than doing basic bread and butter reporting and they don’t keep a clear bright line between opinion and fact reporting.

As much as it’s wrong to blindly trust the mainstream media — which almost no one does, — it’s even more wrong to blindly distrust them.

They do report the truth, they just might not report the entire truth. They don’t know what they don’t know — and so they don’t report it.

They do engage in pushing “Narratives.”  They are impacted by globalist and corporate concerns because they are nearly all owned by major corporations.

News, at least originally, was supposed to be a public service.  The FCC only required local stations to include News programming to inform the public on current events.  In its purest state News programming should be a cost center.  It shouldn’t include advertising, it should be just. the. facts.

Corporate interests mean that News has to make money.  They have to have commercials — which are paid for by other corporations, who now have a lever to influence what is and isn’t covered by the program — they have be “Sexy” and “saucy” will compelling stories you can’t look away from. 

It leads if it bleeds.

We move from informative fact-based reporting to sensationalism, disaster and tragedy porn.  24-7 broadcasts of weather events, natural disasters and manmade wars.  Yes, media bias is a real thing — but the bias isn’t for Democrats, it’s for Corporations.

The realities of commerce have changed how news is packaged and delivered and nearly all news outlets and agencies battle with these conflicting forces of trying to be accurate and truthful while also pulling eyeballs with sexy graphics, imagery and compelling topics.

All of these complaints can be placed at the feet of Mainstream media outlets from the Major Networks to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.

But Fox is a different animal, aren’t they?

Fox is intended to the the other side of the story.  It openly advocates for the GOP and Conservatives.  It promotes their narratives under the theory that it has to be the voice of the right because all the rest of the media is the voice of the “Left.”

However, the claim that Mainstream Media is “on the left” as many of us here know — is a total crock.

The Mainstream Media is not the tool of the Left.  They are not the voice of Democrats.  We know that they hardly highlight or focus on Democratic priorities at all.  They hardly cover speeches made by the Democratic President.  They hardly cover the bill passed by Democrats in the House, they hardly cover anything that Democrats are doing or saying at all.

Far more often, in order to appear “neutral” they report on every little thing that Republicans do and say. They constantly report on Trump.  They constantly report on Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Bobert, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, James Comer et cetera ad nauseam. They get constant coverage.

They’re endlessly talking about how old Biden is —  when Trump is only 2.5 years younger —  and how Democrats don’t have a “message” as if “Democracy” rather than “Open Naked Fascism” simply isn’t enough.

The battle against the biases requires media literacy, which has now become part of the curriculum of California Schools.

Pushing back against the surge of misinformation online, California will now require all K-12 students to learn media literacy skills — such as recognizing fake news and thinking critically about what they encounter on the internet.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last month signed Assembly Bill 873, which requires the state to add media literacy to curriculum frameworks for English language arts, science, math and history-social studies, rolling out gradually beginning next year. Instead of a stand-alone class, the topic will be woven into existing classes and lessons throughout the school year.

“I’ve seen the impact that misinformation has had in the real world — how it affects the way people vote, whether they accept the outcomes of elections, try to overthrow our democracy,” said the bill’s sponsor, Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Democrat from Menlo Park. “This is about making sure our young people have the skills they need to navigate this landscape.”

And then on Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Dailywire, and Turning Point USA it’s that much worse. On those programs, the Right-wing gets SUPER coverage.  Their main argument is that “everyone on Mainstream Media is lying to you”, but we’re not. Exceot they are very obviously and they do it constantly and brazenly.

The top-rated show on Fox, The Five regularly features four conservates and one liberal.

This is their idea of “Balance” —  4 against 1.

But then again Jessica Tarlov, who has a Masters in Public Policy,  a Masters in Political Science and a Doctorate in Political Science and Government, usually can handle the 4 numbskulls they have pitted against her, led by Judge Boxwine, ex-MTV VJ Kennedy, Jesse the Grinning Goober and Greg the unfunny not comedian Gutfield.

Every once in a while, she gets in a zinger, but it makes no dent at all on the MAGA faithful.

It’s “debate” by ambush, with the Four pontificating on Right-wing nonsense then constantly interrupting Jessica when she tries to make a substantive factual point.

It’s a farce.

It’s not news, it’s theater.  It’s a game of “Smash the Liberal” with Jessica playing the Washington Generals to their Harlem Globetrotters.  Spinning the ball behind her back and dunking on her while she sputters in her nerdy glasses.

And anything worthwhile she has to say is easily dismissed because — she has a squeaky voice.  And who wants to listen to that?

Fox has the pretense of “Balance” only because their Daytime hosts tend — slightly — to try and do “straight news” with a minimum of spin.  But even that slim veneer has grown thinner and thinner over the years as shown by former Fox Host Shep Smith.

Fox News lost in their suit with Dominion, paying out $787.5 Million for Defamation.  The discovery from the suit showed that many Fox hosts — particularly Maria Bartiromo — knowingly lied on air about election theft.

They got caught lying in plain daylight but they treat it like it didn’t happen and since their viewers don’t watch anything else — because they’ve been evangelized not to trust any of it — they can easily get away with that deception.

They lied about the election and Dominion, but Fox doesn’t have to correct the record, they don’t have to fix what they broke —  they can just keep on lying as former Fox employee Allyson Camerota explains.

When former Fox Primetime Host Tucker Carlson was sued for libel — his lawyers literally argued that no one should take anything he says seriously as their defense.

When Tucker Carlson says on his show “[r]emember the facts of the story; these are undisputed” no reasonable person would believe that he was about to state facts. At least, that was Tucker Carlson’s own argument in defending himself from a libel suit.

That argument convinced U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, who dismissed a lawsuit brought by model and actress Karen McDougal. McDougal sued for defamation, alleging Carlson baselessly told his audience she was extorting the President. President Trump allegedly paid $150,000 to help keep quiet a year-long affair with the former Playboy model.

[…]

According to Judge Vyskocil, “Fox persuasively argues . . . that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer arrives with an appropriate amount of skepticism about the statements he makes.” She doesn’t stop there, writing that “[w]hether the Court frames Mr. Carlson’s statements as exaggeration, non-literal commentary, or simply bloviating for his audience, the conclusion remains the same—the statements are not actionable.”

Judge Vyskocil also pointed out that Carlson said “sounds like” prior to saying the word extortion, which “would put any reasonable viewer on notice that Carlson himself doubts the veracity of the source of these statements and that the listener should as well.” President Trump appointed Judge Vyskocil to the bench in 2019.

No reasonable person would believe that he was stating facts.

And that defense worked, the Judge dismissed the case and threw it out of court.

Things are even worse on OAN and Newsmax.  But these are the only networks that basically 30% of the country listens to.  Plus talk radio, plus “doing their own research” of Facebook, 8Chan, Reddit and many other rabbit holes where insane conspiracies are the norm.

Especially on Facebook.

By the time a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, fueled by far-right conspiracies and lies about a stolen election, a group of researchers at New York University had been compiling Facebook engagement data for months.

The NYU-based group, Cybersecurity For Democracy, was studying online misinformation — wanting to know how different types of news sources engaged with their audiences on Facebook. After the events of Jan. 6, researcher Laura Edelson expected to see a spike in Facebook users engaging with the day’s news, similar to Election Day.

But Edelson, who helped lead the research, said her team noticed a troubling phenomenon.

“The thing was, most of that spike was concentrated among the partisan extremes and misinformation providers,” Edelson told NPR’s All Things Considered. “And when I really sit back and think about that, I think the idea that on a day like that, which was so scary and so uncertain, that the most extreme and least reputable sources were the ones Facebook users were engaging with, is pretty troubling.“

All actually authoritative and credible sources have been discredited — not the media nor the government is trust worthy, it’s all a scam by Dread Deep State Pirates— therefore the gap is filled by people willing to promote and suggest the wildest most fantastic ideas.

Everything is being controlled secretly by the Rothchildes and the Astors.  The Great Reset is coming to steal your freedom, and your money, or something. Jewish Space Lasers are setting wildfires in the desert. All the secrets can be unlocked using the numerological magic of Gematria.  And Q has all the other answers.

These people take their cues from podcasters like Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Prager U, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh most of which is actually paid for by corporate globalists like the Mercers, the Wilks, the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson and Pete Thiel.

As much as people have fainting spells over the massive influence of George Soros, the Kochs and the Wilks are much more damaging. 

Through their various outlets, people like the Kochs and Wilks promote an Anti-LGBTQ agenda. They push for book banning and anti-CRT legislation.  They push doubt against Climate Change.  They promote the idea that free-thinking women are “dangerous” and “destructive.” They push the “Stolen election” narrative. The “Great Replacement” and “Invasion at the Border” narrative.

Oh yeah, and “Cancel culture.”

Nearly everything that comes dribbling out of the mouths of your average MAGA, has been laundered and marinated through an outlet funded by the Koch, Wilks, Mercers and Murdoch families. It’s not that they aren’t informed, it’s who they are informed by.

None of this is an accident, it’s all part of a well-funded, strategic media attack by right-wing Billionaires over the last several decades.  These people are deliberately pushing hard-right falsehoods through their media outlets — and their legislation mills like ALEC — while the Mainstream media remains flat-footed and clueless at combating all this disinformation.

We shouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised by many Americans spouting deluded nonsense when asked about current events — they’ve been deliberately strategically disinformed.

It’s all part of the plan.

And we need a way to fight back.

Join me the belly of the Beast at my Facebook Group Army For Truth where we face, fact-check and occasionally troll MAGAs for fun and entertainment.

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