The Danger of Media Bias - Frank Vernuccio #4858
In a nation ruled by the people, the media and educators play a vital role. Voters need unbiased reporting. and the historic knowledge to place news into context. That reality makes the leftist bias of most news, academic, and entertainment outlets deeply troubling. It’s not just bias that is disturbing. Major stories that do not fit in with progressive views are frequently ignored. Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s recent bizarre statement that blacks who vote Republican aren’t really black is a prime example. The media didn’t make much of the comment, despite the fact that both the historic and current record of the Democratic Party is hardly conducive to black interests. It’s hardly mentioned that it is the party that started a Civil War to protect slavery, then pursued segregation in the Reconstruction era. It is the party that idolized Margaret Sanger, who staunchly advocated abortion explicitly to reduce the number of black babies being born. Its “Great Society” economic policies, perhaps inadvertently, created economic conditions that delayed blacks from moving into the middle class. An educational system overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats refuses to teach those facts to students. The bias makes reasonable debate politically risky; conservative viewpoints are inevitably portrayed as cruel. Consider the new third rail of political discourse: Those who criticize any spending program produced in the name of COVID, no matter how pointless, ineffective, excessive, corrupt, or even wholly ridiculous, will be castigated as heartless. America urgently required quick, clean legislation that simply provided cash to those in dire need. But Democrats loaded Covid bills with items that benefited them politically. The media ignored the scandal, the same way they continue to ignore the inexcusable refusal of Nancy Pelosi to allow the House to return to work on a timely basis at a time of dire national need. Consider the debate over how to distribute COVID relief funds. For America to return to economic normalcy, businesses need to be able to reopen and hire back employees. Federal legislation provides $600 weekly benefits to those who are out of work, in addition to state unemployment funds. It’s a generous benefit. Some out of work recipients are now making more than they did when they were working. But those benefits are unaffordable for the nation in the long run. Our grandchildren will be paying off that debt. Businesses that have been forced to close need to be able to reopen, rehire, and pay taxes. But attempts to funnel assistance to them is portrayed as tilting towards capitalists at the expense of workers—sheer nonsense. That logic doesn’t fit the progressive preconceptions of the media elites, so discussion of it is not widely covered. President Trump campaigned in 2016 against China’s growing monopoly on vital industries and its increasing hostility. He was prophetic, but the media ignores that. In January of 2020, he shut down travel to the U.S. from China. Democrats portrayed him as “racist and xenophobic.” In large, progressive-run cities, a failure to timely acknowledge the COVID threat led to disaster. New York became the worldwide epicenter of the disease, due to the refusal of the hard-left mayor and his clueless health commissioner to acknowledge the threat. On an almost a daily basis, the city’s mayor and his state’s governor absurdly blame the White House for the mistakes made by city hall and the governor’s mansion. The reality that Governor Cuomo’s deadly decision to place COVID patients in nursing home, causing vast numbers of needless deaths, receives little more than a shrug from the national media. As the 2020 presidential campaign moves forward, Democrats nonsensically seek to place blame on the White House for the spread of COVID. They ignore explicit evidence that China maliciously, negligently, or both is solely responsible. They take that position because to not do so would be to admit that they have been wrong all along, and that candidate and then President Trump made the right call. You will rarely see that analysis reported.