The Patriot Post® · 'Election Denier' Is the New Media Talking Point

By Nate Jackson ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/88493-election-denier-is-the-new-media-talking-point-2022-05-19

Perhaps it’s nothing more than the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, otherwise known as the frequency illusion. Once you notice something for the first time, you start to notice it everywhere. But in the mainstream media reporting on Tuesday’s primaries, we started noticing a term that we immediately surmised would start showing up everywhere: “election denier.” Sure enough, it’s the new hotness.

This is hardly an exhaustive list, but it will suffice to make the point:

“Election deniers thrive,” says The New York Times. “Election denier wins,” according to headlines at CNN, the Associated Press, and People Magazine. UK media is no different, with the Guardian likewise using the term. Not satisfied with that bias, NBC News went even further, decrying the “Far-right election denier…”

Yet just as we suspected, the term didn’t suddenly appear on Wednesday. Taxpayer-funded PBS was headlining about an “election denier” three weeks ago, ABC News used the term a month ago, and taxpayer-funded NPR employed it back in early March. We bet a video montage of TV talkingheads saying those words would get pretty lengthy.

Mark Alexander launched The Patriot Post in 1996 to combat exactly this megaphone bias in the Leftmedia and, nearly 26 years later, it’s sometimes still astounding that the same Democrat talking points so thoroughly permeate the mainstream press. Just imagine for a moment what the political landscape would look like if media outlets were even-handed in their coverage.

The Democrats’ great hope for 2022 is to foment fear of Donald Trump and his dangerous supporters. Republicans, it should go without saying, shouldn’t help them. The January 6 Capitol riot was a shameful event in part because it did just that — gave Democrats two years of political fodder with which to scare voters who consume too much mainstream media.

It also makes talking about 2020 election fraud a mixed bag. Was there fraud in 2020? Absolutely, and perhaps determinative in some states. We may never know for sure — even more so since discussion of it is suppressed on social media and “fact-checked” by mainstream journalists disgracefully uninterested in committing actual journalism regarding what actually happened in 2020.

The partisan fight over 2020 has driven the parties further apart and toward nominating more populist pugilists. Doug Mastriano, the winner of Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary and the subject of most of those “election denier” attacks, is a great example. He’s more obsessed with voting machines than he should be, and he cavorted with conspiracy theorists on the campaign trail. He was also in DC on January 6. But he would be a better governor than outgoing Democrat Tom Wolf or Democrat nominee Josh Shapiro.

Remember that it was Shapiro, currently the state’s attorney general, who pronounced ahead of the 2020 election, “If all the votes are added up in PA, Trump is going to lose.” Trump supporters were appalled as they then watched the former president’s 700,000-vote lead on election night evaporate in the wee hours and following days after the election, so they could be forgiven for thinking Shapiro had already decided the result. Is it “election denial” to think that was fishy?

If it is, then the Leftmedia is guilty as charged. The Washington Post, for example, which spent virtually Trump’s entire term on the stolen 2016 election beat, says giving Mastriano “significant influence” over Pennsylvania’s elections is “worrying experts already fearful of a democratic breakdown around the 2024 presidential contest.” If Mastriano wins this year and the Republican presidential candidate wins Pennsylvania in 2024, will The Washington Post and its Leftmedia echo chamber consistently condemn the inevitable “election deniers” on the Left?

On a final note, it’s worth highlighting that 81 of 84 Trump-endorsed candidates have so far won their primaries. Some see that as a sign of Trump’s influence within the party, which it surely is, but it could also be argued that more Republican candidates have learned to connect with voters the way Trump did and are winning as a result. That includes connecting with a lot of folks who think the 2020 election process and result stunk to high heaven and that something ought to be done to restore election integrity.