The Patriot Post® · Americans Agree: MSM a 'Major Threat' to Democracy
In an interesting poll put out by The New York Times/Siena, the respondents were asked if they thought democracy was under threat and, if so, what was the biggest threat. Ironically enough, right, left, and center all agree that the mainstream media is the biggest threat to democracy.
Fifty-nine percent of respondents believe that the mainstream media is a major threat and 25% think it’s a minor threat. This is not hard to imagine. If you’re a conservative, your distrust of the mainstream media is grounded in its decades-long descent into lying and colluding with Democrat politicians. Then there’s Crossfire Hurricane and the Steele dossier that no one in the mainstream media even questioned but rather peddled as incontrovertible truth, solely to gain ratings by damaging Donald Trump.
Another perfect example of the media feeding the country a narrative instead of the unvarnished truth would be the George Floyd riots, also known as the Summer of Rage. Candace Owens, in her documentary “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold,” calls out the media for feeding the lie that allowed Black Lives Matter to extort “dollars from white America” by “using black emotion and black pain.” No help was offered. No truth was told. Instead, blacks were exploited for media gain.
Leftists like those at The Washington Post believe that Republicans are distrustful of the media because “the media’s insistence on the reality of what happened in 2020 is at odds with what Republicans want to believe, which then increases skepticism about the media.” In other words, the Post blames former President Trump and January 6 in an argument akin to saying a rape victim had it coming because of her clothing.
As far as election integrity and the mainstream media, Trump — whose trademark is hyperbole — is perhaps overstating that the election was stolen. However, there is a healthy skepticism among Republicans who are concerned that the election rules being unilaterally changed for COVID, including increased bulk-mail balloting, affected the election results. After all, some of the critical swing states were won by Joe Biden by very slim margins — about 43,000 votes across three states decided the victor. The mainstream media has done its darnedest to distract from these concerns by pointing to J6 as the trump card.
The interesting point that this poll clearly demonstrates is that the country is tired of being fed narratives instead of being told the news in an unbiased way. The poll also asked respondents how they would solve the problem of threatened democracy. The majority, 84%, said we can fix our democracy through our laws and institutions, and 41% wanted to solve it democratically by improving laws, processes, and general systems.
As political pundit Ben Shapiro writes: “Why precisely are so many Americans worried about the state of democracy? They’re worried that their political opponents will threaten the institutions they cherish. Forty-seven percent of voters declare former President Donald Trump a ‘major threat to democracy,’ and 39% declare President Joe Biden to be the same. But shockingly, the institution they blame most for threatening democracy is the mainstream media… Perhaps that’s the biggest takeaway from all this data: that Americans don’t hate each other, but they’re being polarized by a media determined to divide them from one another, whipping up madness where mere concern would suffice. And what’s more, Americans can feel it. All of which means that sanity may reign once again, so long as Americans reconnect with each other rather than believing everything they see on the news.”
No wonder Trump rightly called the Leftmedia “the true enemy of the people.”
Americans have the hope of a future with a thriving democratic republic, if only we can learn how to talk to one another and tune out the noise that is the mainstream media.