Although President Trump’s comment about the media being the enemy has caused a lot of outrage in the media, the general comment about the liberal media being the greatest enemy of the United States has been around for a number of years.
The real conflict is that liberal journalism wants to claim that it is objective, but at the same time the liberal media openly states that it is in the business of shaping the public opinion. You can’t do both simultaneously.
Deliberately shaping public opinion sounds very much like “propaganda” if you think about it.
There are too many examples to enumerate of the media attempting to shape the public’s perception, but let’s name a few:
Illegal immigrants are called “undocumented immigrants” in an attempt to hide the fact that they’re here illegally. Illegal immigrants are often called simply “immigrants” in an attempt to conflate them with immigrants who are here legally. The “we are a nation of immigrants” meme is meant to gloss over the fact that any reasonable person differentiates between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants.The Herald published a poll from the “non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation” without noting that the Kaiser Foundation was instrumental in helping pass the ObamaCare law by publishing a series of very questionable polls. This is advocacy, and the facts of the story were not objective or complete. An illegal edict from the Obama administration favoring transgender people was called a “protection” without mentioning its illegality. No news story, that I can recall, has ever objectively examined both sides of the climate change issue. The Herald simply publishes pro-climate-change articles, usually of the doomsday genre. This doesn’t even get into the issues of “gatekeeping,” selective coverage, and so on.Is the liberal media the “enemy” of the United States? Maybe, maybe not ... but advocacy and deceptive journalism are certainly not the reasons the U.S. Constitution gives special protections to the press.
Try objective and fair reportage and I suspect more people will subscribe.
Mike Sigman
Durango
