As far as corporate media are concerned, the massacre in Waukesha, Wis., on Sunday was a “Christmas parade crash.”
That’s how the attack that killed six people and injured more than 60 others is being described by ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Newsweek and others. Not an intentional attack, not a massacre allegedly committed by a violent career criminal already facing multiple felony charges, but merely a crash. The New York Times is calling it a “tragedy.”
Not to be outdone by major news outlets, The Daily Beast rushed to remind its readers that “there are no indications of any additional motive for the Waukesha killings, or any reasons to label it domestic terrorism. That didn’t stop these right-wing trolls.”
Oh no we wouldn’t want to assign ideological motives to a case too soon. But these damn right-wing trolls sure will! No mention from the Beast, of course, of the worst possible example of that in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which every major news organization gladly went along with.
Here’s the thing. The next time you read an article in the New York Times or the Atlantic, watch a bit of breaking news on MSNBC or a panel on CNN, or hear a report on NPR, your default assumption should be that what you are reading, watching, or hearing is not true. Either it is an outright falsehood, a distortion of the facts, or not the whole story. That should be your posture toward literally every piece of news you consume from corporate media from now on.
There is ample justification for such a posture. It’s justified by every single major news story in recent years — the Russia collusion hoax, the origins of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter riots, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the debate over Covid vaccines, the January 6 riot, and especially the Rittenhouse trial, to name just a few. Every one of these stories, and many more besides, were dishonestly reported by a corrupt media establishment that you should never trust again.
Consider the Rittenhouse trial. How many times in recent weeks did you hear that Rittenhouse “crossed state lines” with an “illegal firearm”? Or that his mother drove him to Kenosha, Wis., that night? Or that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist and the men he shot were black? How many times did you hear that the Kenosha riot was over the police “killing” of an “unarmed” black man, Jacob Blake?
You probably heard all of that, a lot. We all did. None of it is true. The corporate press lied incessantly about nearly every little detail of the Rittenhouse case, and it was aided in that deception by Big Tech, which has also forfeited any presumption of trust by its users.
In the immediate aftermath of the Kenosha riots last summer, Facebook proclaimed that Kyle Rittenhouse had committed “mass murder,” blocked all searches of his name, and censored all “praise or support” for him, including links to fundraising sites contributing to his defense. Eventually, fundraising sites like PayPal and GoFundMe did the same.
Facebook wasn’t alone. Before Rittenhouse’s trial, Twitter censored and suspended users who dared to say the teenager hadn’t done anything wrong and acted in self-defense. After a jury acquitted Rittenhouse on all counts, confirming that indeed he did nothing wrong and acted in self-defense, Twitter continued to censor users and suspend accounts that declared Rittenhouse’s innocence, even though it was now a matter of judgment in a court of law, not opinion or speculation.
Big Tech’s official position, long before the trial, was that Rittenhouse was guilty. For Twitter, at least, Rittenhouse remains guilty in some sense, despite his acquittal on all charges. If you wanted to post about the case on these platforms, there was only one opinion you were allowed to have.
It was the same with The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story last year. Twitter banned the Post over it, suspending its account and demanding the paper delete all tweets about the story, which turned out to be completely true, as the Post insisted it was and as Hunter’s former busines partner Tony Bobulinski confirmed at the time.
Regardless, most corporate outlets worked to suppress the story until the election was over. Only this past September did Politico admit the story was true. Yet The New York Times continued to call it “unsubstantiated” before quietly deleting the false claim amid pushback.
It is the same with nearly every major issue in every major new cycle. During the gubernatorial election in Virginia, where the influence of critical race theory on public school curricula became a flashpoint in the race, we heard over and over from corporate outlets and talking heads that, actually, critical race theory isn’t even taught in Virginia schools! Glenn Youngkin, they said, was simply lying. But of course they were the ones lying, along with Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, whose lies cost him the election.
Once you notice what is happening, it is impossible to un-see it. Just this past weekend, a shocking report by The New York Times about how Hunter Biden helped a Chinese conglomerate secure a major cobalt mine in Congo was assiduously ignored by every major news network. The networks showed zero curiosity about President Biden’s son facilitating the purchase from an American company of one of the world’s richest cobalt mines in 2016, when Joe Biden was still vice president. Instead, ABC News hyped online Black Friday deals, while CBS and NBC News focused on LeBron James’ suspension.
On and on it goes. If the media are not lying outright, they are distorting or ignoring major stories that undermine their preferred narratives. You won’t have to wait long for this to happen again. It will probably happen this week.
When it does, remember that this is what the corporate press has been doing for years now. They are not interesting in informing their readers and viewers, they are interested only in telling you what to think. That is their entire raison d’être.
And rest assured that if you do somehow end up with the wrong opinion, Big Tech will silence you.