Imagine that the mainstream press simply disappeared one day: that by a strange and miraculous turn of events, the main corporate bodies simply vanished from the face of the earth. Would the American people, and our republic, be worse off than they are now? Could we even get better? It's the kind of bad thinking that crosses one's mind when confronted with the role of mainstream journalists in fueling racial unrest in this country and actively changing public perceptions of events when those events undermine the media narrative of a supremacist nation. white who hunts her black citizens for sport.
"Journalistic malpractice" does not begin to describe the problem. What these outlets have inflicted on the nation in recent years, and especially after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, is downright criminal.
The latest outbreak of media roguery came in response Waukesha parade massacre that killed six innocent people, including an 8-year-old boy, and injured more than 40. I blame you for thinking the murder was the work of a sentient and evil SUV, and not of Darrell Brooks Jr., a black man with a long criminal record and a history of anti-white racism.
"Here's what we know so far about the sequence of events leading up to the Waukesha tragedy caused by an SUV," tweeted the Washington Post on November 24, days after the true nature of the event was established. The lead story was slightly better: Brooks didn't show up until the fifth paragraph, and throughout the paper continued to refer to the vehicle, not its driver, as the offender.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, CNN informed us that "Waukesha will hold a moment of silence" to commemorate "a week since a car went through a Christmas parade in the city." What a terrible, lousy machine. Bad car.
My favorite entry in the genre came courtesy of David Begnaud, the principal national correspondent for CBS, who tweeted on Nov. 23 that a sixth person, a child, "died in the crash of the Wisconsin parade." See the sheer determination of a network news correspondent to turn a seemingly intentional killing spree by a Black Lives Matter devotee into a mere accident - the kind of thing that sadly happens dozens of times a day across the country.
Come on: It's painfully obvious why journalists and editors, including increasingly influential social media editors, are turning to such cheap hacking tricks in front of a figure like Brooks. Man overturns in every way the story that the media, and our elites more generally, have run about race in America. As Pedro L. Gonzalez documents on his precious Substack blog,
[Brooks's] social media posts present a range of extremist views, from encouraging "eliminating whites" and enslaving them, to supporting Black Lives Matter, the Black Panther Party and the Black Jewish Israelites, a militant hate group of black supremacy. In one of his rap songs, Brooks boasted that he was a "terrorist" and a "killer in the city".
All of this is extremely uncomfortable for our ruling class. Then it needs to be airbrushed away.
It is true that the media have always, well, mediated the truth for readers and viewers. National and international newspapers were born because no one can understand what is happening in their city, much less in the country or in the world. Serving the needs of the media consumer necessarily involves shaping the daily news stack into relatively compact and, yes, interesting narratives.
Yet a clear line distinguishes this legitimate task (of curating and framing) from Pravda-style propaganda in favor of power and powerful ideologies. American corporate media crossed that line a long time ago; the shameless, supporting-DC-consensus-at-all-cost-drums for the Iraq war was one of the earliest transgressions.
Today's racial fiction is next-level stuff, as children say. It reminds me of nothing as much as the way the European media covers the crimes and terrorist attacks committed by recent migrants from the Middle East and North Africa: it is often not learned that the killer was a migrant up to the last paragraphs of history, if at all. Open borders are a priority for Europe's ruling classes, and so journalists and publishers airbrush, for example, the inconvenient fact of women being raped by "asylum seekers" in Munich.
"Follow the story wherever it takes you"? Yes, not anymore.
Consider the media coverage of Nick Sandmann, the Catholic high school student immediately classified by the media as a racist because… he smiled at an elderly Native American who was hatefully banging a drum in his face. Or Kyle Rittenhouse, who the mainstream media knew was a racist, based on exactly zero evidence. Sandmann sued his slanderers, forcing CNN and the Washington Post to settle. There are now rumors that Rittenhouse is doing the same thing, although so far its spokespersons insist there are no immediate plans.
I say give it a try, Kyle. The pockets of media owners are deep, but not infinitely. But the victims of the media should fight back as hard as possible by all legal means. "Don't joke with me, lest I hurt you" - is there any other principle governing American public life these days?