The media stole the 2020 presidential election, plain and simple. They did it over the course of four years by creating a caricature of Donald Trump and convincing voters that to save the country and the planet, his defeat was imperative.
They persuaded millions of voters that the president who had turned the economy into a job-creating engine, made us energy independent, secured the borders, transformed an activist judiciary, and returned sanity to American foreign policy, was a monster — a racist megalomaniac, an enemy of the environment, a bungling foreign-policy loner, and an anti-science know-nothing.
I’ve been following media coverage of campaigns since Goldwater. I worked in a newsroom for 19 years. In terms of bias, I thought I’d seen it all. I was wrong. Media assaults on Trump were wall-to-wall bias, 24/7, bias on steroids.
A survey by the Media Research Center found that between June 1 and July 31, coverage of Trump by the networks was 95% negative, while coverage of Biden was 67% positive.
The mainstream media had lies for all occasions. There was Trump the bigot (who supposedly praised neo-Confederates and inflamed racial tensions), Trump the Russian agent, Trump who refused to take the Coronavirus seriously (who called it a hoax) while 260,000 died, and Trump who refused to provide relief to the unemployed and businesses going under to punish Democrat cities and states.
All were lies, but (following Goebel’s much-quoted adage), accepted as truth by a segment of the electorate which otherwise would have been sympathetic to the Republican cause this year.
- Trump the bigot – It started during the 2016 campaign, when he said murderers and rapists were coming across our southern border. Nonsense! They were Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls. It continued with the lie (that’s now become entrenched) that Trump said there were “good people” among the white supremacists in Charlottesville. The media took his comment that there were good people on both sides of the argument over removing Confederate monuments, and turned it into an endorsement of cross-burning. And he’s yet to issue a commemorative stamp for George Floyd.
- Trump who exploits racial tensions for political gain –In the face of rioting, looting and burning that Democrat mayors refused to lift a finger to stop, Trump urged elected officials to act against urban anarchy. And what should he have done – acted like Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler who thought the riots would burn themselves out, like Joe Biden who ignored the whole thing for the first three months, like the media call bloodshed peaceful protests?
- Trump the Russian agent – It started when Trump refused to get hysterical over Putin’s interference in the 2016 election. Was Trump an agent of Putin or was Putin an agent of Trump? In fact, Moscow tried to spread confusion to discredit democracy. The idea that Moscow favored Trump because it wanted an America that was energy-independent and strong militarily is absurd on its face…