By Rob Meyne
- April 12, 2022
- 3-min read
There are countless times, in any given day, you are likely to hear references to “two Americas.” Depending on the speaker, issue, and occasion, one person may not even be picturing the same two Americas as another.
Americans get their information from different sources and in ways that didn’t exist not that long ago. Whatever you presume to be a “fact” depends on where you get news, who you trust, and what they believe.
People also believe something a friend or family member tells them more easily than information from another source. Whether it is true has nothing to do with it. Countless Americans think Donald Trump said, “Nazis and white supremacists are fine people” or that a new bill in Florida prohibits people from saying the word “gay,” or that Republican-sponsored state laws restrict voting rights of black Americans. None of these three beliefs is true. But people have heard it and assume it is true.
The digital age has increased the amount of information we can access, but its reliability isn’t what it once was. Most people don’t have the time, interest, or expertise to check key facts in every story they come across. It is understandable. People are busy.
In addition, most people don’t watch a variety of networks or listen to different radio programs. We are creatures of habit. A lot of people watch ONLY CNN or NBC. They thus feel well-informed, even though those outlets sometimes don’t even cover major news stories.
“Confirmation bias,” giving credibility and trust to anyone saying something you already believe, furthers our tendency to get news from sources that confirm what we already believe.
A lot of outlets simply don’t cover news they don’t like. As a result, it has gotten so easy for individuals to avoid news they don’t like, even if they do it subconsciously, that the ability or our republic to function is at risk.
Our divisions are pervasive and deep. There is some conservative media in cable, radio, and online outlets, but the mainstream and social media space is dominated by leftists. They control the public discourse. Even if Fox covers a story like the Hunter laptop, and they did, the censorship of the story by all major social media and most mainstream media effectively killed it. Many true stories are called “conspiracy theories” by team Biden/Pelosi, and only recognized as truthful long after tremendous damage is done.
Controlling who can speak out, and what they can say, is essential to the success of the left. On most major issues, support for the leftist agenda decreases the more people know about it. Truth is freedom’s friend. Censorship is its enemy.
The Daily Wire points out that 96% of donations from media companies went to Democrats. In 2016, a presidential election year, there was no White House reporter who was a Republican. Overall, 7% of journalists were Republicans. https://www.dailywire.com/news/5-statistics-show-media-bias-real-aaron-bandler
If you look at the number of people who get their news online, from computers, and smart phones, it is an astonishing 86%. So only about 14% get news primarily from newspapers, tv or radio. See Forbes story on this, here https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/12/more-than-eight-in-ten-americans-get-news-from-digital-devices//
All of this is germane because the legacy media joined with social outlets to censor the information about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which emerged just before the 2020 election. The media downplayed the story to help Joe Biden, and about 17% of his voters surveyed say they might not have voted for him if they had known about this before election day.
We’ll be looking into the Hunter laptop, and the disinformation campaign that killed coverage of it, in days ahead.
