Media Bias, Censorship & the War on Free Speech
Bill D’Agostino, a senior research analyst at the Media Research Center and media editor for NewsBusters, meets with Peter Demos to dissect the deep-rooted liberal bias in America’s mainstream media, censorship, and the disintegration of objective journalism. Among the topics discussed:
- Why news coverage of Donald Trump hit “historic lows” in objectivity
- The rise of “activist journalists” and the fall of neutrality
- Inside the 6,000+ documented cases of conservative censorship
- The “Censorship Industrial Complex” and its control over social media
- Why alternative media is rising — and what it means for our future, and
- How to outsmart bias and become an informed citizen today
Peter Demos is the author of On the Duty of Christian Civil Disobedience and the host of Uncommon Sense in Current Times. A Christian business leader from Tennessee, Demos uses his biblical perspective and insight gained from his own struggles to lead others to truth and authenticity in a broken world. To learn more, visit peterdemos.org.
Editor’s Note: The transcript that follows was automatically generated and lightly edited, so please be aware there could be typos or other small errors. The Stream is working toward a transcription service that does fast, accurate, and reliable work; thank you in advance for your patience!
00:00:00:16 – 00:00:27:02
Revolution of common sense. Revolution of common sense. A revolution of common sense. Truth was once common sense, but today truth is uncommon. Explore biblical truths around faith. Business and politics with Peter Thomas. Uncommon sense in current times.
00:00:27:04 – 00:00:52:27
Hey, folks. Working on common sense in current times. I’m here today with Bill D’Agostino. I know it’s not a surprise for you that mainstream media has a dramatic liberal bias. We’ve talked about it on the show a couple times. And so I’m really excited to talk with Bill on this. He is the media editor for Newsbusters and senior research analyst for the Media Research Center’s news analyst division.
00:00:52:29 – 00:01:19:14
I want to make certain I read this correctly because there’s some numbers in here that I think is important. The Media Research Center’s TV news archive features 925,000 hours of video dating back to 1987, and they can demonstrate instances of media bias through both present day and historical footage. And they’re in the Sensor Track database comprises over 6000 recorded cases of online censorship of conservatives.
00:01:19:16 – 00:01:24:03
So, Bill, thank you so much for coming on to the show. I greatly appreciate you being here.
00:01:24:06 – 00:01:25:16
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
00:01:25:21 – 00:01:46:23
So I’m curious now. So I want to talk about like kind of the level of documented bias because I think the probably the most that’s in the most people’s heads, that’s the most recent is obviously Donald Trump. I think he is managed to maintain or change it to unprecedented levels on it. And we can just kind of look at the election.
00:01:46:23 – 00:01:58:20
So how bad was the bias in this election? And I don’t want to spend too much time focus on the election because obviously it’s past. We got other stuff we can deal with with the media. So how bad was that bias there?
00:01:58:23 – 00:02:25:02
Historically bad. Historically the worst it’s ever been. During during the first Trump administration, we had a running, Trump coverage study that was for the broadcast networks only. So that’s ABC, CBS, NBC. We looked at their evening newscasts for that. And the reason we do that is because despite the fact that people consider it sort of dated, that is the those are the three most watched, TV news programs in America.
00:02:25:02 – 00:02:53:13
So World News Tonight on ABC Nightly News on NBC and evening news on CBS. And routinely throughout the entire first Trump administration, we found anywhere between 90 and 93% negative coverage. And it was it was incredibly consistent in that regard. So this this most recent election was nothing different. Except for the fact that Kamala Harris earned an unprecedentedly positive amount of coverage.
00:02:53:15 – 00:03:21:01
She was 87% positive for the election. And that’s, that’s like remarkable. Like, we’ve never seen that before. I mean, even even in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was more more on the, negative side. And Biden, I believe, during the 2020 election was somewhere in the 60s of positive, so slightly more positive and negative. But yeah, to be to be pushing 90% positive for, for any candidate is preposterous.
00:03:21:03 – 00:03:41:12
All right. So when you’re looking at bias, I think I think it’s also critical for us to understand because I think those are easy numbers to, to, to see. And so even if we say, okay, your data is incorrect slightly, it still would show that overwhelmingly, one direction or another, that, that it was definitely biased. There. But how do y’all define bias?
00:03:41:12 – 00:03:49:13
Like where do you where do you get it? And don’t you think that all media has some level of bias in their in their reporting?
00:03:49:15 – 00:04:18:09
Absolutely. I mean, humans are innately biased animals, right. And so you you can’t you can’t ultimately separate that from the practice of journalism. The idea is to understand your own biases and try to separate your coverage from that as much as possible. In other words, try to be evenhanded despite what you might might want to do otherwise. But especially in the era of Trump, we have seen journalists giving into their, their worst predilections again and again and again.
00:04:18:09 – 00:04:37:23
And I mean, there was even that New York Times piece at the very beginning of the first Trump administration saying, this is not a normal presidency, so you’re not going to see normal coverage out of us and most of the rest of the media followed suit, right? I mean, basically, the notion of journalistic objectivity has been completely thrown out the window whenever Trump is involved.
00:04:37:25 – 00:05:03:09
The way the way we find bias and specifically for these kinds of studies is we’re looking at evaluative statements. And those are those are statements being made by people who are not innately political. So if they choose to play a clip of, say, Marco Rubio criticizing, Kamala Harris, that wouldn’t count as negative coverage towards Kamala Harris, nor what a quote of, say, Adam Schiff criticizing Trump count as negative coverage of Trump.
00:05:03:09 – 00:05:27:21
Because that’s their prerogative, right? They’re they’re political entities. But if a journalist, for example, described what Trump is doing as draconian, let’s say on the border, that would be an invalid of statement from somebody who you shouldn’t be expecting a political them to be weighing in on a political topic in that way. So that would that would count as a biased comment in the negative column towards Trump.
00:05:27:24 – 00:05:44:01
And so you separate that out. We, we literally we just go through transcripts and basically pick them apart word by word, sentence by sentence, segment by segment, and and count up all the negative and positive positive, a valid of statements that are made about, whoever the subject is.
00:05:44:03 – 00:06:10:28
So now you all had an article that was, recently, that was talking about the, talking about it says TV hits Trump with 85% negative news, 78% positive press for Harris. And, someone wrote in there that, that if Donald Trump regains the white House next week, the media’s campaign against him will have accomplished nothing except to further except the further erosion of their own reputations.
00:06:11:03 – 00:06:31:19
We’re seeing this decrease of trust. And it why why do you think they continue to try to do this? Because if it seems to have a negative effect on them and it doesn’t seem to be working on what they’re trying to do, I mean, for me, I know that if I eat ice cream, it has a negative effect for me, and it does not make me look healthier by doing so.
00:06:31:19 – 00:06:44:18
So I don’t eat it. It seems to be common sense to me for someone to say, hey, this isn’t working, and it’s for having a more larger negative impact. Why do you think they continue to operate in such a way?
00:06:44:21 – 00:07:01:20
I think it’s simply the people who are choosing the coverage. You could you could argue that the media ought to moderate their coverage now that they’re realizing that most of the country disagrees with them on most of the issues, that they’re pushing, most of the narratives that they’re pushing. But I think it’s a little bit more complicated than that.
00:07:01:20 – 00:07:21:23
The reality is that the majority of journalists, at least corporate journalists in America, are not people who got into the profession because of a love of journalism. They they see themselves more as political actors who simply happened to choose journalism as the vehicle for their political activism. But they could just as well have chosen any other profession.
00:07:21:23 – 00:07:41:18
Journalism is just what they identified for themselves as where they would be most effective in pushing their agenda. And so what what reform of the media would really look like, in my opinion, is, a cleaning of house, really? I mean, like, so what’s what’s going on at CNN right now is actually a bit of a start.
00:07:41:21 – 00:08:10:22
It started with Chris Licht when he first, took control of CNN. He got rid of some of the worst actors there, Brian Stelter, although he’s now back. But Don lemon, John Harwood, etc.. Or I guess I guess a more cogent example would be The Washington Post right now, the way Jeff Bezos is changing their editorial staff, changing what the standards of their editorials are, and you’re seeing a lot of mass resignations as a result of that, and as a result of the paper not endorsing a presidential candidate.
00:08:10:24 – 00:08:31:15
And that kind of soft forced turnover, that’s that’s what reformation in any media outlet looks like. It’s not the people who are already there kind of changing their coverage. A lot of these people are never going to stop being political actors. And so they kind of just have to leave. They have to go somewhere else. That’s, basically the only way forward.
00:08:31:15 – 00:08:35:04
If the media want to change their tune.
00:08:35:06 – 00:08:59:17
So in the 1980s, there was a book that came out called a media Monopoly by Ben Big Dick in and, I remember reading it back then, and then I had, I want to do some research for a previous show, a solo show that I was working on with, you know, looking at the media room and all of this because of, I think, TV stations in the in the 1970s, there were dozens of independent media ownership groups.
00:08:59:17 – 00:09:22:29
In the 80s, it went down to about 25 to 30. In the 90s, it dropped down to about 10 to 15. In the 2000s. It was 6 to 8. 2010 is 5 to 6. So do you think that and that’s just and this is TV stations. Newspapers went from tremendously more like there was hundreds or 1500 of them over that of ownership groups in the 70s.
00:09:23:02 – 00:09:50:25
And I think now let me kind of scroll down my numbers here real quick. There’s fewer than 100 groups of, of, of TV or newspapers. So do you think that it’s more of this monopoly of the media that’s creating it, or do you think it’s the individual biases of the ownership groups because the reason why I asked that question is, is let’s say we had the 1500 in the dozens TV stations, and with cable, you think there should be more, that they can hold each other a little bit more accountable.
00:09:50:25 – 00:10:12:21
So instead of me saying, I’m going to report something that is blatantly false or so extremely biased, that everybody else is just kind of jumping on the bandwagon because there’s only five people that’s getting dispersed among hundreds of TV shows. So. So do you think that’s the real problem, or do you think it’s actually individual bias within the individuals?
00:10:12:23 – 00:10:38:01
Well, I think it’s definitely both. And you’re making a good point there. I mean, consolidation is never going to be a good thing as far as diversity of viewpoint among the media. And if, for example, there were, let’s say like seven different cable channels at the same level of prominence as CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, there’d be a lot more scattered kind of political areas on the spectrum that those would occupy.
00:10:38:02 – 00:10:55:21
Right? I mean, CNN is currently running up against the uncomfortable issue of we’re kind of the left wing cable network, but MSNBC is also the left wing cable network, and they’re more open and brazen about it. And so everybody kind of likes MSNBC, and CNN is basically just the network that’s on in the bar or the airport. Right.
00:10:55:21 – 00:11:15:14
That’s sort of what they’ve been relegated to. Right. And that so that’s an uncomfortable position. Right. Because you’re basically you’re, you’re competing with with the other leading cable network, whereas Fox News, they’re, they’re basically eating everybody else’s lunch as far as, as far as conservative cable goes, at least for right now. And so I think that’s not quite the same thing that you were talking about.
00:11:15:14 – 00:11:34:27
But just as an example, I think that, yeah, like the more the more competition there is, the more individual entities there are in the space. Absolutely. The more diversity of viewpoint there’s going to be and the more competition there is going to be, which forces all of them to kind of up their journalistic standards. Right? I mean, it’s a bit of an arms race in that regard.
00:11:35:00 – 00:11:54:06
And of course, there’s there’s something to be said as well for if some very wealthy person starts acquiring a lot of a lot of different stations all at once, like the way that that George Soros has a group that trying to, acquire Odyssey right now, right, that that is obviously incredibly detrimental.
00:11:54:09 – 00:12:09:25
Okay. So but but when you talk about, let’s just say like the Fox News example, we’re seeing bias on the conservative side. Do you all measure that as well? Just curious or do you only measure it from kind of more of the liberal, perspective of things?
00:12:09:27 – 00:12:35:03
We primarily focus on the liberal bias, and that’s because we feel that there is an almost uniform, wall of bias in most of the corporate media, all coming from one side. Fox is sort of be the lone stand out. And in fact, we, when we were founded, Fox News didn’t even exist. So it was kind of it was kind of out of necessity, we felt, because there was there was basically it was it was talk radio and that was essentially it.
00:12:35:07 – 00:12:40:17
Right? Everything else was was uniformly center of left or, left of center. Excuse me.
00:12:40:17 – 00:12:41:05
Right, right.
00:12:41:08 – 00:12:47:18
And so that was that was kind of our, our animating mission state.
00:12:47:21 – 00:13:10:04
So when you when you’re looking at that and you’re looking at the, the kind of the left of center, obviously we see there are extremes. You know, I look at, you know, every time, you know, you. Yeah. I call George Snuffles Snuffleupagus, you know, gets on there, or, you know, you know, you know, again, you had the Don Lemon’s you had that some on CNN.
00:13:10:04 – 00:13:35:00
But MSNBC doesn’t seem to care. Like if if you’re right, crazy to the left, we’re just going to go and put you on no matter what it. It seems to me that, again, from a purely economic model, that if you can appeal to more people and you could be kind of more toward that center that, that it would, that it would, it would serve while you have these extremes on both sides that that you would do that.
00:13:35:03 – 00:13:48:04
But that doesn’t seem to be playing out. It seems like the extremes are the ones that are winning, at least in the market. Share on that, am I, am I right? And I don’t have the data to support that. It’s just kind of my gut tells me.
00:13:48:07 – 00:14:05:25
You absolutely are correct. And I think the reason for that is because the more politically engaged you are as a not as a journalist, but as like an audience member, a consumer of news of, of news media, political news media specifically, the more likely you are to be in all of that because you have an ax to grind, right?
00:14:05:25 – 00:14:33:15
Because you have a, a coherent ideology that you care about. And maybe you have a team, right? You are a staunch Democrat or you are a staunch Republican. There’s there’s not a lot of people who are extremely politically engaged who are like, very firm centrists. There are some for sure, but it’s it’s it’s frankly just an issue of audience size or of, I guess target audience size.
00:14:33:15 – 00:14:58:19
Right. And so if you’re, it’s kind of like a political primary, right? The people who turn out for the primaries tend to be the people who are the most liberal in the Democratic Party or the most conservative in the Republican Party. It’s the same deal here. And in fact, we have a real world test of that. News Nation exists, right now as a, as a at least trying to be, kind of centrist news, not not really letting too much of their bias bleed in.
00:14:58:19 – 00:15:17:09
I think that sometimes they, they do better with that goal than others. But in general, that is what it is. And it’s just kind of straight news. And frankly, I think a lot of Americans just find that boring. But I’m glad that News Nation now exists to test that, because the old response was, well, if you don’t want if you don’t want bias, then just watch C-Span.
00:15:17:09 – 00:15:43:09
But of course, C-Span is like painfully boring, right? I mean, C-Span is a sleep aid. So that’s that’s a little much. So I’m glad that News Nation exists, but I think that it’s it’s kind of testing and proving the theory that, yeah, people, people who are dead in the middle, are not as numerous as people who are very much on either side, at least among the population of people who are very politically engaged and, and consuming political news media.
00:15:43:11 – 00:16:06:01
So we talk about censorship. I talked about censorship in the introduction because this so I’m trying to figure out how to kind of kind of tie in with what you just said there with, with this, because obviously censorship was targeted, of of yeah, I was canceled off of YouTube. A couple shows were canceled off of YouTube. I know people that were permanently banned from YouTube.
00:16:06:03 – 00:16:24:03
But there seems to be that censorship seems to target that all that alternate media, did it also target? Did he use it to target mainstream media as well, or was it strictly kind of these, social media? Take these kind of the big tech areas? Where did where did Biden’s censorship, start on there?
00:16:24:05 – 00:16:46:24
I mean, yeah, it’s primarily it’s primarily been individuals and alternate media. And I think that the reason for that is because the left identifies alternate media as their biggest threat right now. Right. So you have Fox News, you have Newsmax. It’s a lot harder to control and go after them than it is to go after just any individual podcaster or any individual who maybe got a start on YouTube.
00:16:47:00 – 00:17:08:15
Right? Right. And so that’s that’s a lot more of a soft target, I guess you could say they can they can go a lot further with their efforts there. And certainly pressuring individual accounts on Twitter, even if they have something like, you know, a million followers, it’s a lot easier to do something like that than it is to take down an entire media conglomerate.
00:17:08:18 – 00:17:17:06
And so, yeah, the majority of their censorship efforts were absolutely, towards the individual or the small organization.
00:17:17:08 – 00:17:32:01
So, so this is kind of this is where my conspiracy theorist, I guess, string is to come out because, you know, I listen to what you’re saying as far as what people want to listen to the mainstream media, that basically is going to reinforce what they already believe. We know that they already do that on social media.
00:17:32:01 – 00:17:58:15
We know social media already twist people to kind of do that. So you feel like you know that everybody is on my side. And so that therefore, if you’re not on my side, you’re that extreme divisive group over there. And then if if the government censors the other side, that’s not them. And now all of a sudden I’m left with this reinforcement of social media that ties in with the mainstream media.
00:17:58:17 – 00:18:19:21
It doesn’t matter that we don’t trust the mainstream media, because I get to add more credibility to it because I’m believing what I’m already reading on this meme I wrote yesterday. This this this sounds almost, almost too fanatically unrealistic, but it also seems very realistic. So kind of weigh in on that. Do you do you do you see it as being coordinated?
00:18:19:21 – 00:18:24:13
And if so, who’s pulling the strings on this? Because Biden couldn’t pull the strings on his own shoes.
00:18:24:16 – 00:18:51:18
Right. I mean, there’s there’s a lot of different players in this. A lot of it is NGOs, that that get government grants, to do all of this. There’s something that people refer to as the censorship industrial complex, which is this kind of unholy alliance of public, private, entities that go after basically every social media that they can that doesn’t, doesn’t bend the knee or doesn’t conform to, what their standards are of censorship.
00:18:51:18 – 00:19:13:20
Right? Although they don’t call it censorship. Right? They call this fact checking, they call it policing, misinformation, etc.. Right. Obviously. But but yeah. So it’s, it’s yeah, I would, I would say it’s like pseudo pseudo governmental, but of course the government’s hands are kind of tied. They’re restrained by the Constitution. But even I mean, as we saw with the Twitter files, right.
00:19:13:20 – 00:19:38:17
The government was still doing a lot of this. They will directly approach social media platforms and say, hey, we want you to take this or that down. That was the FBI, that was DHS, that was I mean, there were there were dozens of governmental organizations, government, dozens of agencies that were actually doing this directly. But then there also are a lot of lawfare groups, right, that will will attempt to sue people, that will attempt to make your life miserable in other ways.
00:19:38:20 – 00:20:01:15
And that will pressure a lot of these hosts behind the scenes, like the lobby, YouTube, they’ll lobby Twitter to take people down. And so the path of least resistance, if you run one of these platforms is to just comply, right. Because it’s it’s not too much skin off your back at the end of the day, if there’s one random account that you don’t really care about that much, maybe you’re not even familiar with them, gets taken down or silenced or what?
00:20:01:23 – 00:20:26:10
Right. Like you might you might have a bit of an ideological opposition to that. But with all of this massive governmental legal, everything else pressure bearing down on you, it’s easiest to just take the account down when when all that pressure mounts. And so it’s kind of like a scorched earth approach. And that’s why Elon Musk, I think, is so dangerous to them because he’s not going to respond to any of their incentives.
00:20:26:12 – 00:20:48:03
He’s made that abundantly clear. And, I don’t know exactly what his standards of speech are. He still hasn’t made that entirely clear because he seems a little bit inconsistent. He’s certainly not a total free speech absolutist, but the fact remains that it’s it’s a lot more of the Wild West on Twitter than it is or excuse me, than it is basically anywhere else in the social media landscape.
00:20:48:06 – 00:20:58:05
You know, I still call it Twitter, I can I have such a hard time saying X, and even people that say X is like X, formerly known as Twitter. It’s.
00:20:58:07 – 00:20:58:24
I’m formerly.
00:20:58:24 – 00:20:59:22
Known as Prince.
00:20:59:24 – 00:21:08:01
I’m so tired of writing x parentheses, formerly known as Twitter, and every piece that I’ve written in the past two years. It’s exhausting.
00:21:08:03 – 00:21:15:20
I mean, at least he could have put an explanation point on the other side of X to make it, like, very, very clear what you’re talking about. Not like explaining the unknown variable out there.
00:21:15:22 – 00:21:29:05
I know he’s ruined unknown variables for us now. Yeah, because I’ll say like I’ll say, oh, you have to get rid of X and them say Y, and I’ll be like, no, no, no, no. Like for example, I mean, or or y or Z. Thank you. Thanks dude.
00:21:29:07 – 00:21:51:02
So so when we’re looking at this alternative media and we’re seeing this again, well I notice that they’re liberal groups seem to like they’re trying to kind of get involved in it. And I think they did the same thing after Rush Limbaugh became so popular with the radios. But I’ve noticed, like, you know, Michelle Obama now has like the show, Monica Lewinsky has her show, and they’re talking about different.
00:21:51:02 – 00:22:17:19
And, you know, all these people are trying to talk about it from a this liberal perspective on things, with it from there to try to combat it. Do you think because they have the mainstream media seems to be so biased, do you think there’s going to be any success there? Do you think they’re just competing with their own group or do you think because I know I go to these kind of alternate sources because I don’t have somebody who I can trust in the mainstream media?
00:22:17:21 – 00:22:32:08
Do you? So so I guess two questions. Do you think if we became less biased, the mainstream media, the alternative media would go away or and do you think that they’re just going to kind of eat itself and cannibalize itself on the liberal side?
00:22:32:11 – 00:22:48:24
Well, I don’t think I don’t think alternative media would go away. Even if the corporate media became less biased, I think that they would be more trusted. And I think that more people would just rely on them. But I mean, if you’re if you’re somebody who likes the way Joe Rogan talks, if you’re somebody who finds him interesting, right?
00:22:48:24 – 00:23:14:00
Like you’re not you’re not going to say, oh, well, NBC seems to be really cleaning up their act. So, you know, forget Joe Rogan now, right? Like there’s, there’s kind of these personalities in alternate media that people follow. For example, like the Daily Wire has, you know, like a whole stable of them. Right. I do just want to point out, though, they’re, they’re starting those podcasts that you talked about because they feel like the right is kind of dominating it.
00:23:14:00 – 00:23:36:13
And there was this conversation about, you know, we on the left, at least we need our own. Joe Rogan. Right? Right. The issue is you had your own Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan. Right. Like they they forced him out. We need our own Elon Musk. You had one. It was Elon Musk, right? I mean, like Tesla’s were the ultimate liberal status symbol.
00:23:36:19 – 00:23:58:22
And so they’re kind of doing this to themselves. And I also want to say, you know, who is who is the group that they lost biggest with in this past election. Right. It was it was men across basically every age group, but particularly young men were, a shocker turn for the right. And so what’s the response as a Michelle Obama podcast?
00:23:58:24 – 00:24:18:29
Like, I’m, I don’t know, a lot of like 20 year old guys, but I assume most of them are not like worshiping Michelle Obama. Right? I think that most of them aren’t like, yeah, let me let me get some life advice from Michelle Obama. Or Monica Lewinsky. Right. Like, so they’re, they’re they’re so stuck in their own way that they don’t know a way to break out of it.
00:24:19:01 – 00:24:38:12
Right? I mean, who is the male role model on the left at this point? Right. Who is who is reaching out to these younger guys. And they’re they’re scrambling to figure somebody out. But they everybody they roll out either looks like a complete wimp or totally fake and propped up and corporate and, I think that that might be like a systemic problem.
00:24:38:12 – 00:24:45:06
I’m not sure that there’s a way for them to address that, which is hilarious to watch, but it’s not enviable.
00:24:45:09 – 00:25:04:00
I recognize, too, that they had Trump as well. I mean, we’ve seen the we’ve seen the the the the adoration. And you’re right, Elon Musk is another one. You know, I mean they we see that that there was they were the best things ever. And then all of a sudden they they they went to the other side and now they’re just evil.
00:25:04:03 – 00:25:29:18
And you can’t there’s, I’m baffled by the, the the loss of of consistency even or even like the acknowledgment of, hey, we thought they were great, but we don’t like them anymore. They wouldn’t even acknowledge that. They just pretend like, oh, it’s only news for the day. Do you do you think some of that is kind of do you think that is a systemic part of just the media itself, is that we just got to be right for today.
00:25:29:24 – 00:25:54:12
Tomorrow we can be right for tomorrow. And it could be different as long as we’re right. Data time, almost like a nympho slave. Can’t remember in Greek mythology. They couldn’t remember the day before, you know. So is there is there something in that that is inherent, in the, in the, in the system of media, that creates this or do you think that there is and if so, can that actually be fixed?
00:25:54:14 – 00:26:13:05
Well, yes and no. Like it. It that does exist and it doesn’t exist completely dependent on whether they want want historical context to be brought to the table or not. If there is historical context that bolsters their point or their narrative, they will talk about it, they will bring it out. They’ll they’ll give you a history lesson.
00:26:13:07 – 00:26:31:07
And suddenly everybody in the corporate media is an expert on this or that thing that happened back in the 40s or the 20s or whatever. But if if Trump does something that they want to call unprecedented, for example, and there’s an example of, say, the Obama administration doing it, or the Clinton administration or whatever, they will all suffer collective amnesia about that event.
00:26:31:07 – 00:26:49:25
And what Trump is doing is unprecedented. It, and so it’s it’s tactical amnesia, I guess you could call it there’s there is definitely historical context brought to bear when they think that it helps them. But yeah, you’re absolutely correct that they had the memory of a goldfish as long as as long as that’s what benefits them the most in any given time.
00:26:49:25 – 00:27:07:06
And I think that for the most part, that tends to be more to their benefit than not. And so the historical context is often very lacking. There’s, there’s very little of it in any of this coverage because it is I mean, the news cycle kind of lends itself to this, this way of thinking, right? Because everything is ephemeral, right?
00:27:07:06 – 00:27:29:09
And every the topic, the topic du jour changes not by the day anymore. Practically by the hour. And I mean, that’s stressful for us to hear at newsbusters because sometimes we’ll have like, I’ll think I have like just this banger video or study or whatever. But then Trump says something that’s got them all running around with their hair on fire, or, you know, some other crazy thing happens.
00:27:29:09 – 00:27:37:02
Chuck Schumer comes out and makes some pronouncement and suddenly nobody cares anymore. And I’m like, oh, great, thanks, guys.
00:27:37:05 – 00:27:55:17
You know, I, I heard I wrote an article and it was actually it wasn’t against Trump. It wasn’t for Trump. It was basically warning Christians to not look at Trump as a messiah figure, you know? And it was just it was it was, you know, it kind of kind of hit both sides. It’s like, hey, I support him, but we need to be really careful.
00:27:55:17 – 00:28:16:07
And how as Christians, we need to analyze him and his role in leadership. And it was it blew up like all these people. And I was talking with somebody about it, and they said that that so many reporters are talked or trained to mention Trump somewhere in there because people are so divided that it really helps their readership.
00:28:16:09 – 00:28:35:00
The comments, I mean, just people can’t just contain themselves when it comes to him. Right? He’s obviously going to be gone at some point in time. He’s going to die at some point in time. I mean, when he even when he finishes his presidency, you know, he’s going to have opinions. And he ain’t going to stop, you know, being interviewed.
00:28:35:03 – 00:28:35:27
But eventually he will.
00:28:35:27 – 00:28:37:13
Try to play kingmaker. Probably. Yeah.
00:28:37:17 – 00:28:54:12
Yeah, yeah. So when, when that happens, do you think things will settle a little bit, or do you think that they’re going to try to create another Trump like person out there just to hate, even if it doesn’t work? You’re nodding on that one. So I’m assuming that’s what you believe.
00:28:54:15 – 00:29:18:25
Oh, yeah. I mean, for talking about historical context, right? I mean, Mitt Romney was going to put black people back in chains, right? I mean, I mean, George George W Bush was a Nazi. So was so was Dick Cheney. Right? And so like, I mean, this rhetoric has always been been used. I think it’s just that it took with Trump, for whatever reason, it it resonated with people.
00:29:18:27 – 00:29:38:21
And I’m not sure if that was just like a groundswell of millennials kind of coming of age and becoming politically very politically active at the right time, or if, if it’s just something about Trump, because I know that there’s this is kind of a tangent, but there’s this thing in psychology, it’s like a certain form of rage that you experience.
00:29:38:21 – 00:30:09:08
Like if you’ve if you’ve ever been trying to kill a fly that’s like in your kitchen or something, and it just keeps getting away at a certain point, you, you you’re not just frustrated anymore. You start to like, hate that fly. You’re like furious at it, right? For just like, let me ask you, and I kind of think that that’s what the media went through with Trump, because everything that should have ended there, his campaign, in their eyes, that didn’t furthered their their vitriol and their resolve to sink his campaign.
00:30:09:08 – 00:30:28:21
Right. Because there were there were a bunch of different things that he said in 20, even in 2015. Right? I mean, like what what he said about, about John McCain, the whole, the whole conflict with what was that guy, the, the Gold Star father, right. Who was with the Constitution Trump agenda, like with him? What he said about, like, illegal aliens and Mexicans, right?
00:30:28:21 – 00:30:50:03
When he’s coming down the escalator. Right. Like all of these were things that the media felt should have killed this campaign and tried to use them to kill his campaign, and they didn’t. And so the rage just built and built and built. And I think that there is more vitriol for him, more genuine hatred for him among the media than there has been for any of these other, any of the other names that I mentioned.
00:30:50:03 – 00:31:14:11
Right. Like, they they opposed Romney because they wanted Obama. They opposed McCain because they wanted Obama. But they didn’t they didn’t detest those men on like a deep, visceral level. And so that might be part of it, because the, the journalists were just were redoubling and redoubling again, their efforts against him. But I think that now that that genie is out of the bottle and tensions have gotten so high that they’re not going to go much lower.
00:31:14:14 – 00:31:35:02
And if you remember, during the Republican primary, people were writing pieces about DeSantis basically saying he’s actually he’s actually worse because Trump is at least funny. And DeSantis is basically just Trump is funny, Hitler. DeSantis is mean. Hitler was basically the tank, right? And I mean, I guarantee that if JD Vance runs in 28, it’s going to be the exact same thing.
00:31:35:08 – 00:31:59:16
Meet me the new, worse, scarier Trump. Trump 2.0 super. That’s it’s it’s absolutely going to be that. Well we’ll see. We’ll see how convincing that is for people. We’ll see if there’s the same seemingly grassroots, partially astroturf like massive hatred for Vance that there that there seems to exist on the left for Trump. But they’re certainly going to try right.
00:31:59:19 – 00:32:15:05
All right. So I’m a regular consumer. We’re getting toward the end. So I want to ask this kind of question. So I’m just your regular consumer. What advice you give us for us to determine and detect to detect it because you all do studies on it. I don’t have the time to do studies on it. And, you know, the regular people don’t have time to do it.
00:32:15:05 – 00:32:29:13
They’re getting they’re watching maybe their morning news or the evening news is they’re getting dressed or while they’re eating dinner or something. So. So what advice do you give them to pay attention to? Oh wait, that’s probably bias. I need to be really careful on that.
00:32:29:15 – 00:32:53:24
Well it’s it’s tough right. But the, the one, the one piece of advice that I get basically everybody is don’t watch news on like broadcast or cable news. That is, I would argue, the single worst format for presenting an informed account of events. Everything is bite sized, everything is there. Like there’s so much room for agenda and narrative to seep in.
00:32:53:27 – 00:33:31:03
Bias by omission is most rampant in, in television news, simply because everybody’s pressed for time constantly like it. An eternity is like three, three full minutes of coverage of something on on broadcast news. It’s really that fast paced. And I would also say if you find yourself routinely reading one outlet, one journalist, find somebody else who’s covering the same thing from a different perspective, any given event that you’re that you’re reading about them covering, find another journalist who is covering the same thing from a different perspective, and look at what facts both of them omit from their own piece.
00:33:31:06 – 00:33:50:15
And you can kind of you can build a more complete image of what’s going on. Right? Because if the guy over here is omitting facts that are inconvenient for his narrative, the guy over here is I’m meeting facts that are inconvenient for his narrative. Maybe if you put them together, you get a little bit of a synthesis. You have a more total istic understanding of what’s happened.
00:33:50:17 – 00:34:06:16
And then you can kind of form your own opinion. Of course. That’s like, you know, that’s so time consuming. Right? And so who has time for that? And that’s, that’s why self plug here. But if you, if you come to Newsbusters, we will help identify what the media are leaving out and what they’re overemphasizing.
00:34:06:16 – 00:34:22:03
So so so how do we find newsbusters like where do they go to find find it to find more about what y’all are doing? I know you got a website, but. Yeah, kind of tell people what are all the different medias that they can do depending on how they absorb news or information for sure.
00:34:22:03 – 00:34:49:07
Yeah. Come, come check us [email protected]. We have a, a Twitter account as well at newsbusters. Follow MRC as well on, on Twitter and MRC or whatever. Our MRC, ETV is also our, it’s our primarily video, video account. So most of the content that I make will end up there. And follow me on Twitter if you want band underscore bill, although I’m not banned anymore.
00:34:49:07 – 00:34:49:27
Thank you. Ellen.
00:34:50:03 – 00:35:08:23
Yeah. There we go. All right. Well, cool, I appreciate it. And, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been really lightning because like I said, I love the I love the study, the media, the, and oddly enough, in that book, media monopoly, big Dick Ian was thinking that it was all going to turn conservative biased.
00:35:08:25 – 00:35:14:03
Like what he is. Premises were correct. His conclusions were way off. But, but his premise.
00:35:14:03 – 00:35:14:15
Adorable.
00:35:14:15 – 00:35:23:14
100% on point. It was pretty impressive. So I highly recommend, if you hadn’t read it, read it. Go ahead and read that because it’s fascinating to see what’s happening.
00:35:23:16 – 00:35:25:21
Yeah, thanks for the recommendation. I’ll definitely check it out.
00:35:25:24 – 00:35:30:04
All right. Well thank you again, I appreciate it. And, thank you so much for being on the show.
00:35:30:07 – 00:35:31:10
Absolutely. Thanks a lot, man.