Corporate Media Narratives Corrupt Democracy
At this site I have offered more than 270 incidents where the corporate media pumps out narratives that are false or lack evidence or where important stories are being actively suppressed. I use the tag "Narratives in Media" to label these articles.
For instance, how can you explain that more then ten million people pour across the U.S. southern border in coordinated fashion, yet our major media outlets don't even find this interesting? Even when this pouring in of unvetted people is combined with government efforts to hand these people the right to vote in the upcoming elections?
I'm very suspicious about what is going on with undocumented people pouring over the border and attempts to give these people the right to vote, even in municipal elections. But wouldn't it be nice if our "news" outlets showed some sense of curiosity? I can think of dozens of questions they could ask about this situation. For instance, they could trace the flow of money enabling this. They could skewer Biden's claims that his hands were tied even though he was the one who threw open the borders. Instead, we have nonchalance and see-no-evil. That silence is our corporate media doing what it considers to be its job, to re-elect Joe Biden. To them, everything else is reverse-engineering.
I no longer use the phrase "mainstream media" to refer to the primary culprits of this concocted news: NYT, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and WaPo. Instead, following in the footsteps of Glenn Greenwald and Comedian Dave Smith (in an excellent all-round discussion), I use the term "corporate news," although the big corporations that control these outlets are inextricably entangled with the federal government and its security state (FBI, CIA and NGO cutouts funded by these agencies, such as the Atlantic Council and USAID). The "news" these corporations offer is no longer believed by many Americans. Check out these findings:
The news media is the only industry mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Without trustworthy news, we don't have informed citizens, the type that can vote meaningfully.
"Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government." Thomas Jefferson"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." Thomas Jefferson
"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” James Madison
Yet the above findings, especially the AP poll from 2024, show that the great majority of us are extremely, very or somewhat that we are being misled by our "news outlets" on the issue of election coverage and these concerns are buttressed by my own articles on media narratives.
I'll end with this graphic by KanekoaTheGreat, setting out dozens of falsehoods pumped out by the corporate media over the past few years. I don't agree with everything on this list, but I think the list shows that the corporate media repeatedly pumps out false stories. It shows that the corporate media lacks credibility on important issues. THIS is the track record of our corporate media and there is no reason to think that it will be any better going forward.