Do not let your enemies set the terms of the debate
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Do not let your enemies set the terms of the debate
The corporate media must be exposed for the political actors that they are at every opportunity
After they spent four years peddling largely nonsense against Donald Trump and his supporters, while mostly ignoring genuine horrors like his increasing support for the Saudi genocide against Yemen, you would think that conservative commentators would quit talking about corporate media under the terms of their preferred narrative: That of “objective journalists.” In reality, they are political actors who will say or do whatever they feel is necessary to further their own political agenda. Currently, it is in their perceived interests to prop up Joe Biden as being the anti-Trump who sometimes misspeaks but would certainly never brazenly lie as that’s something only Trump would do.
When President Biden said during his CNN Town Hall that there was not a COVID vaccine when he came into office I genuinely believe that he simply misspoke as he is prone to do, but that’s not the point. The point is what the people defending Biden’s gaffe would be saying about Trump if the roles were reversed: The 24-hour news cycle would be nothing other than fact-checkers calling Trump a liar, awarding him some arbitrary number of “Pinocchios,” and endless discussion of what it means for the state of democracy to have such a brazen liar inhabiting the White House before switching over the outrage porn the next day to some other dumb comment Trump would have made.
Some conservatives are inexplicably expressing confusion as to how the corporate media could have two entirely different standards for Trump and Biden, however.
It actively hurts your cause to pretend that you “don’t know how you go from that hyperliteral standard to giving Biden a pass on this.” I don’t know how you can continue to let them control the parameters in which you discuss their actions. It is inconceivable that Hemingway, who writes at The Federalist, could actually not know exactly how Kessler is giving Biden a pass, and it is a terrible strategy to pretend that he doesn’t.
It will no longer do to simply point out that a double-standard exists and end your analysis there, because the important factor that people care about and need to understand is motive. Why is there a double-standard? If you “don’t know,” then you’re leaving the interpretation up to the reader and giving the benefit of the doubt to those who have spent the last four years making clear they would not do the same for you by repeatedly demonstrating their willingness to do whatever it takes, such as destroying your life, reputation, and career, to eliminate you as a threat to their power.
These people have an agenda, which is at best self-serving if not outright nefarious, and they are not acting in good faith. The double-standard on display is a result of their agenda, which is to use their status as “neutral arbiters of truth” to promote Joe Biden as a mature, sober, reasonable, experienced, compassionate president, the anti-Trump, as I said before, and to increase their own stature, fortunes, and power by hitching themselves to him. They promote him so that he can promote them and they each benefit as a result, and it doesn’t matter what any of them actually do or say in reality because they have every incentive to ignore it, deny it, or spin it as positively as possible.
This is what must be hammered home over and over: They are not reporting the news; they are pushing their agenda, the agenda is to secure their own power, status, and fortune, they will do or say whatever it takes to implement their agenda, and they will try to destroy anyone who threatens their attempt to implement their agenda. Donald Trump proved this is the most effective way to counter their propaganda by relentlessly attacking them as “fake news.” Turning this epithet against them was a direct hit on their credibility by exposing their agenda, and he did it over and over every time they tried to go after him.
Directly attacking their credibility and exposing the agenda of the corporate media is how you limit their influence, but letting them go back to setting the terms of the debate is a sure fire way to go back to the days of Dole v. Clinton or Romney v. Obama. To go back not just to losing, but to being completely marginalized, in other words.