I watch the morning news on one of the legacy networks every day, more or less. I figure it pays to know the enemy. I can check the facts later on Epoch Times or Daily Signal or Newsmax, but it does require critical thinking.
I started to wonder if other people know what to listen and look for when watching or listening to what passes for journalism these days. The media lies about us—law abiding gun owners and defenders of the Second Amendment—and to us. I think most of us pick up on the lies they tell about us; we can simply compare their reporting to our own lived experiences. Lying to someone’s face must be executed a little more artfully. Here are five ways the media lies to us.
Say one thing and show another. I have been active in the pro-life movement since I was in college in the 1990s, so I vividly remember seeing a news report a few years ago on the efforts to stop giving taxpayer money, through Congress, to Planned Parenthood. While they talked about the votes and lobbying going on, they showed stock footage of women getting mammogram screenings. I was absolutely incensed because I knew that Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide mammograms, which President and CEO Cecile Richards was forced to admit under oath in front of a congressional committee in 2015. Yet four years later, the media was still subliminally trying to tell people that they do.
In case you missed it, I covered a similar story in the Spring 2023 issue of the Illinois Shooter. In February, on the evening news, NBC 5 Chicago aired a piece about the reaction of parents and others in Evanston after a 13-year-old brought a loaded gun into his school. One result was a joint effort by the Evanston Police Department, Robert Crown Community Center, Fleetwood-Jourdain Community Center, and Moms Demand Action to distribute free gun locks. The pre-packaged part of the report included multiple video clips showing yellow cable locks clearly marked Project ChildSafe. As our gentle readers likely know, Project ChildSafe is a longstanding project of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Just as in the Planned Parenthood story, the video (called B-roll in the business) was not explained or really referenced at all. But it would give the uninitiated the idea that Moms Demand Action or one of the other groups involved runs Project ChildSafe, which is a lie.
Newspeak. Maybe 2023’s journalists aren’t quite as bad as the government in 1984, but they’re getting closer by the day. We’re all quite familiar with a perfect example: illegal aliens. This used to be an accurate, perfectly acceptable label for people who sneak into our country without permission. Several years ago newscasters started calling them “undocumented workers.” That’s a euphemism if ever I’ve heard one! Now the City of Chicago government officials and local news personnel are calling them “asylum seekers,” which is likely not even accurate, as the qualifications to seek asylum are fairly narrow (to be eligible for asylum, you must be able to demonstrate that you were persecuted or have a fear of persecution in your home country due to your race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or your political opinion). Searching for the American Dream because your country of origin offers no economic prospects or getting as far away as possible from the drug cartels that are likely to rape and murder the members of your family does not make someone an “asylum seeker.” Calling every illegal immigrant an asylum seeker cheapens the true meaning of the label and obfuscates what’s really going on…which is kind of the point.
Word choice. Closely related to Newspeak is the way modern reporters use word choice to manipulate your emotions instead of just presenting the facts. Consider these excerpts from a report from HuffPost.com: “Ballistics experts will fire up to 139 shots at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Friday during a reenactment of the 2018 Parkland massacre…The shooting, which sparked a nationwide movement for gun control, left 17 dead, 17 wounded and hundreds traumatized in the South Florida community…. After Friday, the Broward school district says it will begin demolishing the building. It had remained standing as evidence in the Cruz and Peterson criminal trials, looming over the campus behind a chain-link fence.” The writer made the choices to use the word “massacre” instead of “homicide” and “looming over” instead of “remaining.” The writer assumed that “hundreds were traumatized”; or does he or she have a degree in mental health and personally interviewed hundreds to determine that they were, indeed, “traumatized”?
Semantics matter, and it’s not difficult to understand why. Picking up on these word choices on the fly is more challenging than contemplating them in print. Television and radio reporters count on it.
Presenting opinions as facts instead of as editorial. There used to be a bright line in journalism between the two, but now most outlets don’t worry about blurring it or just dropping it altogether. I often hear anchors, while reporting hard news, offer their opinions just before moving on to the next story. What really burns my biscuits, however, is when a reporter sits on a panel for a political show, like Meet the Press or Face the Nation, gives their opinion about a political figure or strategy or situation, and then sits at an anchor desk a few days later! They don’t even pretend to be impartial anymore, and the networks don’t prevent them from crossing those lines. Call us old fashioned: the Illinois Shooter still labels editorial as editorial.
Repetition. In 1943 Walter C. Langer of the Office of Strategic Services—the precursor to the CIA—authored a report later called The Mind of Adolf Hitler. In the report Langer said one of Hitler’s primary rules was that “people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” A similar sentiment is often attributed to Joseph Goebbels, who headed up Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda. Whatever the truth is about the origin of “The Big Lie,” today’s media appears to have embraced it like grandma at Sunday dinner. The lie du jour is repeated at 7 a.m., 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. on any number of news broadcasts and even more frequently on the dedicated news channels. It’s printed in the newspapers and published on their websites and on their social media pages. With today’s 24-hour news cycle, it doesn’t take long for just about anything to be accepted as truth by more than 50% of the population. If you don’t fall for it, hook, line, and sinker, they come up with a label for you, like election denier, conspiracy theorist, science denier, or fascist to make it easier to marginalize you and others like you.
I will let you know when I suss out more of the media’s techniques for lying to us. I expect this will be at least a three-part series.
