Despite being in the information age, obtaining reliable information is nearly impossible

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

In the halcyon days of journalism, the public could easily obtain a factual account of the news. We had The New York Times, Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and Eric Sevareid. We had people you could trust. In 2024, you can’t trust anyone.

“The American mainstream media is filled to the brim with liars, frauds, partisans, cheats, plagiarists,” says Breitbart News Network, “and those who tolerate, defend and enable all of them.” Combine that with the increasing censorship over the media by the Biden administration, and we have a situation where the average citizen can’t form an intelligent opinion on major issues.

The news we get is the product of a corrupt mainstream media that lives in the pocket of the Democratic Party. When you read an article on the front page of the Times, there is a better than even chance that you are reading fact mixed with opinion. Bernard Goldberg has referred to this as “passing off editorial opinion as straight news,” where news is distorted in order to influence public opinion.

The Left does not want people to know the truth—otherwise Democrats would desert the party like rats escaping a sinking ship. Getting to the truth is almost impossible because the media lie to protect the Left. When they lie, they don’t bother to give an explanation. They simply rely on groupthink and the gullibility of the public.

In a moment of classic leftist hypocrisy, liberal commentator Ted Koppel told conservative spokesman Sean Hannity that all conservative commentators are bad for this country because they appeal to people who are more interested in ideology than facts. The opposite is true. The left-leaning media—The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, and their pals—have surrendered the mantle of objective news reporting. They believe that the purpose of the media is to impose its leftist ideology on the public.

These are some of the techniques used by the media to fool us: falsification, misrepresentation, and omission of facts; exaggeration and distortion; vague source attribution; selective reporting or “cherry picking”; downplaying what they don’t want the public to know.

One of the critical topics they don’t want us to know about is climate change. I was suspicious from the beginning about the alleged dangers of global warming, so I did my own research. What I learned from my investigation is that the entire global warming argument is a hoax. Any person who cares about the truth can easily discover that man-made global warming does not exist, that climate change is not caused by human activities, and that climate change does not pose an existential threat. So why have the media been shoving all this climate nonsense down our throats? The answer is that alarmism over climate is being used to justify the big government aims of the Democratic Party, together with the globalist aspirations of the UN and the EU.

Unfortunately, the truth about some issues cannot be revealed so easily. I am thinking specifically about the war in Ukraine. I keep asking myself if we should continue to provide financial support for Ukraine against Russia. Thanks to the morass of propaganda created by the news media and the Biden administration, I am totally confused about the facts surrounding this crisis.

Why is that critical? “If you don’t have access to information,” said Tucker Carlson, “you don’t have a democracy. If media outlets align with entrenched power, then you have a powerless population. It’s totalitarian and that is very quickly the direction the US is headed.”

For anyone who believes in free speech, this denial of access to accurate information is terrifying. “This is not just an attack on free speech,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “This is an attack on an entire movement of people with the intent of driving them underground—keeping them from getting jobs, having legal representation, and even cutting them off from legitimate financial transactions.”

If we can’t acknowledge that there are two sides to every story, Carlson is correct. The US is well on the way to becoming a totalitarian state. It starts with accusations of spreading disinformation and ends with a call for purging conservatives and sending their children to indoctrination camps.

Free speech is mocked by the Left as a “right-wing fetish,” said author Mark Steyn. Disagreeing with the official state position is now forbidden in the US, he said. “To get power,” said Tucker Carlson, “they plan to control what you think. They are using law enforcement powers to identify and punish people who think the wrong thing. That would be opponents of the Biden administration. Joe Biden’s partisan political enemies are now officially enemies of the state.”

“They want to put out false narratives,” said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, “without people being able to speak out and fight back.”

“If Democrats and Republicans in Congress are not terrified by this and doing everything they can to stop it,” said Charles Hurt of the Washington Times, “then we’re done—we’re finished.” The only effective solution is to ensure that the public has access to accurate information. That is a virtual impossibility when the media and government conspire to keep us all in the dark.

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