They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 2 Timothy 4:4 (NIV)
Once upon a time, Mainstream Media was an honest source of news with journalists who had respect for the sanctity of journalism. Mostly anyway. A defamatory media publishing untruths is as old as this country herself. John Adams had reporter Anthony Haswell put in prison through the Sedition Act for printing offensive remarks toward his administration that he felt were untrue. You would probably say that this was unconstitutional under the First Amendment, and you would be right. The reporter’s statements did, however, go against biblical law found in Exodus 20:16, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” So, it is probably a good thing that jailing journalists is no longer legal in today’s government. Could you imagine President Trump with this power? All of the Mainstream Media would have been in prison during his presidency.
Unfortunately, our Mainstream Media today are full of flat-out liars. When Trump called certain media outlets “fake news,” he was not just shrugging off what they said. This came from a gradual build-up of dishonesty that started before Trump was ever in office. There are great examples of this throughout history, going back to times like when the media falsely painted Barry Goldwater as a racist during his presidential run against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Or even to the beginning of this country as one of our Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton himself, would write columns to sully the names of his opponents under fake aliases. Of course, the difference is that Hamilton believed what he was writing, just not enough to stand behind it with his own name, even though his targets knew it was him by his writing style.
Not to speak ill of Hamilton, but his belief in his own propaganda is the perfect parallel to how the Democrat party, a party he laid the foundation for through his Hamiltonian policies, sees the world today. Today the Left can believe that 3 - 1 = 1, not because that is how they see it mathematically, but because they are being told that it equals 1 by the “experts,” and they are told not to think for themselves. This is why they do not question what they are told and get defensive when someone from the Right challenges their beliefs. Let us discuss a few examples.
Immigration
On July 2, 2018, Time Magazine’s cover featured a migrant Honduran girl named Yanela Sanchez, probably around the age of two or three, standing and crying in front of a towering Trump with the caption, “Welcome to America.” The image was photoshopped to pull at your heartstrings for this child, trying to make you feel sadness for this little girl and hatred toward Trump. By using simple emotional tactics, they attempt to control how you feel and use that as a tool to control how you think. The article claimed that this little girl had been separated from her mother because of Trump’s border separation policy. On June 21, 2018, CNN wrote an article describing how the photo demonstrated the compassion gap between Trump and the real-life people affected by his “zero-tolerance” border policy. Even the New York Daily News Editorial Board, on June 15, 2018, wrote an opinion piece entitled, “Lying coward Trump: Administration separates children from their parents at the border, and he will not even own up to his cruelty.” A very disturbing image indeed. Except it is a lie.
According to the girl’s mother, Sandra Sanchez, they were detained together and never separated. On June 21, 2018, after seeing the photo on the news, Denis Javier Varela, the girl’s father, told the Daily Mail: “You can imagine how I felt when I saw that photo of my daughter. It broke my heart. It is difficult as a father to see that, but I know now that they are not in danger. They are safer now than when they were making that journey to the border.… I did not support it. I asked her, why? Why would she want to put our little girl through that? But it was her decision at the end of the day.” While a correction was made at a later date, Time Magazine and others stuck to their story despite this new information. TIME’s Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal said that he would continue to stand behind the image, exploiting this little girl, because it served to make a broader point against the immigration debate. This little girl ended up being the false symbol of the Left as she was used to attack Trump and his administration.
Activists, lawmakers, and journalists continued to accuse the administration of running “internment camps,” leading to the hatred of Trump when it came to illegal immigrants. They would coin the phrase, “No human is illegal.”
When the photo of children in cages surfaced, the media jumped right on it without bothering to verify its source. They pushed their agenda hard. This then led to the narrative that the Trump administration was putting children in cages. In fact, however, those cages date back to 2014 during the Obama administration. They built them when a spike in unaccompanied minors crossing the southern border into our country was taking place due to Obama’s Dream Act which allowed undocumented children under the age of 16 to stay in America. This loophole was quickly abused and caused the flow of illegals to increase dramatically. The media, of course, wants to blame it on Trump.
Trump was later asked about the MS-13 gang members, and in response, he called them animals. This is a gang whose motto is, “Rape, control, kill.” How did the media report it? They removed the context and created the headline, “Trump calls some unauthorized immigrants ‘animals’ in rant.” Starting to see a trend?
This has been an excerpt from History vs Leftist Myths: America’s War on Information. To read the full chapter on this subject as well as other controversial topics, please check out our book available on Amazon. Your Amazon review is also greatly appreciated.
SOURCES:
- Blake Ellis, Melanie Hicken, and Bob Ortega, “Handcuffs, assaults, and drugs called ‘vitamins’: Children allege grave abuse at migrant detention facilities,” CNN Investigates, Cable News Network, June 21, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/21/us/undocumented-migrant-children-detention-facilities-abuse-invs/index.html.
- Daniel Bate and Karen Ruiz, “They're together and safe: Father of Honduran two-year-old who became the face of family separation crisis reveals daughter was never separated from her mother, but the image of her in tears at U.S. border control ‘broke his heart,” Daily Mail, Associated Newspaper, June 21, 2018, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5869829/Father-two-year-old-face-child-separation-crisis-speaks-out.html. - Julie Hirschfeld David, “Trump Calls Some Unauthorized Immigrants ‘Animals’ in Rant,” New York Times, Associated Newspaper, May 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/politics/trump-undocumented-immigrants-animals.html.
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