An uninformed American citizenry… Imran Jan
When Donald Trump was the president last time around, a significant part of his presidency was spent in proving to the American people that he had won the election legitimately and that Russia’s Putin had nothing to do with it.
The nonstop American media rhetoric during those days was that Putin had used Facebook to drive the American voters away from Hillary Clinton and toward Trump.
Robert Mueller was hired for a hefty wage to investigate any links between the Trump campaign and the Russian meddling. Not much came out of those intense investigations, which the mainstream US media played from morning until midnight and then from midnight until the following morning.
They called it the Russia collusion. Trump kept calling it a witch-hunt, which we were not convinced by at the time, but looking back at it now, that is exactly what it seems in retrospect.
The American people just now found out that Biden had some deep Chinese links. His son, whom he very conveniently pardoned, had links with some very powerful businessmen in China and Chinese government officials.
It is almost a carbon copy of the story that CNN and others were peddling about Trump; that his children and his son in law were deep into businesses with the Russians and that Trump might have been compromised already.
Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury and Bob Woodward’s Fear all tried to convince us all of the same lies that Trump was acting as a Russian agent inside the White House. Having secret contacts with foreign powers’ leaders and receiving money from businesses in those countries are all true, except not about Trump, but rather about Biden.
The other media noise at the time was that Trump was spreading misinformation. Fact checkers were hired by the mainstream media claiming to be investigating everything that Trump would say or tweet.
In the days leading up to the 2024 election, CNN and others continued to make a strong case that the polls suggested that Kamala had a significant and clear lead over Trump and that she was going to win comfortably.
The complete opposite of that was true. When the election results were rubbed in their faces inside the newsrooms, nobody hired any fact checkers to tell us about the lies of the newsrooms. Instead, they started making the case that people do not answer honestly when asked about who they’d vote for. They started shifting the blame to the people.
The truth was that they were lying to the American people about the polls. And this wasn’t the first time they were lying. The same print and broadcast media had been making the case 23 years ago that Saddam had possessed the weapons of mass destruction and that he had links with Al Qaeda.
Those days, it was easier to sell anything under the name Al Qaeda than Nike was able to sell shoes under the name Michael Jordan.
Four years ago, Biden campaigned for the American presidency by marketing himself as the guy who would not be controlled by foreign governments. That was a lie because he is heavily controlled by the Israelis. He had also tried to distinguish himself from Trump by arguing that Trump was tied up in too many foreign deals favoring his family businesses.
We now know that Biden’s son used his father’s office of the vice president during the Obama administration to get his Chinese business associates access to Biden’s political power including preferential access to the then US ambassador to China named Max Baucus. Everything Biden told us was not only a lie but also the opposite of what he said he was.
Once again, American journalism has failed the American people and American democracy. For a healthy democracy, an essential ingredient is an informed citizenry. Journalism plays a role in creating such a citizenry. That is why it is often referred to as the fourth pillar of the government. It is but a hollow pillar, which is not able to hold the American democracy.
COURTESY TRIBUEN