Introduction

Nonpartisan research outlets have reported that Americans widely recognize severe bias in major media outlets, a “large majority says Americans see different facts depending on the news sources they turn to,”(I1) and that there is “little overlap in the news sources” that US Democrats and Republicans “turn to and trust.”(I2) Unsurprisingly, Gallup found that 83% of Americans blame the media for political division.(I3) 

A 2007 Zogby International survey found that 84% of US voters surveyed believe there is real media bias; 64% of those believe that bias favored leftist candidates.(I4) An October 2018 Rasmussen Reports poll of 1,000 likely voters found that Americans believe by a ratio of more than four to one that reporters who write about Congressional races are trying to help the Democratic candidate compared to the Republican candidate; only 35% believed that reporters tried to report news without bias.(I5) 

In observations long obvious to much of the American public, federal appeals court judge Laurence Silberman observed that “most large papers across the country” functioned as “Democratic party broadsheets….nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet,” and that Silicon Valley “ has an enormous influence over the distribution of news” and “similarly filters news delivery in ways favorable to the Democratic Party."(I6) He noted that “the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news...It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy.”

Former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss noted regarding media bias and corruption: “However bad you think it is, I promise it is much worse.”(I7)

The Rise of Propaganda

Propaganda is attested from some of the earliest written narratives. According to the inscriptions from ancient Egypt and Assyria, many of their pharaohs and kings never lost a battle, and were virtuous rulers principally concerned with the well-being of their people.The modern age of near-universal literacy in developed countries and ostensible guarantees of freedom of speech and press have promoted advances across a range of disciplines as well as greater human liberties and choice. Free exchange and scrutiny in the marketplace of ideas have required theories and beliefs to stand on their merits rather than merely being asserted as dogma. The resurgence of propaganda has already eroded some of these gains, while threatening human liberties more broadly.

Eroding ethics and hyperpartisanship are attested in the intensification of propaganda. The traditional journalistic ethic of reporting facts with real effort for fairness and impartiality has been increasingly repudiated and supplanted by media activism in which the favored agenda and its metastory narrative are primary.  Professed journalistic ethics have increasingly come to serve as propaganda which are cited to claim credibility even as their principles are violated and the public trust is breached.

The tactics of media manipulation used by many American media organizations closely follow those articulated by the “Father of Spin” Edward Bernays, author of Propaganda (1928) and Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923).  Bernays “described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.”(P1) Bernays’ “best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist ‘Torches of Freedom, and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954.”(ibid)  

The results of Bernays’ tactics may have been “desirable” to the special interests and authoritarians employing them, but were an utter disaster with lasting negative consequences from the perspective of human rights, truth, and freedom.

Media manipulation is a form of information control, which attempts to control or manipulate the public into supporting a favored agenda set by elites.  These tactics are anti-democratic and even undermine the legitimacy of elections.  Free and fair elections cannot occur when much of the press serves as a propaganda arm for one political party, and when large portions of the electorate do not have access to basic information that is necessary for making their own informed civic decisions. Authoritarians find that a public which is poorly informed, or which has been indoctrinated in favored ideologies and agendas, is much easier to control than principled, informed critical thinkers. 

Instead of filling the role of a “free press” allowing unfettered flow of information and ideas which stand or fall on their merits and holding government agencies and figures across the political spectrum accountable to objective standards, American media has been noted to increasingly fill the role of “state press” in authoritarian states, mobilizing against designated political enemies and pushing the regime’s agenda through propaganda. Liberal reporter Matt Taibbi observed that “reporters once challenged the spy state. Now, they’re agents of it.(P2) 

Tim Graham noted the distortion of media ethics that has allowed scandal after scandal to occur: “As the media's idea of ethics has wrapped itself around a mission -- removing [an unfavored politician] from office -- whatever helps that mission has been defined as what is ethical.”(P3) Yet scandals that would lead to drastic changes in any credible news organization have been shrugged off while they perseverate in unethical conduct. Christ Barron observed: 

“There are no lessons learned, no moments of self-reflections and no one being held accountable for failing to meet basic journalistic standards."(P4)

Contemporary tactics of American media draw heavily from Marxist Herbert Marcuse’s concept of “Repressive Tolerance,” an anti-democratic and authoritarian ideology which advocates uncritical acceptance of extremists on the political left, and intolerance and repression towards movements on the political right.

Facts, reason, and normative ethics do not matter to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”(P5)  Here we describe and provide examples of propaganda tactics used by contemporary U.S. media in its “war on truth.”

The Metastory

Propaganda is an antithesis of both fair reporting and scientific methodology.  Whereas ethical reporting seeks to establish the facts fairly and impartially, propaganda starts with a narrative or “metastory” to which facts are secondary.  Stories are reported and spun according to the extent that they support the favored narrative, and are downplayed, discredited, or ignored entirely to the extent that they may undermine it.  

Using the scientific method, researchers test a hypothesis based on the evidence. Researchers are required to disclose real or potential conflicts of interest, and to work to identify and set aside biases and preconceptions. Limitations must be acknowledged, and other plausible explanations must be addressed. Research which does not adhere to these standards is not scientific and not credible.  Propaganda does the opposite. Its conclusion is dictated from the outset by the desired agenda, instead of arriving through processes of open-minded search and interrogation of facts and evidence.

As propaganda narratives are agenda or ideology-driven rather than fact-driven, they are rarely objectively “true.” The purpose of propaganda is not to find truth, but to persuade, incite, or indoctrinate. Propaganda does not arise from its proponents’ lack of awareness of contrary data, but from agenda.  Idealistic efforts to “inform” the purveyors of propaganda regarding their factual errors and omissions are almost always fruitless, as propaganda’s roots are not to be found in any specific evidence or in any broader search for truth. When confronted with contradictory information, the propagandist will tend to ignore, conceal, or discredit it. If those fail, the propagandist may make minor tweaks or, rarely, even issue a belated correction -- all without repudiating the underlying agenda. The propagandist’s goal is to promote an agenda, not to tell (or seek) truth.

Information Blackout

A nonpartisan assessment of gatekeeping bias based on actual media stories in mainstream media venues of both the political right and left by cybersecurity firm Zvelo found that “there were NO top political news stories that appeared on both sides of the spectrum” on the date examined, attesting to “a strong Gatekeeper bias on the two sides.”(IB1)  

The decision not to cover a story is one of a news propagandist’s most powerful tools, and may have tipped at least one presidential election. A nationally representative poll conducted by nonpartisan pollster McLaughlin and Associates in November 2020 found that 36% of Biden voters were unaware of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal demonstrating, among other things, shady financial dealings with China. 13% of those, and 4.6% of all Biden voters, stated they would not have voted for Biden had they been aware.(IB2) The Washington Examiner (also carried on MSN) headlined: “Media's hiding of Hunter Biden scandal robbed Trump of clear win.”(IB3) This data needs to be further interrogated, and such findings should not be accepted uncritically. Nonetheless, the ability of unelected news media to potentially tip a close election by impeding the free flow of information and blacking out newsworthy information that they have an ethical duty to cover, should be deeply troubling to fair-minded individuals across the political spectrum.

At times, key facts are omitted to obscure facts and push misleading narratives. For example, an Associated Press article commemorating the fifth anniversary of the mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 and wounded 53 made no mention of the shooter’s name, affiliation, and stated motives, instead representing the shooting as an anti-gay hate crime.(IB4)  In fact, the shooter was an Islamic supremacist who declared allegiance to the Islamic State, and did not specifically target the LGBTQ community but selected the club only after being deterred by heightened security at other potential targets.(IB5) Liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald observed:

“Democratic Senators and activist groups [are] promoting a false, conclusively disproven narrative about the Pulse shootings for their own benefits. Anti-LGBT animus was not part of that massacre. It dishonors the memory of the victims - & the LGBT cause - to lie about what happened.”

Writing in 1974, the Russian poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, troubled by the lack of awareness of young people about his nation’s true history, noted similar suppression of facts by his own government regarding the Stalin death camps: 

“Even when articles are published in newspapers about heroes of our revolution who died in the time of the Stalinist repressions, then the papers fall silent about the cause of their deaths. In a volume of [Osip] Mandelstam published now, there is not a single mention of how he died — from tortures in a prison camp.”(IB6)

In case after case, major media outlets have demonstrated no interest in matters of public integrity and ethics that challenge their favored narratives.(IB7)  When favorites lie or mislead the public, sympathetic media systematically ignore their untruths,(IB8) giving a free pass to allies.(IB9) Plagiarism(IB10) and even patterns of pathological lying to claim victimhood (IB11) are passed over by sympathetic media outlets.Biased “fact-checkers” have often failed to call out sympathetic media outlets for misleading coverage and “missing context” in omitting crucial information that does not support favored narratives, or even a complete coverage blackout on important stories.

Media use of information “blackouts” is pervasive, although space allows only a few examples to be cited here.  One can pick almost any political scandal, especially of figures on the political left, and find no coverage in many sympathetic major media outlets. The Salt Lake Tribune and New York Times present egregious examples of activists posing as journalists imposing a “blackout” on contrary information and perspectives, allowing favored “four-Pinocchio” false narratives to go unchallenged. Major material omissions constitute a dereliction of journalistic duty.(IB12)

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Yevtushenko wrote regarding the suppression of truth: "The truth is replaced by silence, and silence is a lie."

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Running Interference for Ideological Favorites

When major scandals have been exposed, sympathetic media and tech companies have gone into high gear to run interference for their favored candidate(IF1) through  desparate and unethical tactics.(IF2) For example, before the 2020 election, CNN and some other networks inverted the Hunter Biden scandal narrative, pushing a hoax that allegations of corruption were part of a "Russian disinformation" campaign.(IF3)  As a result, a substantial portion of the American electorate was misinformed. Director of National Security John Ratcliffe noted at the time that “there is no intelligence that supports” such claims, and that the Biden laptop was “not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”(IF4)  Only long after the election did CNN and some other media outlets cover key elements of the scandal(IF5) while perseverating in misleading narratives.(IF6) Tucker Carlson observed that “America's most powerful people want you to shut up about Hunter Biden,”(IF7) whereas Adam Mill observed that the tale of media interference “portends a dark winter for free speech.”(IF8)

Conducting Public Relations, Not Journalism, for Favorites

Refusal to hold favorites accountable and ask hard questions represents another major breach of journalistic ethics. The relationship of sympathetic media outlets to a favored subject is often akin to that of a public relations firm seeking to boost a client’s image, and not of independent journalists tenaciously seeking to hold the powerful accountable. Journalists covering Joe Biden’s campaign engaged in nauseating fawning;(PR1) during his inauguration, there was poetic allegory and effuse praise.(PR2) A New York Times’ piece on Kamala Harris was called out as “drooling.”(PR3) Time Magazine was blasted for an “over-the-top” attempt to make Biden “look cool” ahead of a summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.(PR4) “DNC press releases aren’t this sycophantic,” one critic wrote.

In an obsequious interview with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, CNN reporter Brian Stelter dutifully asked Psaki to comment on “what the media gets wrong.”(PR5) Stelter’s question might be rephrased as a request for direction on how media can better serve Biden’s interests.  Liberal reporter and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald called out Stelter’s “sycophantic ‘interview’” as one that should be studied in journalism school as a model of what not to do: “this is how state TV functions.”(PR6)

Some political reporters covering favored candidates have conducted themselves as if they were celebrity reporters for People or Glamor magazine.  Examples include reporters asking Biden about his chosen flavor of ice cream while ignoring the administration’s dismissal of an inquiry into covid origins and other pressing scandals,(PR7) and fawning over Kamala Harris’ fashion choices while ignoring her absence at the southern border notwithstanding the largest number of illegal arrivals in history.(PR8) In some cases, celebrity photographers have literally been called in to create “glowing profiles”for women in leftist administrations, whereas conservative women have been attacked with “hit pieces.”(PR9) Premier fashion magazine Vogue featured a flattering cover story on first lady Jill Biden in June 2021,(PR10) with no mention or inquiry regarding her history of cheating on her first husband with Joe and lying to the public for decades.(PR11)

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Joe Concha wrote in The Hill that Joe Biden’s “choreographed” press conferences “included questions that can't even be called softball, but more like T-ball when putting a beach ball on the tee.”(PR12) He continued:

“Of the 12 questions Biden received Monday, there were zero follow-ups. Zero interruptions during answers. Zero questions about any of the issues above, which rank as among the top concerns on voters' minds, along with the coronavirus.”

Such conduct by supposedly objective journalists demonstrates a breakdown of boundaries and misplacement of professional roles. Ongoing collusion between journalists and political favorites(PR13) has been called out as “the real threat to America.”(PR14)  The failure of the press corps to ask important questions in the public interest led one young lady to infiltrate the White House Press Corps and submit questions no one else was asking.(PR15)  “Kacey ‘Lego’ Montagu, a gamer from the Roblox community,” submitted the question:

"Recently the White House has had read outs of calls and has the name of the people saying ‘Senior Administration official’ so why isn’t the White House releasing the names of people in the calls, making these comments so that they can be held accountable to the American people?"

Good question, along with countless others that the American people deserve answers to. Montagu told Politico: "I love journalism, and I think the press corps is doing a pretty bad job at the moment, so I decided I would ensure some transparency and ask some questions me [sic] and some friends wanted the answer to.” If you think that the press corps is doing a poor job and that almost any thoughtful, basically honest American could do better, you are probably right.

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Letting Favored Politicians Control Their Coverage

Media organizations are supposed to be independent, rather than arms of political parties. Yet many news media organizations have ceded substantial control of the newsmaking and editing processes to favored politicians.  

Notwithstanding initial promises to bring “truth and transparency back to the briefing room” and lip service for “deep respect for the role of a free and independent press,” shortly thereafter, the Biden Administration asked reporters to submit questions in advance of press conferences, apparently to allow “officials time to craft good answers.”(PC1) This request appears to be an extension of Biden’s conduct on the campaign trail.

Politico reported that the Biden administration has frequently required that White House communication officials approve and be able to edit quotations from administration officials before they can be used in reporting. Politico wrote: 

“The practice allows the White House an extra measure of control as it tries to craft press coverage. At its best, quote approval allows sources to speak more candidly about their work. At its worst, it gives public officials a way to obfuscate or screen their own admissions and words.”(PC2)

New York Times chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker lamented that this policy allows politicians to “tak[e] control of your story, stating:”

“So instead of transparency, suddenly, the White House realized: ‘Hey, this quote approval thing is a cool thing. We can now control what is in their stories by refusing to allow them to use anything without our approval. And it’s a pernicious, insidious, awful practice that reporters should resist.”(PC3)

Yet notwithstanding muted grumbling, the sympathetic media has permitted this practice(PC4) without institutional protest or public campaign for reversal, and without cries of assault on the freedom of the press and comparisons to Nazi Germany that would inevitably have followed if this policy had been enforced by a conservative administration. (Politico notes that the “background with quote approval” practice was used often in the “tightly controlled” Obama administration, infrequently under Trump, and pervasively under Biden). 

A sympathetic media also raised little outcry about a Biden clampdown giving journalists “zero access” to border operations notwithstanding inhumane conditions, overcrowding, and rampant activity of criminal cartels including human trafficking exacerbated by Biden’s open border policy.(PC5)

These “pernicious, insidious, awful practice[s]” could not exist if journalists would stand by their ethics and refuse to be complicit, instead of doing “special favors” for favorites.

Hand-Picking Sympathetic Reporters

Closely related to the above issues is granting special access to outlets who align ideologically with a politician’s agenda. Joe Concha reported at one press conference that “the most disturbing part was what has become a theme at Biden pressers, which is to have a staffer choose which reporters ask questions, as opposed to Biden randomly calling on them instead.”(HP1) Hand-picking reporters from sympathetic organizations generates staged propaganda under the false pretense that free press access and actual journalism are occurring.

In contrast, the propagandist limits access to independent outlets that may challenge policies and ask hard questions. Despite Fox News being the most-watched US news network in Q4 2020 by a wide margin,(HP2) White House Reporter Peter Doocy confronted Press Secretary Jenn Psaki noting that Fox News has “never been on the list” of pre-approved reporters,and that he has been able to ask questions “only when he shouts after the president ‘goes through his whole list’ of pre-approved reporters.”(HP3)

Staging and Plants

Just as many “press conferences” have constituted choreographed events with the collusion between sympathetic media and favored politicians, news organizations have publicly represented other news coverage as spontaneous, only to be subsequently exposed as staged. Plants (pre-selected individuals with known talking points) have been falsely represented as random, independent, and spontaneous interviewees in order to push political narratives.

in 2020, NBC hosted a “town hall” meeting with then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and represented attendees as “undecided” voters. The same individuals had previously been featured on MSNBC as Biden voters.(SP1) ABC similarly represented its 2020 town hall election event as unscripted grassroots democracy featuring ostensibly independent community voices. It was subsequently revealed that selected questioners included a former Obama speechwriter and the wife of a former Pennsylvania Democratic candidate.(SP2) When this deception was publicly called out, the network was silent, notwithstanding the violation of public trust and journalistic ethics.(SP3)

A progressive news outlet called out CNN for staging an illegal border crossing at the Mexico-US border in Texas, citing multiple irregularities which led them to believe that the CNN video was “deliberately manufactured to present a story of a border crisis, possibly with the participation of the Border Patrol.”(SP4)

Cherry-Picking “Experts”

A classic propaganda tactic described in Edward Bernays’ 1929 book is hand-picking sympathetic “experts” who are then represented to the public as trustworthy, objective authorities. Contemporary media outlets employ this tactic routinely.

Gawker founder Alex Pareene wrote in the progressive New Republic that media outlets (in this case, the Washington Post fact-checker) cherry-pick data and experts to support their desired conclusions, promoting dogma in the process.(CP1) 

Just Facts president James Agresti noted that USA today dismissed numerous robust sources documenting multiple factual errors in their writeup by citing the contrary opinion of a cherry-picked partisan “expert.”(CP2)  Agresti wrote: “The article, written by USA Today’s Chelsey Cox, contains 10 misrepresentations, unsupported claims, half-truths, and outright falsehoods.” After sourcing the contrary evidence, he continued:

“Cox describes this stunning array of documented facts with the phrase ‘Agresti argues’ and then rejects all of them in favor of an unsubstantiated claim from a progressive lawyer. That’s not fact checking but propagandizing.”

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For over a year, misleading coverage and fraudulent “fact-checks” by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, and Facebook labeled concerns that the covid-19 virus may have accidentally emerged from a lab as a fringe “conspiracy theory.”(CP3) The widely-cited “expert” was EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, whose organization “funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for years” and faced “a clear conflict of interest.”  Other press coverage, including a February 2020 letter in the British medical journal The Lancet signed by 27 scientists who “strongly condemn[ed] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” was orchestrated by Daszak,(CP4) notwithstanding the letter’s statement that its signatories “declare no competing interests.”  Several signers have since recanted these claims. Daszak further thanked Fauci in April 2020 emails for “dispelling the lab leak theory.” WaPo’s Glenn Kessler featured Daszak in a “fact-check” video in May 2020 and then taunted critics claiming that “it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from a lab.” Over a year later, Kessler acknowledged that the lab leak theory was credible.(CP5)  There is no evidence that any of these media organizations had expressed ethical concerns about engaging Daszak as an expert.

These false media narratives did not arise from unusual failures of rigorous journalistic vetting processes or brief ethical lapses.  They arose from standard operating procedures that are pervasive in America’s politicized newsrooms: selecting biased partisans or otherwise conflicted individuals as “experts” to impose a favored viewpoint as factual. No matter how flimsy the “experts’” claims, how dubious their quackery, and how blatant their biases and ethical conflicts, others are not permitted to disagree.

The selection of “experts” on the basis of ideology subverts the process of discovering truth on the basis of evidence and honest appraisal and supplants it with agenda-driven narratives. Facts and reason do not matter to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”(CP6)

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Anonymous Sources Masking Partisan Bias

Even more cowardly is the growing citation of “anonymous” authorities. In multiple cases, claims attributed by anonymous sources have been found to be fraudulent.(AS1) Leftist media outlets have been criticized for repeated systemic bias in pushing false stories with anonymous sourcing .(AS2)  One partisan “tell-all” source claiming to be a “senior administration official” was later revealed to be nothing of the sort.(AS3)  

“Corroborating” False Stories

Repeatedly, media outlets have represented stories attacking unfavored figures as being thoroughly vetted and collaborated by multiple sources, only for the claims subsequently to be revealed as false and the “corroboration” based on circular attribution to an unreliable partisan source.(CF1)

Presenting Partisan Activists as Whistleblowers (PA)

Lying partisans purveying favored false narratives have received wide publicity as media darlings,(PA1) even as true whistleblowers are attacked and ignored.

Lying

Lying, whether to impugn designated enemies(L1) or boost favorites, is one of the most widespread propaganda tactics.  Media organizations have engaged in blatant lying to convey favored narratives(L2) and to silence or discredit critics,(L3) including with misattribution of false quotes to political “enemies”(L4) 

Even media “fact-checkers” have often given a “free pass” for favorites to lie.(L5) The Washington Post “fact checker” has been cited for habitual lying to push ideological narratives and cover for favorites.(L6)

The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin enumerated ten major media lies that have been pushed to mold public opinion.(L7)  Scott Jennings documented numerous examples to demonstrate, in his words, that falsehood pushed by favored politicians is “aided by a media complex that laps it up and uncritically regurgitates it.”(L8)  One media organization that habitually lies for partisan gain has been characterized as “the enemy of the truth.”(L9) Citing examples of media dishonesty, Greg Gutfield observed that media is “the only industry designed to lie, then create awards to champion their lies.”(L10)

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is an extreme form of lying in which facts which are visible or readily verifiable to even casual observers are denied and supplanted with the favored narrative.  Gaslighting involves a synthesis of multiple propaganda techniques. Ian Haworth observed regarding pervasive media gaslighting to repackage the 2020 race riots, one of the most destructive and costly man-made disasters in recent American history, as “peaceful” or “mostly peaceful protests:

“Media outlets like CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have engaged in, arguably, the worst and most blatant act of journalistic gaslighting in modern American history.  Their abandonment of journalistic integrity involves several tactics:

“Telling lies — Stating objective and proven falsehoods.

Ignoring information — Lying by omission, involving an intentional failure to report on certain events, the attempt to use anecdotal experiences as evidence, or the omission of crucial context with the goal of altering the narrative.

“Downplaying or mischaracterizing — Describing the bare bones of an event while hiding its true nature by diluting with intentionally passive language or obfuscating with vague language.

“Defending — Reporting the bare bones of an event while implicitly or explicitly justifying actions, sometimes with the use of irrelevant details.

“Shifting the blame — Directly or indirectly assigning blame, often to someone who is arguably a victim, based on the structure of the report or the details included or omitted.

“Editorializing — Assuming or projecting motive or viewpoint without evidence in order to justify an unsubstantiated conclusion.

“Some tell outright lies. Some ignore crucial details, such as the context behind police shootings. Some downplay the nightly riots as ‘mostly peaceful protests.’ “Some mischaracterize events with irrelevant details, or excuse or justify the violence. Some shift the blame for violence, explicitly naming the political affiliations of some and ignoring the political affiliation of others. Some make unsubstantiated assumptions to justify their conclusion.”(G1)

Junk science “research” papers composed by partisan activists purporting to show that “there is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover” and that social media companies do not censor conservatives exemplify gaslighting.  MSNBC host Joy Reid has  been blasted for “turning the gaslight up to 100” and playing “language games” to propagandize racist Critical Race Theory (CRT) dogma.(G2)

Distraction and Misdirection

Media outlets have pushed favored narratives through misdirection and distraction. When information on Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings with China came to light, NBC News challenged the narrative by “debunking irrelevant Hunter Biden docs” by tweeting “about a random document almost no one has seen. It’s not connected to what Bobulinski is accusing Joe Biden of.”(DM1) The impression was conveyed to readers that the trending allegations had been debunked, when in fact the outlet was engaged in misdirection by citing an irrelevant document that had not been in the news.

Scapegoating

Scapegoating is a form of misdirection that involves placing blame on a third party, often to distract from the culpability of oneself or favored individuals or groups. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documented in the Gulag Archipelago that scapegoating was a pervasive tactic of Soviet Communism, where paranoid and absurd allegations were routinely made against individuals and groups as “wreckers” to distract from the chronic failures, constant shortages and grinding poverty of the socialist “worker’s utopia.”

The New York Times cited attacks on Israel by the terror group Hamas in May 2021 as evidence that Trump’s Middle East diplomacy was not working, despite the fact that Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, had been president since January.(SG1)  This scapegoating was used to distract from Biden administration policies incentivizing terrorists.(SG2) 

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Projection

Accusing others of doing what they themselves are doing(PJ1) is a tactic involving gaslighting, misdirection, and scapegoating refined by totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It serves multiple propaganda purposes, including inciting the public against political opponents, however baseless or absurd the charges. Projection onto political enemies with the facade of moral indignation also distracts from the propagandists’ own conduct and discredits those who would attempt to scrutinize or hold them accountable. Surely they could not be engaged in the very activities they accuse others of when they have expressed emphatic moral outrage!

One example is controversial ex-ESPN anchor Jemele Hill's attacks on West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, excoriating him for not supporting a highly partisan election bill as a "cowardly, power-hungry white dude."(PJ2)  The disastrous HR1 “For the People” bill is a partisan power grab which has been noted to “imperil free and fair elections.”(PJ3) Supporting bipartisanship and engaging in good-faith dialogue to find common ground are viewed as important by mainstream Americans.  Yet Hill, along with some of her media colleagues, flipped the narrative to allege that Manchin, rather than the advocates of this bill that critics say would “enshrine fraud” and that state attorneys general have warned would “make opportunities for voter fraud ‘the law of the land,’”(PJ4), is the one who is power-hungry, while adding gratuitous attacks on his race.

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Biden press secretary Jenn Psaki, a former CNN contributor and Obama administration official, has turned press briefings into a forum for gaslighting and misinformation. Psaki bizarrely claimed that the “defund the police” movement was pushed by Republicans, not Democrats.(PJ5)  Even Democrats are well aware that Psaki’s claim is fraudulent. Just two days later, Democratic House Majority Whip James Clyburn noted that the signature Democratic platform of “defund the police” was “cutting the throats of the party.”(PJ6). The Washington Post fact-checker rated the White House’s creative but fraudulent claim as false with three Pinocchios.(PJ7)  Yet projecting toxic positions of her own party onto opponents with bizarre conspiracy narratives is easier for the Biden White House than dealing honestly with the issues. This conduct is enabled by many media organizations that refuse to hold the administration accountable, no matter how outrageous the claims.

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Imputing False Motives

Imputation of false motives is a propaganda tactic invoking confirmation bias, or interpretation of information in a way that supports favored narratives and beliefs, and projection onto third parties. The attribution of negative motives and agendas to favored groups and individuals is disallowed no matter how clear the evidence, whereas the worst possible motives are imputed without evidence to unfavored groups and individuals. The propagandist’s conclusions are determined by favored narrative and agenda, not evidence. New Zealand journalist Lushington Brady observed:

“It’s funny how the mainstream media’s mind-reading abilities just come and go, when it comes to terrorism. There are times the media are able to divine instantly a terrorist’s motives. Even if that means flatly contradicting even what the terrorist says their motives were. Other times, though, the media are flummoxed. Bewildered. Even if the terrorist very specifically selects targets and clearly states their motivations, the media remain all at sea. It all seems to depend on the terrorist’s skin colour, religion and, most importantly, who their victims are.

“For instance, Man Haron Monis, the Lindt Cafe [Australia] terrorist, was a Muslim who pledged allegiance to ISIS, shouted Allahu Ackbar! and demanded a Shahada flag to wave. The media were puzzled about his motives. Mental illness, perhaps? On the other hand, Robert Aaron Long clearly said that he shot up a trio of 'massage parlours' because of his sexual addiction. Nuh-uh, scoffed the media, who just knew it was because of ‘racism’. Timothy McVeigh flatly stated that he was an agnostic, and his anti-government views were not dissimilar to something you’d read from an impeccable leftist like Noam Chomsky. Naturally, the media knew better: McVeigh was a ‘right-wing, Christian white supremacist.’ After all, the media just know these things when they see them.

“The rest of the time, though, they refuse to see what they don’t want to know. [The GOP Baseball team shooter] was only a Bernie Sanders campaigner and Rachel Maddow fan, who targeted a group of top Republican politicians, had a list of Republicans in his pocket and specifically asked bystanders if the people on the baseball field were Republicans. Aside from that, though, it’s a total mystery.

“Besides, start noticing that the media and the FBI are selectively running cover for certain, apparently protected, terrorist groups, and you might start wondering about other ‘unsolved’ crime mysteries…”(IM1)

Reframing News by Attacking Opponents’ Response

Reframing news by attacking opponents’ responses is another distraction/misdirection propaganda device. In covering power-grabs or other dubious and unethical conduct by political allies, propagandists often ignore the core story and instead attack political opponents for objecting, painting them as petty, partisan, and out of touch. Ian Haworth wrote:

“When a Democrat does something ‘bad,’ the story is that Republicans ‘pounced,’ drawing focus away from the actions Democrats would rather obscure. There are so many examples that ‘Republicans pounce’ has become a Leftist cliché. “Ocasio-Cortez Team Flubs a Green New Deal Summary, and Republicans Pounce” is one wonderful example. The phrase is so hilariously overused that Tucker Carlson joked in 2019 that ‘the symbol of the Republican party might have to be switched from an elephant to a tiger’ due to its apparent propensity for pouncing...the Left are now partnering this strategy with a clear effort to delegitimize such criticism by predefining any such reaction as inherently conspiratorial.”(RA1)

Another example is National Public Radio attacking conservatives for opposition to Critical Race Theory (CRT), which it describes as “an academic approach to examining U.S. institutions through the lens of race.”  Demonstrating the propaganda tactic of cherry-picking biased “experts” whose opinions are imposed as authoritative, NPR cites partisan sources to claim that the opposition is merely “the latest GOP effort to use cultural issues to drive voters to the polls.”(RA2) Conservatives are smeared with claims that opposition is anti-scholarly and politically motivated as NPR insinuates without evidence that this is the latest in a string of petty partisan behaviors. Reasons why many find CRT problematic and divisive are never acknowledged, nor does NPR address CRT’s troubled “scholarship” and underlying ideological biases. 

Critique and debate are part of the scholarly process. There is no shortage of fringe theories in academia, yet NPR implies that CRT is entitled to uncritical adoption by schools and government merely because some “academics” have advocated these views. By the same standards, Marxism and countless conflicting ideologies have long been discussed and debated academically.  Yet CRT is, as critics have noted, not an academic approach at all.  Not only is rigorous peer-reviewed scholarship proving CRT’s claims conspicuously lacking; the theory fails basic standards of the scholarly process. 

What reasonable person, implies NPR, could possibly disagree with the teaching of CRT? Long before the 2020 riots and the accompanying financial windfall for the CRT industry, Black scholar Coleman Hughes dismantled critical race theory as based on ideological assertions rather than competent scholarship.(RA3)  Coleman documented that guru Abram X. Kendi’s CRT bible “How To Be An Antiracist” is “wrong on its facts and in its assumptions.”Coleman observes that “the book is poorly argued, sloppily researched, insufficiently fact-checked, and occasionally self-contradictory.” Kendi’s work, he notes, reads as a “conversion story” rather than a product of scholarship, and it is not clear that Kendri’s statements are intended as “factual claims subject to empirical scrutiny” rather than “as diary entries to be accepted as personal truths.” Kendi has a tenuous grasp on reality, having believed in high school that white people were “literally aliens.” Coleman documents that “Kendi’s goals are openly totalitarian” and observes that Kendri’s readers will learn “less about how to be antiracist than about how to be anti-intellectual.” 

Yet NPR abandons objectivity to push “revisionist history” and ideological agenda. Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo noted of the NPR piece: “It's like a headline from 1981 saying: ‘Republicans across the country are decrying communism, a political approach that emphasizes sharing resources and caring for one another.’"(RA4)  Amid widespread critique of the NPR piece, commentators also acknowledged that CRT is in no way an “academic approach.”

Mainstreaming Favored Extremists, Marginalizing Opponents

Echo-chamber media partisans twist language to represent favored groups and individuals on the extreme of the political spectrum as mainstream, while attempting to marginalize political opponents. This tactic has long been used by authoritarians, and is specifically called for in Marxist Herbert Marcuse’ doctrine of “repressive tolerance.”

Media representation of Kamala Harris, the Senate Democrat with the farthest-left record in the Senate and the lowest rate of participation in bipartisan legislation, as a “pragmatic moderate”(ME1) is an example of both gaslighting and trying to mainstream favored extremists. This is also the case for identification of far-left radicals in Biden’s cabinet as centrists.(ME2)  For another example, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has smeared election integrity audits as “a continuation of the insurrection.” (ME3)

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