Opinion/Editorial
THE MASS MEDIA SURGEs TOWARD THE RIGHT
Just before this upcoming, and supposedly ‘change things for all time’ mid-term elections, the mass media turns ever more right, which can be a good thing if you are from the conservative side or a bad thing if from the more liberal.
The New York Times, for example, a supposed bastion of liberalism, put out its morning paper on 10-27-22 with the elections only nine days out) with a front page that splashed only two articles across the top of that page. Those articles were all about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and How inflation is still raging across the nation. There was an article on the stunning and huge incident wherein the Speaker of the House had her home broken into and her husband badly beaten with a hammer right in the presence of responding police officers. That article, however, was placed down at the bottom right of the page and the picture of Pelosi’s husband was smaller than that of Jerry E. Lewis, who passed away the day before.
As the writer of these newsreels also publishes a newspaper, I can tell you that this placement of articles alone sends a message, and that message is a message about the paper’s shift to the right and along with that its intent to sway the election results toward the right on the 7th of November. The body of the articles on Musk were also slanted right. Musk will ‘have the opportunity to view his political stand on current issues’ with this new control over messages that go out to tens of millions of people every day. The other article’s interior message is all about how Inflation will not abate because the people who got all the money in the stimulus plans are still spending that money. Further inside the paper, in the first section, Ron Johnson is given half a page to deliver his message about running for the center, not as an advertisement but as an actual news article. That’s a right-wing message in itself. There’s also a huge full-page article about how most executives of larger companies in the U.S. believe the Saudis are right to cut production of their oil. Why? Well, apparently, and according to the Times, that’s because the ‘Saudis know oil and all about the energy business and their judgment is best to follow.’ That these messages, in all of these articles, are ridiculously based upon nothing at all except opinion and hot air is not mentioned. Right along with the Times the networks and cable news channels are also shifting right, with special emphasis on CNN and MSNBC, supposedly television bastions of the liberal side of the culture.
CNN runs energy stories with big signs showing gasoline at seven dollars a gallon, or more, even though the current price is $3.54 and going down rapidly. MSNBC trumpets the supposed fact that Republicans are rising up to lead the Democrats dramatically in polls, even though it would be hard for the Republicans to rise higher than they were already considered to be in this coming election. The shift of media attention to the right will have a rightward effect. Television is still far and away the greatest ‘voice’ in the culture. The Internet isn’t even close when it comes to either the news or the expression of political opinion. Watch for the effect of this in the results.
Michael Moore, the noted and famous pundit, recently predicted that the election would go massively to the Democrats across the board. This is the man, almost alone, who also predicted that Trump would win handily in 2016, even though Moore himself is a very convicted liberal. The obvious fact (to me) that Trump could not have won the election in 2016 without chicanery being involved was, and remains pretty clear to me, but that’s another issue entirely. Trump’s win and service did not sink the nation into either civil war or authoritarianism, and neither will those results occur no matter who gets elected in the coming election. The mass media is even more powerful than it was back in 2016, however, and that power will very definitely affect the outcome.
