How Can I Lie to Thee, Let Me Count the Ways

How Can I Lie to Thee, Let Me Count the Ways
The View from the Middle

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled “Lies of Omission” where I talked about how the press can mislead us all in more ways than straight out lies. They can just not cover or under report very important stories and I gave examples of where they did just that. One example I gave was the reporting on the May jobs numbers. The “experts” had suggested that we would lose nine million jobs in May and the unemployment rate would go UP to 19.0%. In actuality, we created 2.5 million new jobs and the unemployment rate went DOWN to 13.3%. These results were amazing, but the real story was the gargantuan miss by the so-called experts. CNN literally devoted five seconds to this story and didn’t even mention the vast gap between the projections and the actual results. So, what had to be the biggest story of the day was given five seconds from a network that is devoted to the news 24 hours a day. Really?

Of course, the media can just lie right to our faces also, and they have. Remember the story that President Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King from the Oval office. This, of course, was proof positive that Trump was a racist. When it was discovered that this was a lie, all we got was an “Ooops” from NBC that no one even heard. Then there was the claim that Trump said that, “all Mexicans are rapists”. When that turned out not to be true, the story just faded to black. Everyone heard the claim and no one heard any retraction or correction. Finally, Trump was called a traitor and a Russian asset for years by morally suspect John Brennan and James Clapper, but when the Mueller report came out and debunked that claim, there were no apologies or retractions for that either. Yes, the media has lied right to our faces!!

Then there is the deception of the double standard or what I will call “double vision”. It appears that President Trump can perform the exact same action as other Presidents or even candidates, but the reporting of those actions is twisted into a negative light. That happened most recently when President Trump gave a speech in front of Mount Rushmore. I actually watched that speech and found it to be one of Trump’s better moments as he honored Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt with an accurate historical tribute.

In 2008, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama visited Mount Rushmore and both CBS and CNN not only found the visits appropriate but asked both candidates if they pictured themselves joining the Presidential quartet on the Mount someday. For Obama’s visit, the media described the massive sculpture as “quite a sight” and “majestic”. In 2016 candidate Bernie Sanders visited the Mount and said of it, “This is our country at its very best”. He added that it was, “and incredible achievement” and that, “it really does make one proud to be an American.”

But, of course, all this must be changed by the lame-stream media if President Trump should dare to visit this incredible and legendary site. They must twist and contort this marvel of history and art into something disgusting and even reprehensible. So, as President Trump prepared to give his speech in front of Mount Rushmore, as 16 other Presidents have done, CNN decided that the Mount was no longer majestic or incredible or a source of pride, but now, because Trump was there, it was a, “monument to two slave owners, and on land that was wrestled away from Native Americans.” Wow, it’s amazing how blatant theirs bias has become.

And just so my readers understand, this article is not about President Trump. It is about a media that has abandoned their role as arbiters of truth. They have committed to an agenda and they will twist every story they find by making bold-faced lies, lies of omission and using the deception of their double standard to mislead you at every possible opportunity. And this is just the main-stream media. If you are using Facebook or Twitter as your source of news, the dishonesty is only magnified through the use of selective censorship or robotic manipulation which accounts for over half of their traffic and messaging. You must be diligent in your search for truth. You will have to find new sources of the news because the established media is committing journalistic malfeasance on a daily basis. This, unfortunately is our task, lest we become 2020’s version of George Orwell’s “1984”. And if you haven’t read that great book, you should do so now so you know what’s at stake.