It’s very easy to blame the media for their bias and misinformation and it really does exist but I think we need to assume that that is already baked into our assumptions and drives our skepticism and that it’s up to each person to ferret around and find out what’s really going on. So a lot of the blame can be sheeted home to the incuriousness and disinterest of people. In short as the story below illustrates, they get what they deserve.
A case in point —
Brent Bozell of Media Research Centre which has been around and monitoring media since 1987 in the US, crunched some numbers in recent weeks that make the point and demonstrate and reflect how the media, through their bias by omission dramatically influences events.
The Hunter Biden laptop from hell story broke in the New York Post on October 14th. The laptop contained enough information (phone conversations, texts, email, dates, times, places and people) to indict Joe Biden for his activities in China.
Much, much bigger than the eight and half minutes of dead air from the Oval Office tape recordings and cover up that brought down Richard Nixon.
You would normally expect non stop coverage and investigation of the laptop story as the media viciously competed amongst themselves to be first with the latest. After all they went after Trump for 4 years over an absolute hoax. But here was something very real an tangible.
For the 2 weeks after the New York Post story, the entire network media devoted 113 hours to actual news coverage of all news. Within that 113 hours the total number of time given to the laptop story was just 21 minutes. That’s not a typo. 21 minutes. In effect it didn’t happen. The topic was verboten.
On Oct 28th Tony Bobulinski appeared on Tucker Carlson on Fox News for an entire hour and corroborated the details on the laptop, specifically the emails to and from himself and Hunter Biden and others and the meetings he had with the Biden’s. It even featured actual audio files. Ordinarily that would be explosive stuff
The next day the coverage of it was absolutely zero. Nothing at all from the network news. Crickets. Again, it didn’t happen. It never existed.
In a twisted kind of way it’s redolent of the philosophical thought experiment, “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound”? In other words if, what would normally be a major story breaks, but goes unreported or under reported, did it really happen? I guess if you don’t know about it, in your own bubble at least, the answer is no.
Here’s the kicker —
After the election the MRC ran a survey of Democrats asking them if they knew about the Hunter Biden story. 36% said they new nothing about it. 4% of that 36% said if they had known about it, they would not have voted for Joe Biden.
The MRC then took that 4% and spread it across the electoral landscape and found that if they had known, the Democrats would have cratered in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Trump would have won 289 electoral college votes.