If you want to know how media bias works, check out an unscientific poll that was conducted on the broadcast of the Saturday morning program Smerconish on CNN. The moderator, Michael Smerconish, is as moderate and as even-handed as you can get in the political arena today. Nonetheless, he still works for uber-leftist CNN, which paints the news with their liberal slant and a distorted picture of America to its mostly liberal viewers.
As a result, when their viewers were polled in live format this Saturday morning, only 11% of the respondents claimed that the government shutdown resulting in the long line at our airport was the fault of Democrats.
Now, there are many things we can argue about, but it’s indisputable that this shutdown was caused by Democrats who wanted leverage to change the procedures related to ICE.
Republicans did not vote to shut down the government; Democrats did. This is not debatable. One can try to make the argument that the Democratic shutdown was justified, but you cannot make the case that it was Republicans who precipitated the shutdown.
Now, certainly, this was not a scientific sample, but it just goes to show how predisposed the viewers of CNN were to exonerate the Democrats for a shutdown they caused. And there is no doubt that their views are shaped by the network’s biased coverage.
That refusal to lay the blame on the Dems was echoed in a Newsday editorial, which lashed out about government in general and its inability to keep the government open. They presented a “blame both sides” moral equivalency between what the Democrats and Republicans are doing. Again, the media was failing to come straight out and say that it was the Democrats who caused, and are prolonging, the shutdown.
The biased perspectives are also shaped by the placement of liberal news outlets to the top of social media outlets. The algorithms created by the lefties in Silicon Valley push to the top of your iPhone news outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, SP and CNN, which appear on the first one or two pages of your screen If you want to see a New York Post article of something from Fox, start scrolling down to the third or fourth page.
This isn’t conjecture; it was proven by analysis conducted by AllSides, a nonpartisan group that classifies news outlets by their political leanings. It reviewed a total of 166 articles that appeared on Apple News over a two-week period last October.
The New York Post noted, “Not one of the 82 articles displayed in the curated ‘top news’ section was written by outlets classified as ‘right-leaning,’” according to AllSides.
Overall, just 2% of the articles reviewed for the study came from conservative outlets, while a whopping 50% came from liberal outlets and 23% from centrist outlets.”
The implications of this are enormous. If the Democrats are shielded from backlash for the shutdown they caused, they won’t feel any pressure to relent. So the two-and-a-half-hour lines at the airport will continue.
Before you can solve a problem, you have to be able to clearly and truthfully identify the cause of the problem. When the media acts as an apologist for their team, America suffers.