(83)The Media: A Key Battleground in a Total War

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The Media: A Key Battleground in a Total War

The communist philosophy of struggle spares no means and respects no moral bottom line in order to achieve its political objectives. In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump opposed “political correctness” and declared his advocacy of measures to shift America from the far-left to the right: a return to traditional values, rule of law, tax cuts to revitalize the economy, a renewal of people’s reverence and humility before God, and so on. His outspokenness threw liberals into a panic. Armed with the mainstream media, they lashed out with an all-out assault against Trump.

During the presidential campaign, the left-wing media used various methods to willfully demonize and denigrate Trump while ostracizing his supporters, who were described as racists, sexists, anti-immigrant xenophobes, and uneducated whites. That is, the media tried to influence the results of the election by manipulating public opinion. Apart from a small number of media outlets, almost 95 percent of the media repeatedly predicted that Trump would definitely lose. Against all expectations, Trump defeated his rival and was elected forty-fifth president of the United States.

Under normal circumstances, no matter how fierce the campaign trail may be, the different parties and groups should return to normal operation after the election is over. More importantly, the media should uphold the principle of fairness, put national interests first, and maintain the principle of media neutrality. However, after the 2016 presidential election in the United States, we have seen that the media has continued its campaign-trail frenzy even at the risk of its public image.

Most media outlets deliberately ignored the achievements of the Trump administration, such as the stock market soaring to record levels, American diplomatic achievements, and the near-total eradication of the Islamic State (ISIS). With the unemployment rate hitting an eighteen-year low in the United States, the American economy is enjoying a revival. Furthermore, the media is doing everything possible to hamstring the Trump administration by making groundless accusations. For example, the media stirred up a conspiracy theory of collusion between Trump and Russia, but a special investigation has not found any evidence to support this. A Congressional report has stated unambiguously that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia.

In order to attack Trump, the media also generated a lot of fake news. In December 2017, a TV news giant had to suspend two senior journalists for four weeks without pay and redact their work because they had fabricated fake reports that Trump had ordered Michael Flynn to make contact with Russia. Finally, the two reporters were forced to leave the TV station. This particular team had previously made outstanding accomplishments, winning four Peabody Awards and 17 Emmy Awards, but fake news brought them shame and disgrace.

When President Trump condemned the infamous MS-13 gang, especially those members who had entered the United States as illegal immigrants, he said, “They’re not people. These are animals, and we have to be very, very tough.” However, the major media in America immediately took it out of context, claiming that Trump said that illegal immigrants were animals.

In June 2018, a photo of a crying Honduran girl was widely circulated in the media and on the internet. This little girl and her mother were stopped by border patrol when trying to sneak into the United States. The media claimed that the girl was forcibly separated from her mother and used this opportunity to criticize Trump’s border policies and zero-tolerance stance toward illegal immigration. Later, Time magazine combined the photo of the little girl with a photo of Trump on the magazine cover, adding the caption “Welcome to America” to ridicule Trump. However, the girl’s father later told the media that border officials had not separated her from her mother.

According to studies conducted by the Media Research Center, Trump was the main focus of the evening news broadcast by the three main U.S. media networks over the last two years, taking up one-third of the total airtime used by the evening news. In 2017, 90 percent of coverage given to Trump was negative, while positive coverage was only 10 percent. In 2018, negative coverage reached 91 percent. The report concluded: “Without question, no President has ever been on the receiving end of such hostile coverage, for such a sustained period of time, as has Trump. …”

However, the American public is becoming more aware of fake news. From a poll conducted by Monmouth University in April 2018, the percentage of Americans who felt that “the major media outlets were reporting fake news” increased from 63 percent in the past year to 77 percent. In 2016, a Gallup poll found that America’s trust in the media had sunk to a new low, with only 32 percent of people having a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media, down 8 percentage points from the previous year. Unsurprisingly, the owner of a large media company lamented that “fake news is the cancer of our times.”

Judging from the results of the U.S. election, half of Americans support Trump, but the attitude taken by the media is literally one-sided. Under these abnormal circumstances, Trump is attacked and demonized because he strongly advocates the restoration of tradition, and his ideals cannot coexist with the anti-traditional ideology of the Left. If the media’s attacks on Trump are able to cause the public to lose their confidence in him, this would achieve their underlying objective—to prevent society from returning to tradition.

More worrying, however, is that many media outlets have become catalysts for magnifying radical rhetoric, provoking animosity and hatred, and polarizing the population, thereby further widening the cracks in society. Basic ethics have been thrown out, and consequences are ignored to the point that destroying oneself so as to bring about the demise of an opponent has become acceptable. The country has been pushed to a state of extreme chaos and danger.


From Chapter Thirteen: Hijacking the Media

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In 2018, 91 percent of coverage given to Trump was negative.
 
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