In light of the coming midterm elections, I discovered an interesting poll put out by The New York Times/Siena. The respondents were asked if they thought democracy was under threat and, if so, what was the biggest threat? Ironically enough, right, left, and center all agree that the mainstream media is the biggest threat to democracy. Fifty-nine percent of respondents believe the mainstream media is a major threat and 25% think it’s a minor threat. This is not hard to imagine. If you’re a conservative, your distrust of the mainstream media is grounded in its decades-long descent into lying and colluding with Democrat politicians.
A perfect example of the media feeding the country a narrative instead of the unvarnished truth would be the George Floyd riots, also known as the summer of rage. Candace Owens, in her documentary “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold,” calls out the media for feeding the lie that allowed Black Lives Matter to extort “dollars from white America” by “using Black emotion and Black pain.” No help was offered. No truth was told. Instead, Black people were exploited for media gain.
Some Republicans who are concerned that the election rules being unilaterally changed for COVID-19, including increased bulk-mail balloting, affected the election results. After all, some of the critical swing states were won by Joe Biden by very slim margins — about 43,000 votes across three states decided the victor. The mainstream media has done its darndest to distract from these concerns by pointing to Jan. 6 as the trump card.
The interesting point this poll clearly demonstrates is that the country is tired of being fed narratives instead of being told the news in an unbiased way. The poll also asked respondents how they would solve the problem of threatened democracy. The majority, 84%, said we can fix our democracy through our laws and institutions, and 41% wanted to solve it democratically by improving laws, processes, and general systems.
Maybe that’s the biggest takeaway from all this data: that Americans don’t hate each other, but they’re being polarized by a media determined to divide us from one another, whipping up madness where mere concern would suffice. And what’s more, all Americans can feel it. This means that sanity may reign once again, so long as Americans reconnect with each other rather than believing everything they see on the news from both sides. Americans have the hope of a future with a thriving democratic republic, if only we can learn how to talk to one another and tune out the noise that is the mainstream media. Americans should unite not incite.
Norman Phillips,
Woodland
