We’re all pretty familiar with the culture of deception that has infected much of today’s news media. Some of this is cynically driven by overt ideological agendas. Some is also the result of ingrained bias on the part of the compilers and presenters of “information” about current events, being largely imparted by the modern J schools that train and “certify” our journalists.
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True, some news sources are more objectively reliable than others, and it remains our responsibility to properly judge them all on this criterion.
Using news manipulation to motivate public policy was showcased to me when in high school history class. William Randolph Hearst used his vast newspaper empire to provoke the U.S. into going to war against Spain. The cost was, fortunately, not particularly great, and it launched the career of a subsequently famous world leader, Theodore Roosevelt.
Nowadays, we have a plethora of information sources. Google is currently attracting a lot of scrutiny; others are likely to be next. But the First Amendment gives free rein to sources of propaganda as well as those of genuine information. It remains to the audience of all this blather to scrutinize their input.
There are also the two prevailing methods of deception: commission and omission. Outright lying is more easily spotted than leaving out pertinent details, so omission is often a “go-to” for deceivers.
A fairly recent example is the COVID panic. In order to establish a precedent for a catastrophic pandemic, here and there reference was made to the “Spanish” influenza that happened around the time of the First World War. The death toll was far greater than with COVID, partly because of the state of medical technology at that time. What was omitted from the common narrative was that the influenza mostly killed young people, whereas COVID was and is considered particularly dangerous for the elderly.
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Scientific American, prior to its capture by a woke mob, not only explained the statistical exclusion of elderly victims, but also said the first record of the disease was at a National Guard base in Massachusetts, not Spain. The infection spread throughout the rest of the world after the soldiers at the base were deployed to the war in Europe. The article explained the possibility of the age disparity by suggesting that there may have been an earlier flu pandemic in the late nineteenth century that inoculated the survivors of that event, who were then the elderly of the time of WW1. A physician friend, who also read the article, suggested the other possibility of a cytokine storm, where young immune systems can react to infections with much greater intensity than with older folks. They can literally drown in their own phlegm.
This brings us to the mother of all modern deceptions: global warming, or climate change. The perpetrators of this hoax are, thus far, successfully relying on the general public’s pervasive ignorance of meteorology, climatology and paleontology. This falls under the heading of omission. Underpinning this pervasive deception is the eternal fact that fear is a great motivator, though it is not usually conducive to reasonable reactions.
What next? As dire predictions continually fail to materialize, the climate change hoax may be losing ground. Regardless of fear, people still like to live their lives in peace and comfort. Americans, especially, are inherently suspicious of demagogues who are trying to enslave the masses and reduce their standard of living. The strident true believers keep pushing to punish the rest of us who eat meat and enjoy the convenience of automobiles and gas appliances.
Meanwhile, a particular place in Hell should still be reserved for the purveyors of a deception by commission that led to the “Great” Recession of 2008. For several years, the demagogues of the left kept flogging “redlining” as an example of minority persecution at the hands of racist lending institutions. Ultimately, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977. Eventually, the legal mandate to look the other way when considering credit score while granting purchase mortgages to designated “minorities,” led to a plethora of uncreditworthy borrowers running up a mass of questionable debt.
This led to an avalanche of foreclosures. Ordinary sellers were harmed by the price depression resulting from all of the distressed properties falling onto the market. Paul Gigot of the Washington Post penned “The Fannie Mae Gang” to describe the damage done by lending home purchase money to uncreditworthy borrowers. Thomas Sowell has since pointed out that, prior to the CRA, the foreclosure rate among inner-city minorities was identical to the population as a whole. Yeah, another crummy hoax.
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Image via Pixnio.