Don’t believe everything you read.  Major media outlets have been caught over the years taking money to print propaganda and slant stories a certain way.  Among the paymasters are the Chinese Communist Party, left-wing foundations, super-rich Leftist George Soros, and the U.S. government.

The U.S. government has paid journalists to shill for Obamacare, green jobs, and, most recently, COVID vaccines.  Now comes news the Biden administration paid the left-wing Poynter Institute another $23,500 to train journalists how to create supposedly “balanced and bias-free” journalism.  Or at least that’s the cover story.  The U.S. Agency for Global Media has previously paid Poynter for such training in the past.  In addition, the State Department has paid Poynter $360,000 over the years for this training.

Poynter is funded by big Democrat donors like George Soros and Bill Gates.  They get their money’s worth.  Poynter started a “blacklist” of conservative news outlets it deemed “unreliable”.  Poynter was forced to retract the list after fierce criticism.  Poynter runs PolitiFact, the supposed fact-checking site that routinely attacks Republicans and conservatives.  It has had to retract numerous fact-checks, including one that called the now widely accepted lab leak coronavirus origin theory “ridiculous”.  So don’t believe everything you read in PolitiFact, either.

Poynter has urged social media platforms to censor what it deems to be ‘misinformation’.  It parlayed that campaign into a $13.2 million grant from Google to Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network to help fight so-called “misinformation”.  There’s also PolitiFact’s arrangement to censor information on Facebook.

All of this is uncomfortably close to the wide-ranging government censorship exercise – carried on with social media and left-wing advocacy group partners – now documented in multiple releases of the Twitter files and in the ongoing case Missouri and Louisiana brought against the Biden administration for censorship.  You can be assured whenever any of these people talk about ‘misinformation’, what they’re really talking about is their desire to censor all views they don’t like and to vanquish their political enemies.

The Poynter Institute is not the only journalistic enterprise shown in recent days to be pushing its political views.   To push the transgender narrative, NPR ridiculously claimed there is “limited scientific evidence” that men have a “physical advantage” over women in sports.  But biological transgender males have been trouncing real women in swimming, cycling, weight lifting, and track & field, and everybody knows it.  Moreover, females are getting hurt going up against males.  This injustice will not stand forever, NPR’s political views notwithstanding.

Untrustworthy mainstream media outlets have been so bad on other stories recently, they have been forced to issue retractions.  NPR wrongly reported Joe Biden’s son Beau died from injuries received in the military.  The New York Times and Rolling Stone – also left-wing outlets like NPR – issued corrections to stories they ran about FBI whistleblowers.   The Washington Post has issued a number of retractions recently, including the use of the terms ‘debunk’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ in a story criticizing Senator Tom Cotton for repeating the COVID lab leak theory, a theory now found credible by the Energy Department and the FBI.  MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell had to admit she was less than precise when she claimed Ron DeSantis didn’t want slavery taught in schools.

These people are so invested in getting their political enemies, they cut corners and misrepresent the facts.  Unfortunately, the media has been trending this way for years.  CNN kept running stories for two and a half years about the Trump/Russia collusion hoax when it knew there was nothing there.  And don’t forget Dan Rather, the CBS news anchor who was forced to resign in disgrace after running fake news about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service.  Left-wing partisan hacks, all.   Just like Google News which skews its news curation to favor left-wing outlets, a recent study showed.

American journalism has gone from claiming it is objective, to admitting its liberal bias, to conspiring with leftist-controlled government agencies and left-wing billionaires to weaponize its coverage and wage jihad against its political enemies.  Welcome to fascism, the combination of Big Government and Big Business.  If you still believe anything they write, all I can say is, ‘there’s a sucker born every minute.’

©2023 Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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