Corporate media – Freedom First Network https://freedomfirstnetwork.com There's a thin line between ringing alarm bells and fearmongering. Sat, 09 Nov 2024 08:34:35 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.2 https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/cropped-Square-32x32.jpg Corporate media – Freedom First Network https://freedomfirstnetwork.com 32 32 178281470 Cenk Uygur’s Corporate Media and Election Post Mortem Is Shockingly Accurate https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/cenk-uygurs-corporate-media-and-election-post-mortem-is-shockingly-accurate/ https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/cenk-uygurs-corporate-media-and-election-post-mortem-is-shockingly-accurate/#respond Sat, 09 Nov 2024 08:34:35 +0000 https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/cenk-uygurs-corporate-media-and-election-post-mortem-is-shockingly-accurate/ Some conservatives can count on one hand the number of times they’ve agreed with anything “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur said. Most conservatives couldn’t think of a single time.

This one is a first for me.

The radical leftist posted a short but potent critique of how Democrats view their corporate media lapdogs and it’s actually spot on.

Democrats view media as marketing. That’s why they get so angry when any left-wing media doesn’t agree with them 100%. And they got used to mainstream media, like Morning Joe and The View, being pure propaganda for them. So, they’ve developed a very unhealthy entitlement complex.

There’s a lot @joerogan doesn’t agree with Trump on, but Trump didn’t give a shit. He took the win. Democrats think it’s unacceptable unless the host agrees ahead of time to give them everything. They’ll take nothing instead. Ok, well that’s what you wound up with – nothing.

It fundamentally misunderstands the current media dynamics. You’re not getting it – we don’t need you, you need us. How many elections are the Democrats going to lose before they figure this out?

To be fair, it’s mostly corporate media’s fault they’re treated this way by Democrats. They bowed before Barack Obama and then never stood back up to face future Democrats. They got so used to kissing his butt that they started kissing whatever blue butt was in front of their faces.

It’s a crude visually, but it’s accurate.

As I’ve long said, the far left and the far right share a common disdain for mainstream interests. Granted, the far left has been willing to ignore those interests as they pertain to the media because it has benefitted their side for so long, but that doesn’t mean they don’t recognize the hypocrisy. Uygur is just voicing something he’s known clearly for a very long time.

The funny (or sad, depending upon your perspective) part about all of this is that corporate media would be MORE effective at promoting their UniParty Swamp puppet masters if they pushed back against them sometimes. There’s a reason why đť•Ź as a platform and podcasting as a medium are viewed more favorably than corporate media and left-aligned Big Tech.

It’s not because there are no Democrats on đť•Ź; there are actually more Democrats than Republicans there.

It’s not because there are no leftist podcasts; some of the most powerful podcasters, including Rogan, are or were Democrats.

The reason corporate media has sunk so low on the trust scale is because they’ve become agenda-driven instead of truth-driven. That has always been the case to some extent, but over the last eight years it has become so commonplace that members of corporate media are no longer trying to hide their biases. They hate Trump and they’re willing to admit it. They hate Trump’s supporters and they no longer disguise their disdain.

The big concern for conservatives shouldn’t be media continuing on their unhinged, leftist path. The longer they do it, the less they’ll be trusted. The real concern for conservatives is if corporate media wakes up and starts reporting facts instead of narratives. of course, that would take a complete overhaul and it’s unlikely any of them have the stomach for that.

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Gaslighting Media and Big Tech Are Trying to Manufacture a Kamala Win https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/gaslighting-media-and-big-tech-are-trying-to-manufacture-a-kamala-win/ https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/gaslighting-media-and-big-tech-are-trying-to-manufacture-a-kamala-win/#respond Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:16:25 +0000 https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/gaslighting-media-and-big-tech-are-trying-to-manufacture-a-kamala-win/ (Substack)—Scholars, philosophers, shrinks, scientists, and mystics across time have attempted to explain the power of positive thinking. Those who believe in a particular outcome tend to see that outcome happen. Even quantum physicists have their own theories that have panned out in the laboratory.

Whatever energy, spirit, or superpower one wants to attribute to the phenomenon, it’s definitely real. Henry Ford broke it down for the individual with his famous quote, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

It works even better on a mass scale. If a large group of people can be convinced that something is going to happen, it often does even if outside forces point to a different outcome. This is important on Election Day because corporate media is in the process of trying to convince the world that Kamala Harris can win.

Here’s a snapshot from Google News “Full Coverage” of their top story this morning:

Google News

None of those headlines are accurate. The first one is particularly egregious in its gaslighting because the Kamala Harris campaign is in full-blown panic mode while the Trump campaign is trying their best not to seem overconfident.

Corporate media, upon orders from their UniParty Swamp and Deep State commanders, are trying to get Democrats pumped up so they can manufacture a win. At least that’s what they’re being told, and let’s hope that’s true. The alternative is ugly.

Donald Trump is on the brink of a massive landslide victory. As much as I hate public polls, it’s telling that the most accurate poll from 2020, Atlas Intel, has him winning all of the battleground states while being competitive in Minnesota and Virginia. Add New Hampshire to that list and likely a couple of “surprise” tight races in blue states and Trump should coast to well over 300 Electoral College votes and a majority of the popular votes.

In a free and fair electoral process based on legal American citizen voters, it’s possible that we could have results on election night. Of course, the caveat is “free and fair.” That’s very unlikely to happen unless the Democrats’ internal polling shows Trump achieved his goal of “too big to rig.”

This is why I’m relatively confident (slighting over 50% chance) that the sudden surge of unified gaslighting by corporate media trying to tell us that Kamala is going to happen is pure hopium. If not, then we’re witnessing their attempt to suspend disbelief. In that scenario, they’re prepared to steal the election and they need as many Americans as possible to disregard everything we’ve seen for the last month so we can accept the false results they have planned.

I’m not going to elaborate on the potential for a stolen election. We’ll cross that unfortunate bridge if it happens, but I don’t think it will. Every single indicator points to a Trump landslide. The only reason more pollsters and analysts aren’t saying it is because most of them hope it’s not true.

Let’s assume the indicators are right and corporate media is lying. That’s not exactly a tough pill for most Americans to swallow, not with trust in corporate media at an all-time low.

The only thing we should trust is that God is in control. If He wants Trump in the White House again, there’s no measure of cheating that can overpower His will. And if our judgment is due and Kamala is His choice, then we need to buckle up and brace ourselves.

Ephesians 6:11 comes to mind: Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

Don’t fear. Fight the good fight. Take care of yourself and your family no matter what happens with this crazy election. God is in control but He hears us. Otherwise prayer and free will would be meaningless.

For those who are not Bible-believing Christians, think positively about the outcome of this election with confidence that Donald Trump and his supporters have done enough to earn this victory. For Bible-believing Christians, do the same but throw in a prayer for good measure.

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The Establishment Media is Unaware of its Growing Irrelevance https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/the-establishment-media-is-unaware-of-its-growing-irrelevance/ https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/the-establishment-media-is-unaware-of-its-growing-irrelevance/#respond Thu, 31 Oct 2024 05:17:43 +0000 https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/the-establishment-media-is-unaware-of-its-growing-irrelevance/ (Mises)—Last week, the news media went ballistic after the owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post blocked each paper’s editorial boards from formally endorsing Kamala Harris for president. The Times editorial editor resigned in protest. Two other members of the editorial board followed her lead. Two Washington Post columnists resigned as well to signal their disapproval of the move, and many readers from both publications have reportedly canceled their subscriptions in response.

Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who are famous for reporting on Watergate while working at the Washington Post, released a statement stating their disappointment. Former executive editor Martin Baron called the decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Nineteen Washington Post columnists signed an op-ed calling the lack of an endorsement a “terrible mistake.” And the unions of both publications released statements expressing their concern over such a move.

Across the board, the cited concern is that we are just days away from a consequential election where one of the candidates poses a major threat to democracy itself. The rest of the media see the billionaires who own each outlet as “preemptively self-censoring” themselves to avoid offending Donald Trump. This “self-censorship” then, we’re told, makes it more likely that Trump will get elected.

The assumptions that underlie these concerns are worth unpacking. The first, and perhaps most foolish notion, is that an endorsement from the LA Times or Washington Post will be a consequential factor in this election. The audience of both papers already skews heavily Democrat. Also, it is no mystery to anyone who spends as little as thirty seconds scrolling through editorial headlines that the papers’ editors support Harris over Trump, and why.

A short look at the opinion and news stories in either paper is also enough to dispel the notion that either outlet’s executives are worried about displeasing Trump. Even in the “hard news” sections, Trump is framed as an unhinged fascist set to destroy the country to nurse his fragile ego, while Harris is a serious, stern, problem-solving public servant who, at worst, has made a few tactical mistakes on the campaign trail. No honest observer can seriously say these papers are “staying silent” about this election.

Above all, the intensity of the meltdown we’re seeing from media figures both inside and outside of these two publications reveals how profoundly out-of-touch most of the establishment media is about their own importance.

There was a time, mainly back in the mid-to-late-1800s, when the public got virtually all its news from newspapers. It’s hard to overstate how much power that put in the hands of the printers, and later editors and executives, who produced these papers.

As we go about our lives, we are constantly building and refining an internal model of reality that helps us better act to achieve our desired ends. Much of this model is fashioned from our own experience or the experience of our friends and families—which gets shared with us through advice and stories. To understand all parts of the world that exist outside the experience of ourselves and those we personally know, we rely on media. In the nineteenth century, the media consisted almost exclusively of books, pamphlets, and newspapers.

Because our internal models of reality are indistinguishable from reality itself and newspapers were effectively the sole source of information about current events, newspaper editors exerted an enormous amount of control over how the population saw the world. And their near-monopoly over public discourse about current events gave them a lot of authority when analyzing or endorsing the actions of politicians.

As other forms of media gained traction, however, the dominance of newspapers began to wane. That started with magazines—the first truly national news outlets—and it really accelerated with the rise of radio and television news. But the high cost of starting a new publication and the government’s early seizure of the airwaves kept control over the information space mostly in the hands of a small, establishment-friendly group.

That changed in the 1990s with the introduction of internet blogs. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could reach readers without filters, editors, or space constraints. It wasn’t obvious at first, but with this one seemingly-innocuous development, the establishment’s monopoly on the information space was shattered forever.

Now, three decades later, the consequences of such a change are much harder to ignore. From Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the campaigns of Ron Paul and later Donald Trump at home, to the Arab Spring and the passage of Brexit abroad, the internet has changed the world. Not only because it allowed people to see and hear dissenting views, but because it showed people that those views were popular.

In an election this close, neither candidate has been able to ignore the new reality we find ourselves in. Both Harris and Trump have appeared on popular podcasts, with Trump making such appearances a central part of his campaign. Last week, Trump sat for a three-hour discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, which is technically the most-watched talk show of any kind in the world by far.

Trump’s appearance on Rogan has been viewed nearly forty million times on YouTube alone (Spotify and Apple Podcasts don’t publish download numbers, but both also account for a large portion of Rogan’s listenership, so the total number is likely much higher.) The interview towers over Kamala Harris’s recent interview with Fox News, which, at 8 million viewers, had been celebrated as the highest-rated interview of the 2024 election. The internet is no longer a sideshow in our media environment. It’s the main stage.

Which is why it’s absurd to see an absolute meltdown over whether two newspapers print formal endorsements for one of the candidates. The panic can only be understood as a symptom of the legacy media being unable or unwilling to face the fact that they are no longer the main force influencing and controlling how the public sees the world.

The establishment press does still pose a serious threat with all the various ways they distort our perceptions of the truth in ways that are politically-expedient for them and their friends in government. But the hysteria last week over the withdrawn editorial endorsements demonstrates that many are still hyper-focused on some media practices that today are largely irrelevant. And that’s grounds for optimism.

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Far-Left Media Launches All-Out ‘Trump Hitler’ Blitzkrieg With 5,500 Stories In One Week https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/far-left-media-launches-all-out-trump-hitler-blitzkrieg-with-5500-stories-in-one-week/ https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/far-left-media-launches-all-out-trump-hitler-blitzkrieg-with-5500-stories-in-one-week/#respond Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:17:30 +0000 https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/far-left-media-launches-all-out-trump-hitler-blitzkrieg-with-5500-stories-in-one-week/ (Zero Hedge)—This week, the far-left corporate media hate machine unleashed a ‘blitzkrieg’ of propaganda against the American people, a clear sign of desperation as polls increasingly point toward a favorable outcome for former President Trump this November.

New data from Bloomberg shows the story count for “Trump Hitler” in MSM jumped to a mindboggling 5,500 this week – the most massive total count in the ten years Deep State muppets in MSM have called Trump a Hitler/Nazi. This is a clear indication that Biden-Obama-Harris radicals and their billionaire funders are getting increasingly desperate.

On X, conservative commentator Liz Churchill showed MSM’s information war against the American people in headlines.

The blitzkrieg of hate by Democrats started with Kamala Harris…

Harris’ accusation that Trump “wants generals like Hitler had” is based on a hearsay claim from Gen. John Kelly. This is the same man that Trump fired while in office for incompetence. The same man that claimed in 2023 that Trump called military casualties “suckers” and “losers.”  There is no proof to verify any of Kelly’s assertions.

Democrats defaulting to the ‘Trump is Hitler’ playbook are signs of desperation, especially after this…

Here’s what X users are saying about the Bloomberg data just nine days before the presidential election:

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The Shifting Media Landscape https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/the-shifting-media-landscape/ https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/the-shifting-media-landscape/#respond Fri, 18 Oct 2024 04:59:37 +0000 https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/the-shifting-media-landscape/ (The Epoch Times)—Listening to an interview with journalist Megyn Kelly, I was startled to learn that her private media company beats the mainstream legacy networks in traffic and influence.

She has six employees. When she was fired by NBC in 2018, she believed that it was the end of her career. She went to dark places in her mind.

But she bounced back with her own broadcasting company and has never been happier or more influential.

The same story has been told by Tucker Carlson, whose network is gigantic and whose influence is far beyond even the heights that he obtained at Fox in the old days. I have no direct knowledge of how many people work for his personal channel, but it is a reasonable guess that it is no more than a dozen.

Everyone knows about the success and reach of Joe Rogan’s show. Apart from that, there are many thousands more with influence in their own sectors of reach. The share of influence dominated by legacy seems to be falling dramatically. You can detect their influence in this election season in which candidates are working the podcast circuit.

You might chalk this up to technology: Everyone has the capacity now to make content and distribute it. Therefore, of course, people do it.

The real story, however, is more complicated.

A new poll from Gallup offers an intriguing look. The latest polls show trust in major media is at an all-time low. It’s fallen from a post-Watergate high in 1976 of 72 percent to 31 percent today. That is an enormous slide, impossible to dismiss as mere technological change. Along with that, the poll documents dramatic losses of trust in government and essentially all official institutions.

The loss of trust has hit all age groups but more profoundly affects people younger than 40 years old. These are folks who have grown up with alternatives and developed a sophisticated understanding of information flows, and are deeply suspicious of any institution that seeks control over public culture.

Gallup stated: “The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process. The legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is rated about as poorly as the media, with 34 percent trusting it.”

In contrast, “majorities of U.S. adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their local government to handle local problems (67 percent), their state government to address state problems (55 percent), and the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing the country (54 percent).”

It seems based on this poll that, in people’s hearts and minds, we are defaulting back to the America of Alexis de Tocqueville, a network of self-governing communities of friends and neighbors rather than a centrally managed and controlled monolith. The farther the institutions get from people’s direct experiences, the less they are trusted. That is how it should be, even aside from other considerations.

In this case, the causal factors are not only the distance and not only the technology that allows for alternatives. Legacy media has been so aggressively partisan for at least nine years that it has alienated vast swaths of the viewing audience. Top executives have known about this problem for a very long time and worked to fix it, but they face tremendous pressure from within, from reporters and technicians with Ivy educations and a dedication to woke ideology.

The New York Times after 2016 attempted to repair the damage from having so completely mishandled and miscalled the election. It hired new editors and writers, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven out in a reminder to the top brass that there was a cultural revolution afoot, and that the personal is the political and visa-versa.

The newspaper defaulted back to extreme partisanship, leaving owners and managers to figure out other paths to sustaining profitability.

As a result, it appears that an entire industry is in the process of a long meltdown with no available fixes. Huge audiences have turned away from it toward alternatives that are not necessarily partisan on the other side but simply display a dedication to telling facts and truths about which actual readers care.

A question has long mystified me: Is this loss of trust entirely because of a change in media bias, or is it that new technological options have fully revealed what might always have been there but was not widely known? I don’t have the answer to that but it is worth some reflection.

When I was a kid, there were exactly three channels on television and one local newspaper. There was never a chance to see The New York Times except perhaps at the public library. The nightly news came on at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. It lasted for 30 minutes. It opened with international news, moved to national news, turned to sports, and then the local affiliate took over with local news and weather.

There was perhaps 10 minutes per day of national news on three separate channels, each reporting more or less the same thing. That was it. People in those days chose their station based on whether they liked the voice and personality of the broadcaster. News media was highly trusted. But was that trust based on reliable and excellent reporting, or simply a reflection of all that people did not know?

In those days, my own father was deeply distrustful of what he saw on television. Somehow, he intuited that Richard Nixon was being railroaded by the Watergate scandal. He theorized that someone was out to get him, not for bad things he had done, but for the good he had done and had planned to do. He preached this opinion constantly and it set him apart from all conventional wisdom. Indeed, as a young man I knew for sure that my father was the outlier: None of my friend’s parents agreed and none of my teachers did, either.

Since then, much has come out that seems to reinforce my father’s views.

If Watergate happened in today’s world, there would be a huge explosion of opinions in all directions, with motives of all actors pushed out on every channel, and there would be widespread competition to find the real story. We certainly would not be relying on two relatively inexperienced reporters at The Washington Post.

I happen to believe that this is a good thing, even though it has come with a loss of trust. Maybe the old trust was not nearly as merited as people thought, simply because there were so few options. As the years went on, there were even more sources, starting with PBS but moving to CNN and C-SPAN. After the web came online and social media took off, that’s when the veil was really pulled back and media wholly transformed.

People on all sides of the political spectrum today express profound regret for this change. Former presidential candidate John Kerry has said that today’s media environment makes governing impossible, and Hillary Clinton has floated the idea of criminal penalties for misinformation, a word tossed around so frequently these days but rarely defined as anything other than speech that some people do not like.

All told, the rise of alternative media has surely contributed to the decline in public trust in the mainstream media. This might not reflect a fundamental change in the bias of media sources but simply the reality that we are only now fully aware of what has always been true. In that case, we are better off seeing these trends as good news all around, provided that we have an attachment to seeing reality as it is. In any case, we all should.

Returning to the Kelly/Carlson business model: They are doing far more with fewer staff members than was ever thought possible. It’s a solid prediction that many legacy media companies will be downsizing in terms of personnel in the future. They can do more with less. And they can do it with more fairness and less bias. Economic realities will likely make it so.

The entire landscape of information and media economies is dramatically shifting. That is precisely why we are hearing ever more calls for censorship. Many elites long for the old days of canned and constructed narratives with no other options. But the well-documented loss of trust makes that little more than a pipe dream. It cannot and will not happen.

The only viable path to earning audience loyalty in our times is to write and speak with fact-based integrity. Trust has to be earned.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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Kamala’s Corporate Media Hates Us https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/kamalas-corporate-media-hates-us/ https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/kamalas-corporate-media-hates-us/#respond Mon, 07 Oct 2024 22:16:41 +0000 https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/kamalas-corporate-media-hates-us/

It isn’t just FEMA. It isn’t just Doug Emhoff hitting a woman. It isn’t even the direct attacks against free speech that make our Corporate Media Industrial Complex so evil. The fact that they will only report on pro-Kamala or anti-Trump stories makes them true enemies of the people, just as Donald Trump has said.

On today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, we looked at the various ways corporate media is actually more to blame for the disasters in America than the UniParty Swamp.

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