Objective journalism is so old-fashioned. Activism is the new objectivity, at least where the liberal media are concerned.
Rather than reporting as neutral outsiders on matters of race, CNN hosts and guest actually put their hands up in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” pose that never happened while reporting on protests. They seize on mass shootings to repeat calls for stricter gun control.
The sad fact is that many journalists and news publications don’t report on climate change, health care, wages and other economic issues; they promote a liberal agenda with their so-called news. Here are the top 10 ways the media acted as anti-business or anti-capitalism activists in the past year.
1. Journalists Sound the Climate Alarm
Liberal journalists are activists about many things, but the threat of climate change is one of the most obvious; from the experts they selected, to the ominous warnings they made. The climate alarmist agenda comes with exorbitantly expensive so-called solutions. Just recently, all three broadcast networks cheered the “landmark” and “historic” agreement announced at the conclusion of the U.N. climate conference in Paris on Dec. 12, 2015.
ABC and CBS evening news programs touted it as a “turning point,” for Mother Earth, even though the agreement is non-binding, and the International Energy Agency says it would cost $16.5 trillion to fulfill its goals. No price, or question of the high costs was mentioned by network evening shows the day of the announcement.
But the media didn’t just cheerlead for the Paris conference. They spewed hot air about the threat of climate change throughout 2015, acting like activists all year long.
In January, the broadcast networks and other media rushed to report claims by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that 2014 was the “hottest year” on record.
Then-Nightly News anchor Brian Williams warned that the “striking new report” “may be difficult to reconcile in the dead of winter, the data are showing 2014 was the hottest year for the Earth in recorded history.” Except that wasn’t what the data showed. NOAA’s dataset indicated the “new record high” was within the range of “uncertainty of the dataset” and there was only a 48 percent chance it was actually the warmest. NASA’s probability was just 38 percent!
In the July heat, the media latched on to climate alarmist James Hansen’s latest claims that sea levels could rise 10 feet, calling it a “bombshell” study, in spite of past predictions that failed. His paper hadn’t even been peer reviewed, when the media started promoting Hansen’s conclusions.
CNN even started a “Two Degrees Celsius” initiative, giving reporter John Sutter (who compared climate change to terrorism in a recent op-ed), eight months to warn about the threat of climate change if the world warms more than two degrees.
The media also lashed out at people skeptical of climate alarmism. Salon actually called Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, “loony,” “buffoonish,” and several other mean things in July 2015, because of his climate questions.
2. Energy Bashing for the Climate Cause
An indirect way the liberal news and entertainment media act as activists on the climate change issue, is by condemning all kinds of fossil fuels, the oil and gas industry, and promoting “renewable” fuels while ignoring their flaws.
Acting as the accomplices of environmentalists, liberal journalists have criticized the vast majority of energy sources the U.S. relies on: petroleum, natural gas, coal and nuclear. At the same time, the media refused to ask difficult questions about “green” renewables like solar and wind power.
The UK’s Guardian overstepped into the advocacy role even farther than U.S. news outlets. The newspaper has a “keep it in the ground” campaign against fossil fuels. The website claims it’s goal is to “spread a message of hope that the world can stop climate change.” This is the same paper that touted an unusually windy day in Denmark and used it to claim 100 percent renewable power reliance is possible.
And it wasn’t just the news media.
Hollywood also loves to portray the oil industry as villains. In 2015, ABC debuted Blood & Oil, yet another show depicting oil executives as liars, cheats, philanderers, and criminals with a new setting: North Dakota.
3. Media Help Socialism, By Refusing to Use the ‘S’ Word
Forget the Cold War, socialism is in vogue once again with the help of the liberal media. Rather than expose the ideology of socialism that for so many years reminded people of gulags, bread lines and the death of millions, the media helped normalize socialism. In 2015, journalists spun or ignored “socialism” in coverage of Venezuela and the socialist running for president.
Venezuela’s former president, the late Hugo Chavez, intentionally took his country “toward socialism” and said “nothing and no one can prevent it.” His successor, Nicolás Maduro took over in 2013 committing to pursue “21st century socialism.” The results were economic disaster, yet the three broadcast news networks failed to refer to Maduro or the Venezuelan government as socialist or autocratic more than 87 percent of stories.
The number was almost the same for the networks’ failure to identify presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. Eighty-two percent of ABC, CBS and NBC of morning and evening news show reports refused to label him as a socialist, even though that is what he calls himself. The networks continued their collective near-silence about Sanders’ extreme views throughout much of the 2015 campaign.
It wasn’t just the networks warming up to socialism. The New York Times Science section actually claimed on Twitter that the “embargo and socialism helped protect Cuba’s environment,” on July 1.
4. Big Hollywood Makes Big Bucks Off Anti-Capitalist Rhetoric
Hollywood hypocrisies abound, but the entertainment media’s obsession with portraying capitalists and capitalism negatively is one of the worst. After all, Hollywood is part of the entertainment and media industry, which is worth nearly $600 billion according to Statista.
Those “business is bad” themes continued in 2015 programming in old shows and new ones like Mr. Robot and The Player.
The very premise of USA Network’s Mr. Robot sounded like an Occupy Wall Street rant: “What I'm about to tell you is Top Secret. A conspiracy bigger than all of us. There's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I'm talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys that are invisible. The top 1% of the top 1%, the guys that play God without permission.”
A press release for the show described the “unlikely hero” (a hacker) who is recruited to take down corporate America. The president of USA Network Chris McCumber gushed, saying it “could not be more timely and relevant.”
Actually, It couldn’t be more predictable.
NBC’s new show The Player also had an Illuminati-level conspiracy that the world’s richest people bet on crime with the help of a secret organization. That secret group calculates the “probability of criminal activities” thanks to heavy surveillance and hacking capabilities. Then the wealthy bet for, or against, crimes for their own amusement and financial gain.
5. Low Gas Prices Prompt Major Papers Calls for Higher Gas Taxes
Gas prices plummeted from $3.675 June 2014, so much so that by January 2015, they were at $2.168 according to AAA. So the liberal news media saw an opportunity for higher taxes.
Editorials from The Washington Post, USA Today, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times all called for increasing the gas tax in late 2014 and into 2015. Of the five national newspapers, The Wall Street Journal was the only one that didn’t editorialize in favor of higher gas taxes during that time.
“On principle and on politics, now is the best time Washington has seen in years to raise the federal gas tax,” the Post’s editorial said on Jan. 7.
6. Networks Cheer Wage Hikes, Sympathize with Fight for 15
Taxes aren’t the only thing liberals in the media want increased. Wages are too.
Just hours before the GOP presidential debate on Nov. 10, CBS Evening News framed a story about New York City’s adoption of a $15 minimum wage in favor of the increase and “Fight for 15” workers calling for huge increases in the minimum wage. Correspondent Ben Tracy found a single mother to interview, framing the story for prime sympathy. That was typical of the liberal media’s coverage of the minimum wage issue. A few months earlier, NBC applauded the union-led Fight for 15 protests and and The New York Times celebrated the NYC wage hike.
An even more dramatic wage hike at Seattle company Gravity Payments, garnered overwhelmingly positive coverage in April 2015. The networks spent a combined 18 minutes and 44 seconds praising CEO Dan Price’s decision to implement a $70,000 minimum salary barely examining any possible negative consequences. By July, problems were starting to surface.
7. Media Continue to Push Equal Pay Myth
Even though it has been debunked, the media continued to promote the “misleading” statistic that women make just 78 percent of what men make.
The Washington Post has given that fallacy two Pinocchios and even a Slate.com writer has said people should stop repeated the “lie.” Instead of stopping, CBS Evening News kept the claim alive in 2015.
Millionaire actress Patricia Arquette demanded “wage equality” during her 2015 Oscar acceptance speech, earning coverage by all three broadcasting evening shows the next night. Evening News propped up her arguments and said “she has a point,” rather than pointing out problems with the flawed statistic.
In 2014, Morning Joe liberal co-host Brzezinski also got positively carried away following a “fun” White House equal pay for women event in April.
She described it saying, “It was sort of like a church revival. I’m telling you, every time the president made a comment about why women should be paid equally to men. Equal pay for equal work, talking about the same jobs. You’d hear like, ‘OK,’ clapping, and almost like ‘praise Jesus.’”
8. Univision’s PAC Gives 87 Percent of Its Donations to Democrats
The liberal media love to decry money in politics, but if Univision is any indication the liberal media actually love to spend money on politics.
Univision is the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S., according to Bloomberg. In spite of language on its website that speaks to Latino voters as if the PAC were nonpartisan, donation records told a different story. Since 2007, the Univision Communications PAC has given $569,900 to Democratic candidates (87 percent), and just $75,000 to Republicans. The PAC was funded by Univision employees and spouses, including donations from high level executives Glenda Martinez and Timothy Spillane.
In April 2015, Univision’s News President, Isaac Lee, argued in complete seriousness that advancing “the agenda” was more important than being a fair and balanced journalist. Univision’s executives, staff, and spouses have echoed that sentiment by pouring $747k into the network’s partisan PAC, according to OpenSecrets.
The news network has many liberal ties, including the Clinton Foundation. Univision’s owner Haim Saban vowed to spend whatever was necessary to fund Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The left-wing tilt shows up in its programming, with half of its news reports leaning left.
9. Network Stoke Food Fears
As if there isn’t enough bad news in the world to report, the media love to frighten people about the food they eat. In prior years, they’ve scared people away from even healthy foods like apples and eggs. In many cases, their warnings later turned out to be wrong or the solutions worse than the problem.
2015 was no exception, as the networks exaggerated the risk of eating hot dogs and bacon, attacked salt as dangerous and possibly deadly and promoted fears of genetically modified (GMO) foods.
Health experts began to call government guidelines about salt consumption into question this year. Some doctors have even warned that reducing salt “might actually be dangerous.” But that didn’t stop the broadcast networks from criticizing the “dangerous amounts” of salt in people’s diets for many years. The networks’ evening newscasts portrayed salt as nutritionally harmful without citing any other opinions in 93.3 percent of stories (28 out of 30) between June 1, 2010, and April 24, 2015.
In October, the networks went wild over a World Health Organization announcement about processed meats. Journalists at NBC and ABC promptly turned into nannies, telling people to “cut down on that red meat,” as they hyped the “unprecedented warning.”
The broadcast networks also criticized GMO foods, by promoting fear of “DNA tinkering,” and unproven “potential health risks.” The vast majority (78 percent) of stories about GMO foods said nothing of the benefits and many of those stories relied on GMO critics.
10. Cable Channels Use Amtrak Tragedy to Push for More Government Spending
When an Amtrak train derailed near Philadelphia on May 12, killing several people and injuring many more, the cable news channels didn’t want to find out the cause of the accident before pointing the finger.
Within hours, CNN, CNBC and MSNBC were all blaming insufficient spending on infrastructure and demanding more spending.
NBCNews.com reported on May 13, "Law enforcement officials familiar with the Philadelphia regional and long-distance service identified speed as a likely cause of the crash, adding that whether human error or equipment failure were also involved might take more time to establish." That didn’t slow the cable channels’ rush to judgement.
Just hours after the accident, CNN Tonight connected the Amtrak accident with lack of infrastructure funding. Lobbying firm O'Neill & Associates Senior Vice President and former NTSB managing director Peter Goelz was among the program’s guests.
“I mean, Amtrak has been under budgetary strains for close to 20 years,” Goelz said. “And, you know, the Congress has a very difficult time allocating funds and, or enough funds to, for Amtrak to do the kind of infrastructure safety work that it wants to do.”
MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and The Rundown with Jose Diaz-Balart, as well as CNN’s New Day and CNBC’s Squawk on the Street all turned to former politicians and government officials who complained about the lack of “investment,” in infrastructure and called for more spending.
