A special guest contribution to 100 Percent Fed Up by co-authors Joe Brandis, President of Michigan Citizens for Election Integrity (MC4EI) and Becky Behrends, M.D, Vice President of Research for MC4EI
Part 2 in a series examining left-wing journalism
In a previous article, Part 1, “How the Left is Infiltrating America’s Local Newsrooms With Activist “Journalists” Funded By Big Tech and Radical Organizations”, we examined Report for America which is an initiative of the GroundTruth Project.
This is a nationwide effort to place left-leaning journalists into local news organizations. Michigan has, likewise, experienced the presence of these reporters in the Traverse City Eagle, Flint Beat, AP Michigan, Hastings Banner, and the Detroit Free Press.
The Report for America reporter for the Detroit Free Press/Politifact has a “beat” that is responsible for “fact-checking of Michigan politicians during election season and beyond”. Michigan Citizens for Election Integrity believes it is time to fact-check reporters themselves. Who pays their salary? Do they produce fair and balanced journalism?
This style of reporting is a clear demonstration of advocacy journalism. It is based on the idea that it is not enough to present two sides of the issue when one side so clearly represents misinformation and bias. Proponents of this line of thinking believe that their “facts” and interpretations are correct and any opposing viewpoints need to be eliminated and not even acknowledged. So they shape their news narratives by what they report and what they don’t report.
In Detroit, we used to have the Detroit News vs the Detroit Free Press. But now both newspapers are owned by the same company, Digital First Media. What happens when you remove competition in a market and most of the media has a liberal/leftist slant? What happens when there is no longer a marketplace of ideas? This is a dangerous state of affairs. Where does the liberal/left get the moral authority to determine what the “facts” are? Many of us in the older generation remember the days of Walter Cronkite, the news anchor of CBS Evening News. In a piece entitled, “Walter Cronkite would be disappointed with today’s journalism”, the following is stated, “Although Cronkite admitted to embracing many progressive and left-leaning ideas, you never knew it in his reporting. He was fair and balanced long before it became a catchphrase.”
Are reporters really fact-checking Michigan politicians or are they going after Republicans while ignoring Democrats? Here are some of the articles which have been published:
Michigan Supreme Court Denies Craig and Johnson (anything to show turmoil in the Republican ranks)
Kevin Rinke (GOP Gubernatorial Candidate) Falsely Claims Dead People Always Vote Democrat ( failure to clean up voter rolls which sets up the conditions for fraud always seems to occur on the watch of Democrats which Rinke correctly notes)
And the latest biased “news” piece is Michigan Republicans eye poll worker jobs in big cities (freep.com). These are some of the biased statements the reporter parrotted from legacy media:
“The hall (referring to the TCF Center in Detroit) was already teeming with challengers- more than the number legally allowed- who mistook standard election processes for fraud.”
This is laughable if it wasn’t so serious. An extensive number of affidavits and eyewitness testimonies attest to the fact that the TCF election officials refused the re-entry of Republicans to the center after they went for lunch and restroom breaks. This inflated the numbers of how many Republicans were supposedly in the hall, when in fact they were denied entry. They were never told they needed to “sign out” before taking breaks. This was an after-the-fact made-up excuse on the part of election officials who required no such sign-out for Democrats. It was clear that it was a coordinated effort to shut them out of the center through a war of attrition including bullying, intimidation, and outright physical and verbal threats. As for poll workers, many Republicans applied for these positions but were told they were not needed as they were already filled. Yet, on election day there were only a handful of Republicans out of the over 500 poll workers present. It would only be fair and just if the mainstream media would report this side of the story, but they simply don’t.
“Since his defeat, Trump has fueled an unprecedented disinformation campaign claiming that the presidential contest was stolen from him, undermining the confidence of millions of his supporters in the election system”.
What was unprecedented was the level of deceit, fraud, and illegality manifested by Democrats in the 2020 election which has been abundantly detailed and continues to be uncovered but which leftist judges refused to properly examine with evidentiary hearings, discovery and full subpoena powers exercised. This has been addressed by law professor, David Clements among many others.
And “undermining confidence in the election system”? Who undermined newly elected President Trump in 2016 with ongoing fake media assertions of Russian collusion? And, by the way, no less than the New York Times admitted that the Russian collusion charge was a hoax. The biggest lie of all is the notion of “fact-checking” as reliable and valid when, in fact, honest investigative journalism should have been fully investigating and acknowledging the fake Russian dossier. The aim of this dossier and two impeachment attempts was to remove a duly elected President from office. There was a time in our pre-woke leftist society in which such actions would have been deemed treasonous by the Democrat Party.
There clearly is no intellectual diversity among the New York Times staff despite the Democrats constant call for “diversity”. Thus, the “inmates run much of the asylum” with young leftist indoctrinated media “brown shirts”.
And, in a similar fashion, there is a one size fits all, leftist squad of Report for America young journalists who follow their narrative crafting marching orders with precision.
Where is there a fair examination of Democrat misbehavior and malfeasance from left-leaning journalists in Michigan? How about the following:
Michigan Democratic Party Broke the Law With Illegal Donation
or
Democrats Run America’s Top 20 Crime-Ridden Cities
or
How Decades of Democratic Rule Ruined Some of Our Finest Cities
or
Elections Official in Michigan Charged With Ballot Tampering
or
Lawsuit Claims SOS Benson Illegally Accepted Zuckerberg Money to Swing 2020 Election
And the Detroit Free Press was nowhere to be seen in reporting on these events and issues. Crickets from them.
It is a sad thing but true as pointed out by the English writer, Neil Gaiman:
“It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.”
Thus, the “imperial” media remains in control of the leftist narrative which they want to shove down the throats of the “children and half-wits” who can see right through them.
Senator Rick Scott, R-Fla., said that Republicans “have to be more than a speed bump on the road to America’s socialism and collapse”.
