As the video of Robach began circulating on the internet, there were questions about who leaked the tape, what would happen now that the rants against her employer had gone viral, and how ABC planned to respond. But most pressing was this: Why would a mainstream media outlet like ABC, which claims to report the news, allegedly work to keep the news hidden?
What is most remarkable about Jeffrey Epstein’s billion-dollar pedophilia ring is not the elaborate measures he took to recruit girls and whisk them off to his private island on his private jet—it is the men who accompanied him, including some of the Democrat Party’s most prominent leaders. Among the high-profile names on Epstein’s flight log: Larry Summers, secretary of the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton administration and director of the National Economic Council under Obama, and former president Bill Clinton. What is more, Clinton is shown to have taken at least twenty-six trips aboard the so-called Lolita Express.
According to Robach, she knew all of this. In her accidental testimony, she even declared that she had uncovered considerable dirt on the former president, but, again, she was prevented from revealing it on the air. She alleges that her superiors told her that “no one cared” about the Epstein scandal. If this is true, ABC is guilty of something far worse than simply prioritizing airtime; the network acted as a cover for its wealthy, liberal allies, guarding the immorality of some prominent members of the Democrat Party in order to maintain the allegiance of its millions of voters, including its 90 percent black voting margins.
We know this is not the first time an allegedly “unbiased” news organization has been revealed to be little more than a propaganda machine. In his book Catch and Kill, New Yorker columnist Ronan Farrow revealed that while working at NBC News, his bosses refused to air his early reporting on the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Farrow also alleged that NBC buried allegations of sexual assault and harassment that had been levied against former Today show anchor Matt Lauer. “In recent weeks, NBC has made a loud and clear statement about its values,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan on November 5, 2019. “Profits matter more than journalism, ratings more than truth.”
Sullivan is correct, and I’d offer that the state of our media is worse than she purports; for it is not just profits and ratings that liberal media organizations are after—it is control. By selecting what information is disseminated to the public and intentionally concealing what may expose competing narratives, media organizations directly influence public perception on a variety of topics, from foreign wars—to health care crises—and, of course, to race and politics.
Even as print journalists and TV anchors subvert the presumed impartialities of their industry, they continue to hurl reckless insults and allegations toward President Trump. The result is a propaganda-driven media landscape that works to intensify the black allegiance to the Democrat Party, by hiding the truth about its leaders and its motives.
THE LIBERAL MEDIA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
There is perhaps no better starting point on the topic of biased media than the Trump presidency. Now that the mainstream, leftist media is united in their hatred for President Trump, there are virtually no lengths to which these outlets will not go in an attempt to smear his reputation, while carefully avoiding any actual reporting on his policies. That is because if the media focused only on Trump’s policies (particularly as they relate to the black community), they would find little else to critique.
Here is one particularly amusing example: In late 2017 a media firestorm erupted among the usual left-wing news publications regarding the president’s diet. The discussion began regarding the number of Diet Cokes he was drinking on a daily basis; soon the narrative was expanded to include his entire lifestyle.
On December 9, Business Insider published an article that dripped with latent aggression: “Trump drinks 12 cans of Diet Coke and watches 8 hours of TV per day.” Three days later, the Washington Post followed up with their own story and the headline “Trump reportedly drinks 12 cans of Diet Coke each day. Is that healthy?” CNN, unable to pass up an easy attack on the president, resurrected the narrative a few months later with the story “A 12 Diet Cokes-a-day habit like Trump’s is worth changing,” which ran on March 9, 2018.
Later in 2018, nearly a year after the media first concerned itself with Trump’s drink order, the angle of the story shifted once again. Reporters were no longer focusing their musings solely on the state of the president’s health; suddenly Trump’s affinity for Diet Coke was being presented as a problem for Coca-Cola and Diet Coke, as reporters speculated that the brands would be damaged by association with the leader of the free world. Case in point: the marketing trade publication AdAge.com ran the piece “Does Diet Coke Have a Trump Problem?” on September 25.
Currently, a cursory Google search of “Trump Diet Coke” will yield more than one million results—an overwhelming statement on the absurdity of the media’s efforts to weaponize something as trivial as the president’s beverage of choice. The liberal media had declared itself the moral authority, and Trump, with his penchant for Big Macs and Diet Coke, was deemed to have run afoul of this intimated high ground. Rather suspiciously, the parameters of morality that were so strictly applied to Trump’s love of caramel-colored soda were somehow absent when Obama—who had a far more serious habit—was in the Oval Office.
The fact that former president Obama regularly smoked cigarettes while in office is widely regarded as one of the worst-kept secrets of DC insiders. During his second term in office, the occasional article addressed the issue: There was a debate about a photograph in which Obama is seen holding an object that looks eerily similar to a packet of cigarettes. Other pieces confirmed that he had, in fact, smoked as a college student. None of them, however, dared to vilify Obama for his ongoing habit or his struggle to quit. If anything, the media exercised compassion and understanding for his desire to smoke, as though they were lending the flame to help him light up.
On June 11, 2015, Time published an article with the headline “Why It Matters if Obama Smokes (and Why It Doesn’t).” In it, journalist Maya Rhodan wrote, “The general public doesn’t care much [about his smoking]. A 2009 poll by CNN found that most Americans’ views of the president aren’t affected by his struggle to quit smoking and only a third wanted to see him give up cigarettes completely.” After all, she stated, he had aced three physicals since taking office.
In her piece, Rhodan never went as far as asserting that Obama was, in fact, still smoking—even though all evidence seemed to point to the affirmative. What is more, she concluded her piece with a quote that suggested that his “potential” smoking habit “doesn’t matter that much”: “As a Washington Post writer noted, Obama has ‘the best health care and the lousiest gig in the world,’ so if he chooses to light up from time to time, he’ll probably be just fine.”
The contrast between the media’s treatment of President Trump’s less-than-stellar diet and President Obama’s smoking habit could not be more stark. In Obama’s years in office, the issue around smoking was casually ignored, swept under the carpet, or seen as little more than a minor blemish on the record of an otherwise brilliant leader. However, when Trump, a man who has never touched a drop of alcohol in his life, dares to drink Diet Coke (for which the medical evidence is nowhere near as damning as it is for smoking), the media declares his health to be a problem. My point here is not on either smoking or Diet Coke—I believe it is the right of every individual to make whatever life choices they want—but simply that, in a show of extreme bias and partiality, the mainstream media wildly shifted its philosophical standards from one president to the next, excusing the Democrat Obama before vilifying the Republican Trump for an arguably lesser sin.
This favoritism flies in the face of true journalistic principles, yet it is exactly what the modern media is known for. And it does not stop with this country’s most recent commanders in chief, either. The media’s overzealous def
ense of Democrats and the Democrat Party goes back much further, to one of the most racist men to ever occupy the Oval Office.
* * *
The mental gymnastics that have been performed by the modern media to both justify President Lyndon B. Johnson’s racism while at the same time giving him credit for the successes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s never ceases to amaze me. Indeed, it is yet another great example of the preferential treatment that the modern arbiters of morality bestow upon their favored (read: Democrat) historical figures.
In reviewing the legacy of LBJ, most reporters focus on the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two pieces of legislation are lifted up as indisputable proof that Johnson was an advocate of the black community who was concerned about their welfare and ability to overcome generations of systemic oppression. However, there is scarcely any acknowledgment of the ways that Johnson directly sabotaged the black community.
Like FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society initiative was designed to boost the economy, eradicate poverty, increase educational access, and otherwise restore America to its former greatness. And like FDR, LBJ sought to accomplish all of these measures by instituting unsustainable policies that failed to address the root causes of the issues at hand. Johnson lowered poverty rates in the black community, yes, but not by supporting black-owned businesses or addressing racist hiring practices and the racial income gap. Instead, he passed a series of bills that essentially distributed checks to struggling black families, thereby giving them the fish instead of showing them how to fish on their own.
In a 2018 article for Politico Magazine, Joshua Zeitz, who wrote Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House, inadvertently acknowledges the limitations of Johnson’s antipoverty measures, stating, “The government normally measures poverty on the basis of pretax cash income, but when economists factor in noncash assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and housing subsidies (all products of the Great Society) and tax adjustments like the earned income tax credit (a product of the Nixon administration), the poverty rate fell by 26 percent between 1960 and 2010, with two-thirds of the decline occurring before 1980.”
It is no surprise, then, that sixty years later, blacks, on the whole, are more dependent on those government handouts than ever. And this was, in fact, by design. For while Johnson’s Voting Rights Act was instrumental in getting blacks to the polls in unprecedented numbers, particularly in the Jim Crow South, this turnout did little to leverage the black vote in ways that would be most beneficial for the community as a whole. Johnson’s legislation essentially crystallized a long-term pact between blacks and the Democrat Party that still exists today, lending credence to his alleged statement that he would “have those niggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” There is some uncertainty about whether Johnson actually made that bold claim, but even if he did not, a quote attributed to the president by numerous historians and publications lays bare the actual intention behind his historic civil rights legislation:
These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.
Indeed, LBJ would allege to save us from poverty and the night-riding Klansman; we would repay him, and the Democrat Party, with our blind allegiance for generations to come.
But we do not have to focus on LBJ’s political maneuvers to know that he never had the best interests of blacks in mind and was, actually, a staunch racist. For evidentiary proof one need only look at how he treated the black people who were closest to him.
In his MSNBC article “Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero. But also a racist,” Adam Serwer carefully outlines the myriad ways LBJ revealed his true feelings about blacks, often with prodigious use of the n-word. Serwer refers to the biography Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, written by Robert Caro. In the book, Caro reveals that Johnson referred to civil rights legislation as “the nigger bill”; he also discusses an incident detailed in the memoir of Robert Parker, who worked as LBJ’s chauffeur. Johnson had asked Parker if he would rather be called by his name as opposed to other, degrading titles, including “boy,” “nigger,” or “chief,” but when Parker answered in the affirmative, Johnson balked. “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name,” Johnson is said to have replied. “So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”
Remarkably, Serwer, like most other members of the mainstream media, sidesteps the obvious to push a more favorable leftist agenda. “Lyndon Johnson said the word ‘nigger’ a lot,” Serwer wrote. But he was also, at least according to Serwer, “an uncompromising racial egalitarian whose idealism was matched only by his political ruthlessness.” (Jack Bernhardt, writing for the Guardian, went as far as saying that Johnson, while “a truly awful man,” was still his “political hero.”)
Perhaps I missed something while I read Serwer’s thousand-word ode to LBJ, but the usage of a derogatory slur plus a refusal to refer to one of his employees by his given name hardly make for an egalitarian perspective. We should not forget that before his presidency, while serving in Congress, the Texas-born Johnson almost always voted within the racist southern bloc, known as the “Solid South.” These were the group of congressmen responsible for blocking any civil rights legislation that might begin to undo the centuries of oppression blacks faced in America.
But Serwer, truly adept at the aforementioned mental gymnastics, seemed to dismiss these indelible truths, noting simply that “Johnson was a man of his time, and bore those flaws as surely as he sought to lead the country past them.” Ah, yes. It makes perfect sense that the president of the most powerful country in the world sought to lead the country before even leading himself.
LBJ’s actions and record speak for themselves, absent the need for postmodern Dem-splaining. It is the historical rec-ord of racist voting, the racist language, the racist policies, and the allegiance to a racist party that were there for all to see, culminating in the greatest hoodwinking of the black community to ever take place. In one fell swoop, the welfare policies of 1960s Democrats laid waste to black families and homes, crushing aspirations and the entrepreneurial spirit that had once defined our community. The media, however, continues to treat LBJ as though he is one of the great totem poles of tolerance and virtue in the twentieth century, a shining beacon of civil rights in an age of bigotry. Meanwhile, Trump is cast as the avowed racist, even as the black unemployment rate hits new lows and which, before the mandatory lockdowns for Covid-19, stood at around 5.5 percent, down from the nearly 8 percent when he first took office.
LBJ and the racist history of the Democrat Party can help us understand how it is plausible that Joe Biden, a well-known and well-respected politician, managed to get away with citing Robert Byrd, a West Virginia senator who had previously held the position of Exalted Cyclops within the Ku Klux Klan, as his mentor.
With the help of the mainstream media, the Democrats have assumed the mantle of tolerance and liberalism, despite having had the most racist history of almost any major Western political party. The truth has been twisted to fit the preferred narrative of liberal news organizations so that those with whom they disagree are depicted as pantomime villains.
While the intentions of Lyndon B. Johnson have been called into question, those of the media are clear: ignore the truth, deal out virtue t
o those on whom their favor falls, and keep blacks shackled to the Democrat plantation.
THE LIBERAL MEDIA’S CONTEMPT FOR THE BLACK COMMUNITY
If the media sought only to convince black Americans that Democrats were inherently blame-free and Republicans were incapable of virtue, that would be one thing, but their efforts do not stop with conservative witch hunts and a liberal hero complex. Instead, the media also makes clear its contempt for the black community through its reinforcing of the victim narrative, thereby perpetuating us back into the arms of our liberal saviors. There is no better illustration of this than media coverage of Black Lives Matter, an organization that conveniently received a multimillion-dollar injection from the notoriously liberal George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.
The narrative that black men are routinely discriminated against and slaughtered by white police officers has become a dominant theme across mainstream media, inspiring protests, boycotts, and clashes with police officers. Across social media, footage of black men dying at the hands of white police officers has received hundreds of millions of views, garnering an emotional response from many who have decided that police brutality is a problem that needs to be solved. Of course, virtually no American would stand in support of something as horrific as police brutality, but the truth is, the issue of blacks being murdered at will by vigilante police officers is but a dishonest distortion, blown out of proportion by the liberal media’s foundational need to highlight the suffering of the black community—whether real or imagined.
In an op-ed published by the City Journal on September 25, 2017, writer and attorney Heather Mac Donald used indisputable numbers to dispel the narrative that the killing of black men by white cops was such a frequent, senseless occurrence that all black mothers ought to keep their sons locked up in their rooms. While Mac Donald notes that the number of murdered black people increased by 900 from 2015 to 2016 (this, after a 900-victim increase from 2014 to 2015), she emphasized the point that white police officers are not responsible for those homicides. “Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police,” Mac Donald wrote. “In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.”
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