20 Ways People Get Manipulated by the Media

The “post-fact” era.

The quality of the information we get in America is the worst it has been in my lifetime. It’s so bad, we’re practically in a “post-fact” era. How is that possible? Because there certainly are FACTS, but when every “fact” is disputed, distorted, sensationalized, and treated like it’s part of some sort of great, ideological struggle between the Left and Right, you never know exactly who to believe.

All that being said, after running a successful blog for more than a decade, being one of the most popular conservative columnists in America, heading up one of the biggest conservative news pages and running one of the largest conservative Facebook pages out there, I am much, much better at ferreting out bullsh*t than the average person.

That doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes or get it wrong sometimes. EVERYBODY does. However, I can at least say that there are very few ways that people are misled by the mainstream media, alternative media, and by influencers on social media that I am unfamiliar with.

There are many ways, both great and small, to deliberately steer people in the wrong direction. Today, we’re going to cover twenty for you, and if you pay attention and keep watch for them, it will genuinely help you sort truth from fiction in the coming years.

1) Anonymous sources: Is every story based on anonymous sources wrong? No, but an inordinate number of stories based entirely on anonymous sources turn out to be false because either the sources are distorting the truth for their own purposes, or the media is doing it on their end to create a bigger story.

2) Polling games: Believe it or not, most pollsters at least TRY to get their final polls before an election correct because it impacts their reputation. For whatever reason, in the Trump era, even when they try to get it right, they seem to be having a harder time than normal.

However, outside of the final polls, many polling agencies heavily skew their polls (almost inevitably to influence the public to move to the Left) or do polls of adults, which are essentially useless on political issues since “adults” don’t vote, “voters” do. On top of that, the further a poll is from other polling results, the more likely it is to make news, while the less likely it is to be right.

3) Just make it up from scratch: Want your own huge scoop that no one else has? That’s pretty easy to do on social media because you can just make it up. But, what about “Community Notes,” you may say? Well, every lie doesn’t get caught by Community Notes, and even if a lie is revealed, do you lose the followers you got from the post going viral? Nope. Just remember, if it sounds too good to be true, ESPECIALLY if there’s no proof and you can’t find any other original sources saying it, it probably is.

4) Just Repeating the lie: If you’re liberal, you can often get away with repeating stories FOR YEARS that have conclusively been proven not to be true, as long as it’s about a conservative because your own side often won’t correct you even if they know you’re wrong.

A great example of this is the “very fine people” hoax, which featured liberal politicians and media sources repeating the lie that Trump had called the white supremacists at Charlottesville very fine people. This has continued FOR YEARS after it was conclusively, unquestionably proven to be false:

5) The headline mismatch: Do you want to know a little secret? An awful lot of people share articles on social media based SOLELY ON the headline, without reading it at all. Out of the people that do click through to an article, MOST OF THEM don’t read the full article. Because of this, media sources have realized that the headline needs to be dynamite, or it won’t get read at all, and if it doesn’t match up with the article, they don’t care very much because MOST PEOPLE aren’t going to notice.

6) Censoring alternate opinions: One of the oldest totalitarian tricks in the books is making sure that opposing voices can’t be heard and then claiming there are no opposing voices. This is a tactic that is used extensively on subjects related to science these days, where the best connected, most profitable ideas are often allowed to steamroll competing ideas that may have more scientific merit.

7) The fake boundaries of dialogue: This doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it’s extremely common in the mainstream media anyway. Basically, the Left decides on a narrative, pushes it relentlessly, and simply pretends that counter-narratives don’t exist.

The idea is to gaslight people into believing some totally unrepresentative idea they’re pushing, like, “Black people can’t handle getting IDs,” “Men should be able to play women’s sports,” or “Americans want more immigration” is the uncontroversial, standard position, even though large percentages or sometimes even large majorities of Americans don’t agree.

8) Fake responses: When you go somewhere like X, there are literally MILLIONS of bots, alternate accounts, and even accounts run by foreign governments that have agendas ranging from promoting their country, to killing the Jews, to getting Americans to hate each other. That guy you see saying that people like you deserve to die or giving you a like for saying something moronic may be on someone’s payroll, if they’re a human being at all.

9) Pay-offs: A lot of people you hear on social media, podcasts and in the media are flat out PAID to say what they’re saying. Sometimes it’s what they’d say anyway, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes they disclose it, and sometimes they don’t.

What is certain is that truly MASSIVE amounts of money are changing hands behind the scenes to push certain agendas. I’m not picking on these people because I like and follow all of these accounts, but this is happening on a WIDESPREAD scale all over social media, and the amount of money that’s changing hands is insane.

10) Conspiracies: It’s easy to push conspiracies. Pick some “they” that some groups of people hate and are primed to believe anything bad about, make some extremely dubious claims about what they’re supposedly doing, back it up with sketchy evidence and just keep switching to other questionable claims every time someone blows a hole in the many, many flaws in your argument. Bonus: Talk loudly about the one time you were right, or alternately, make it up, while hoping no one noticed that you were also egregiously wrong over and over and over and over again.

11) Good, bad, doesn’t matter as long as they look: We’ve reached a point where, for most of the media, the only thing that matters is drawing eyeballs. People regularly lie, say inflammatory things, promote evil, and say pretty much anything because having an audience is now, in most people’s eyes, far more important than whether you’re a good person, smart, wise, or ethical. Because of this, a lot of the most popular influencers will DELIBERATELY say things they know are untrue.

12) Video switches: Did that video you saw on social media just happen in the Palestinian territories today, like the person who posted it said, or did it really happen 5 years ago in Lebanon? Who knows? And that’s what they’re counting on.

13) When was that video? If a video draws traffic on social media, it commonly gets shared over and over again for years. Sometimes that doesn’t matter much. However, if you think something happened yesterday, but it happened five years ago, it can be very misleading.

14) Where was the video cut? For a lot of people, as the old saying goes, “Seeing is believing.” However, what you see in a video can fake you out depending on how it’s edited. A classic example of that was the Nick Sandmann video. Originally, the spin was that some 16-year-old MAGA kid was basically picking on an Indian activist. However, the truth was closer to the opposite. The Indian activist, Nathan Phillips, decided to move into Sandmann’s face without being provoked, not vice versa:

Always think about not just what you saw in a video, but what could have happened BEFORE AND AFTER the cut.

15) Staged videos: It’s now perfectly ordinary to see significant numbers of outrageous videos of every sort on social media on a day-in-and-day-out basis. A significant percentage of them are staged in one way or another. Sometimes satire, scenes from movies, or clearly labeled videos get treated as real when they’re reposted. Other times, people just fake things because it will get views. Which is this one? Hard to say, but it sure isn’t real:

16) The anti-hate group scam: The Southern Poverty Law Center is the king of this scam, and the Anti-Defamation League isn’t far behind. They start things out by dramatically overestimating the number and danger of hate groups in America, because there would be no point in their existence at all if they didn’t wildly exaggerate the threat. Then, they layer in all sorts of conventional conservatives with the “hate groups” they’re targeting. In other words, they’re tricking people who don’t pay attention. The reason they get heavily funded on the Left is not to “fight hate,” it’s to deliberately try to blur the line between hate groups and conservatives.

17) Fact checking: You’d think that someone called a “fact-checker” would always get it right. Unfortunately, that’s not even close to true. It’s not that fact-checkers are always wrong; it’s that they are frequently wrong and their mistakes practically always either help liberals or hurt conservatives. In other words, they’re just partisan propaganda under another name.

18) Slanting the story: Honest journalism no longer exists in the mainstream media. Every story is twisted, crafted, massaged, and distorted to make liberals look good and non-liberals look bad. For modern liberal journalists (and sometimes conservative journalists, too), the truth is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS second to the narrative. In fact, this has become so ever present that most liberal journalists don’t even consider it to be deceptive, although it obviously is. Sometimes they go so far overboard with this that they even deliberately leave out exculpatory evidence:

This is an extreme example, but this practice? This kind of behavior is nearly UNIVERSAL in the mainstream media.

19) The lie that sounds good instead of the truth that doesn’t: Actually, Trayvon Martin wasn’t a 12-year-old kid, and Mike Brown didn’t get shot while his hands were up and he was asking the cops not to shoot.

However, the truth, which was that Martin’s death was a sad, ambiguous mess, and Brown was a criminal who died attacking a cop, would have blown up narratives and de-energized the stories. So, the lies were embraced and spread by activists, politicians, and the media. Remember that the original story in these cases is FREQUENTLY wrong, and the activists pushing these cases HABITUALLY LIE to get more attention.

20) Skewing scientific studies: Saying something is the result of a “study” tends to give it more credibility in many people’s eyes, and sometimes that’s valid. However, it’s also an easy way to scam people because not all studies are created equally, and not all studies are reported honestly.

Conflicts of interest in studies are becoming the rule, not the exception these days, and even a well-done study on rats or an epidemiological study isn’t nearly as meaningful as a randomized control trial with humans. It’s also worth noting that many scientific studies ARE NOT well-designed and don’t necessarily tell you anything of value (see pretty much every study on the impact of eating meat ever done). On top of all that, is the media’s reporting on a study accurately showing you what’s actually happening? Often, no. We start with a skewed study followed up with a skewed analysis designed to draw attention, not inform people of the truth.

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