The Liberal Media Cares More About Narratives Than the Truth
One of the best-known and most influential accounts on X these days is Libs of TikTok, which is run by Chaya Raichik. The account mostly consists of Raichik finding liberals openly saying insane things in public, and then presenting it to her audience with a minimal amount of commentary. Her account focuses heavily on schools, teachers, and hospitals behaving badly or grooming kids, which has become extraordinarily common on the Left in recent years.
Just so you can see what we’re talking about, here are some of her posts from the last few days:
In this country, this is what used to be called “reporting.” Discrimination against white people at universities, a liberal interest group pushing explicit sexual material on kids, and a teacher publicly involved in explicit sexual activities championing drag queen story hours in a school are all legit, meaningful stories. However, those are also all stories that put liberals in a bad light, so they’re highly unlikely to ever be reported by liberal mainstream media outlets.
In fact, liberal outlets have gotten so upset at Raichik bringing attention to these stories that they’ve created a narrative about her. That being, her reporting is DANGEROUS and shouldn’t be allowed. You can find endless articles like these online:
When Libs of TikTok tweets, threats increasingly follow
Twitter account Libs of TikTok blamed for harassment of children’s hospitals
Schools Report Bomb Threats Following Libs of TikTok Anti-LGBTQ Posts
The latest one in this vein is from NBC News and it’s called, “After Libs of TikTok posted, at least 21 bomb threats followed.”
Here is an excerpt from the piece:
Raichik, 29, is not accused of making any bomb threats in Iowa or anywhere else..... While the direct inspirations for the threats are not known, the timing suggests that Libs of TikTok posts have been used to pick targets.
NBC News identified 33 instances, starting in November 2020, when people or institutions singled out by Libs of TikTok later reported bomb threats or other violent intimidation. The threats, which on average came several days after tweets from Libs of TikTok, targeted schools, libraries, hospitals, small businesses, and elected officials in 16 states, Washington, D.C., and the Canadian province of Ontario. Twenty-one of the 33 threats were bomb threats, which most commonly targeted schools and were made via email.
...The FBI did not respond directly to questions about Raichik or the status of cases related to the 33 threats.
If you look at these headlines and excerpts, you can see the narrative forming.
“Libs of TikTok is dangerous and irresponsible for doing these posts. Why, she could get people killed! She needs to be censored or maybe even law enforcement needs to get involved! This can’t be allowed to continue!”
Variations of this narrative are repeated over and over again in the liberal media.
However, if you’re not committed to the narrative, there are extremely obvious questions that come to mind.
To begin with, Libs of TikTok is a popular news source, but she’s also one out of many. How do you know her audience is responsible for these threats in a world where unfortunately, bomb threats, death threats, and harassment are extremely common? Furthermore, whatever the case may be, why is Libs of TikTok the only news source in America being held responsible for something her readers MAY HAVE done? As I noted to the author of the piece at NBC News:
Incidentally, that turned out not just to be idle speculation.
You see, this is all part of how the liberal media’s embrace of the narrative works. It only holds up if a double standard is applied and no basic questions are asked.
Now combine that with the fact that liberals dominate the mainstream media, entertainment industry, schools, and most social media to such an extent that most of them won’t ever have to listen to the other side.
There are an awful lot of people on the Left in this country who get up, read a liberal newspaper, never hear from a conservative all day, go home to watch MSNBC, talk to other liberals in real life, follow only other liberals on social media and ALMOST NEVER hear the reasoning of the other side. Almost everything they know about conservatives is fed to them by other liberals who also hate conservatives.
Of course, liberals like this live in a bubble, but on top of that, libs are also notoriously intolerant, censorship-happy, status-sensitive, tribalistic people. Yes, there are exceptions, but as a practical matter, free speech and free thought are heavily frowned upon among liberals.
What this leads to is that the prejudices of the Left are very rarely ever checked on the Left. Liberal newspapers are going to try to protect their side and hurt conservatives. Bad news for liberals will either be buried or ignored completely. Liberals do coordinate sometimes, but most of the time it’s not needed. Popular ideas on the Left will be pushed even if they’re obviously wrong because it’s so potentially dangerous to your career and social standing on the Left to question them.
We’ve seen this for a long time with global warming, just as we saw it recently with COVID. “The experts all agree that we’re right!” You know, except that the experts who didn’t agree were labeled as kooks and blackballed for disagreeing. It’s pretty easy to get agreement when you rig the system so heavily in your favor that people almost have to agree with you to have a successful career in the field:
There are a lot of these narratives around race.
You hear that America is structurally racist because liberals consider it beyond the pale to consider all the other factors that have nothing to do with racism that are holding black Americans back. Republicans are racists – even though there seems to be an ever-increasing number of prominent black Republicans. We’re told that the country is overrun by white supremacists and the primary piece of evidence is a few hundred (!!!) dorks in a nation of 330 million people getting together with Tiki Torches in Charlottesville 7 years ago (!!!) and occasional public appearances by the Patriot Front, a small, anonymous group of racists that are hyped endlessly by the Left despite the fact that they have zero influence or respect on the Right.
Liberals spent years hyping up the idea that black Americans were in terrible danger because white Americans in general and white police officers might kill them at any time. This whole narrative has been relentlessly enforced by ignoring extremely common black-on-black crime while hyping up every killing of a black man by a white person or better yet, a cop, like it was the MLK assassination.
You know what you didn’t see very often in the mainstream media because it contrasted with the narrative? The real numbers that refuted the narrative. The idea that white people are blowing away black Americans at every opportunity is simply ridiculous.
In 2021, 87% of all non-lethal interracial violent crimes committed between blacks and whites in the US were black-on-white — 480,030 incidents with a black offender and white victim, and 69,850 incidents with a white offender and black victim, or seven times as many black-on-white as white-on-black incidents of interracial non-lethal violence.
In other words, whites have more to fear from blacks than blacks from whites, a fact contrary to the race-hustle narrative. “X-ing while white” is a more appropriate way of representing racial crime patterns.
As to police and black Americans, if you want to see the false perception the narrative creates vs. reality, this does a pretty good job of it:
Yet these trends in media coverage and public perceptions seem divorced from empirical reality. A stark illustration of this was provided by a nationally representative survey conducted in 2019 by the Skeptic Research Center,[9] which found that nearly 33% of people—including 44% of liberals—thought that 1,000 or more unarmed black men alone were killed by police in 2019. In fact, according to the Mapping Police Violence (MPV) database, 29 unarmed black (vs. 44 white) men were killed by police that year.[10] Further, whereas the average Skeptic Research Center respondent thought that 48% of all people killed by police that year were black—an estimate that reached a high of 55% among liberal respondents—the true proportion (25%) was far lower.[11]
Meanwhile, an earlier Qualtrics survey conducted by Manhattan Institute fellow Eric Kaufmann found that 80% of black respondents and 60% of highly educated white liberal respondents thought that young black men were more likely to be fatally shot by police than to die in a car accident.[12] Actually, in 2020, the year the survey was fielded, black men between the ages of 18 and 34 were more than 17 times more likely to die in motor vehicle accidents (38.4 deaths per 100,000) than to be shot to death by police (2.2 per 100,000).[13]
More generally, and despite 45% of the public (including 67% of Democrats) thinking that police violence against the public is an “extremely” or a “very serious” problem, instances of police use of force remain exceedingly rare.
Of course, the media’s false narratives around race may be prevalent, but there are plenty of others.
How about, “The rich don’t pay their fair share.” They don’t?
The Tea Party rallies, which essentially had zero lawbreaking and violence were portrayed as extremely dangerous, while the #BLM & ANTIFA riots in 2020 that killed 25 people and did between 1-2 billion in property damage were “mostly peaceful”:
The riots at the Capitol on Jan 6 were not just bad, but an “insurrection,” somehow white conservatives are responsible for Asians being assaulted in liberal cities, diversity is a “strength,” questioning whether America is benefitting from immigration is racist and obviously wrong, Twitter is doomed to fail since Elon Musk took it over and committed it to free speech, and Tucker Carlson was doing something wrong by interviewing a world leader, while it was fine for liberals to do the same thing:
Liberal “journalists” (I use that word loosely) don’t need to prove any of these things or get the other side of the argument, because “EVERYBODY KNOWS” it’s true. However, “everybody” is defined as all liberals who agree with each other about almost every subject and are terrified to speak up when they disagree because they don’t want to be ostracized.
You know, there’s a famous self-help exercise you’ll find instructive if you’re unfamiliar. Try this. Take 30 seconds, look around the room, and count how many RED things you can find.
Ready? Go! Look for red things!
All right, done?
Great. So, how many blue things did you see?
Not that many, right? Why? Because you were looking for red things. This is what narratives do. People see what they’re looking for while they ignore, miss, or discard all the information they weren’t trying to pick out.
Real journalists? They understand that. Liberal “journalists?” Not so much. They don’t know, they don’t care, they don’t even see real journalism as their job.
Liberal “journalists” believe their real job is promoting narratives that help liberalism or hurt conservatism.
Yes, a million times, “Yes”.
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