Corrupt News Media Majoring In Omission

Written by Robert Knight

Here’s a recent Washington Post headline that might help explain why many people distrust the liberal media: “U.S. soldier in Texas shoots man in Mexico: Cross-border gunfire by National Guard member leaves victim wounded.”

A casual reader will conclude that some American yahoo, perhaps even a White supremacist, went overboard and shot a Mexican for no apparent reason.

Then you read eight paragraphs into the story and find this: “According to one of the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] officials, who was briefed on what happened, the Texas Guard member opened fire after three men on the Mexican side of the border started attacking a group of migrants with a knife as the migrants attempted to cross the border.”

You mean the Texas guardsman intervened to save the lives of some migrants? That should have been the headline.

But it doesn’t fit the narrative, so it was buried.

This is a tiny example of what’s happening all over the media, whose reporters and editors took journalism at Gaslight State U. Some even went on to earn a master’s in calculated omission.

For instance, have you heard about the “World Climate Declaration”? Probably not. On Aug. 13, a group of 1,609 scientists, academics and engineers issued an updated statement that “there is no climate emergency.”

The signers include two Nobel Laureates. This runs smack in the face of climate hysteria, so the media have ignored it.

The Global Climate Intelligence Group, which first unveiled the statement in June 2022, says: “The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.”

Current climate models “not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial,” the statement says, adding that more carbon dioxide has enhanced crops all over the world.

This past week, President Biden blamed “climate change” for Hurricane Idalia. In contrast, the GCIG declaration says: “There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2-mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.”

You can do an internet search and look in vain for any coverage of this in so-called mainstream media.

The blackout of the climate declaration is similar to what happened in 2020-2021, when a group of prominent scientists released the Great Barrington Declaration. That document challenged the disastrous, one-size-fits-all, lockdown/shots strategy pushed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and other health authorities.

The declaration on COVID-19 was written by epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, a professor at Oxford University with expertise in immunology and vaccine development, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor and epidemiologist at Stanford University Medical School.

The media treated them as if they were Larry, Darryl and Darryl from the TV show “Newhart.”

Because the declaration emphasized “focused protection” on older adults and the infirm and that the virus posed no serious threat to young people, critics dismissed it as advocating risky “herd immunity.” That is, when the media covered it at all.

Likewise, every shooting is either showcased or downplayed depending on its usefulness. If the perp is White and the victims are minorities, it gets days of coverage. If it’s the other way around, it’s not even a story.

In Jacksonville, a White man went on a rampage on Aug. 20 and killed three Black people in a store before shooting himself. Within hours, he was denounced as a White supremacist by everyone from Al Sharpton to President Biden.

CBS gleefully reported that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who spoke at a prayer vigil for the victims and condemned racial violence, was booed by some in the crowd. In case you were wondering who was to blame for the murders other than the shooter, CBSnews.com noted that Mr. DeSantis “has loosened gun laws in Florida and antagonized civil rights leaders.”

Later, CBSnews.com further explained: “Many elected officials have said racially-motivated attacks like Saturday’s have been encouraged by political rhetoric targeting ‘wokeness’ and policies from the Republican-led state government headed by DeSantis, including one taking aim at the teaching of Black history in Florida.”

Yup. It’s not only Mr. DeSantis’ fault for trying to end Marxist indoctrination of schoolchildren. It’s the fault of anyone who bucks the left’s version of reality. If you think that children shouldn’t be fed a diet of critical race theory, falsified American history and LGBTQ propaganda, you helped pull the trigger in Jacksonville.

As Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute has amply documented, the media don racial lenses whenever they report on crime. For instance, a typical news story may state that Black teens have more police interactions and arrests than White teens.

What’s omitted? Any comparative data about crimes and who commits them. The unfolding tragedy of urban violence, which began skyrocketing after the Democrats’ Great Society welfare programs shattered Black families, is cast as a product of police brutality.

This is the tip of the iceberg. If you want further evidence of the media’s lying by omission, try searching online for “Russian collusion,” “Hunter Biden laptop” or just “Trump.”

Then run, run to the nearest alternative news source.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.