BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,866, January 4, 2021
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The modern American usage of the term “fourth estate” refers to the press as a free power, and even as a watchdog over the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the US government. Today, however, it is the watchdog that needs watching.
The central foundations on which the US is built, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, are enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This freedom is being distorted, strangled, and withheld before our eyes.
Young Americans seem to have no idea of what the media used to be when the country was more united. All newspapers and media outlets once recognized and covered the same big stories. The ideal to which journalistic professionalism aspired was objective reporting—or at least an attempt toward it—and the media tried to keep the news balanced and separate from opinions and op-eds.
Today, journalism has changed so much that the “news” is often conflated with unsupported and biased opinion. Consider Newsweek‘s story on Senator Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) poll-supported claim that “Donald Trump would have won the election if the media had given more coverage to unsubstantiated allegations concerning President-elect Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.” The word “unsubstantiated” is opinion, not fact. As we are learning, the allegations were in fact substantiated. All the Newsweek reporter had to do was look.
Some journalists cannot seem to hold back from reporting on Trump’s supposedly “baseless” claims of election fraud despite eyewitness affidavits, vote count anomalies, abrogations of both the Constitution and state election laws, and the use of Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic software, which are reported to have the capacity to flip votes secretly from one candidate to another.
Widely censored by both Big Tech and the mainstream media was a New York Post article that asserted that an abandoned laptop, the undisputed property of former VP Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, implicates him as the family “concierge” for the Biden family’s influence-peddling in China—a country cited by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe as America’s “National Security Threat No. 1.”
Two corroborated reports in the New York Post highlighted Hunter Biden’s financial interests in various foreign countries—including his partnering with two Chinese military companies that are under investigation, one for espionage and the other for human rights violations. Both New York Post articles were censored—in fact totally suppressed—for two weeks by Twitter and Facebook, as was, for a time, the Twitter account of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany for having posted the allegedly contraband information.
As Glenn Greenwald, who recently resigned from The Intercept, the website he co-founded, wrote weeks before the election:
Early in the day, users who attempted to link to the New York Post story either publicly or privately received a cryptic message rejecting the attempt as an “error.” Later in the afternoon, Twitter changed the message, advising users that they could not post that link because the company judged its contents to be “potentially harmful.”
Recently, YouTube announced that it was removing all videos “claiming (that) mass fraud changed election results.” Left undisturbed, however, are masses of inaccurate material, such as claims that President Trump colluded with Russia as well as Chinese and Iranian propaganda claiming that “the US army may have brought the coronavirus disease to Wuhan.”
It was also, it seems, perfectly fine for The New York Times to have “built our newsroom” around the Russia hoax for two years, as admitted by its editor-in-chief, Dean Baquet. The confirmed facts concerning the Biden family’s influence peddling was apparently “not fit to print”—especially before an election the newspaper was manipulating.
Divisions in the media have presented widely divergent images of the president to the public. To one camp, President Trump is a far-right authoritarian tyrant who seeks permanent rule—a buffoon, a fascist, a racist, a white supremacist, a narcissist, a lunatic, and an incompetent who lacks both empathy and presidential dignity.
To another camp, he is the patriotic upholder of the American Constitution, a man of legendary accomplishments in office—four more partners for peace in the Middle East (the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco); discovery, production, and delivery of a new COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year; expansion of school choice; prevention of an Iranian nuclear breakout; protection of the US border from trafficking and drug smuggling; and the unmasking and confronting of China as a lawless, omnivorous threat. To this camp, Trump is a Hercules who has delivered for the people despite unrelenting attempts to undermine him. He is perceived by them as by far the last best hope to save the US from an energized, appeasement-prone, increasingly socialist takeover.
Many believe that what the US has been experiencing—bogus charges of collusion with Russia, a kangaroo impeachment, and now an election that may have been rigged—is nothing less than a succession of attempted coups d’état, more in keeping with Russia, China, Venezuela, and Cuba than a sustainable republic.
In December, it was claimed that Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia “awarded a $107 million contract to Dominion voting machines two weeks after meeting with People’s Republic of China’s Consul General.”
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has announced that he would like to “change America,” though he has not specified into what.
Transitions to tyranny in the name of “helping the people” are usually accompanied by the desecration of statues, the re-writing of history, and outbreaks of rioting, looting, murder, and denigration to whip up hate. All those malign actions have been undertaken in the US in support of the idea of “cancel culture.”
For much of the country, the attempted coups were sanctified and legitimized by the election of Biden—an election many Americans suspect was “stolen.” Those Americans are now obliged to watch the top-ranking conspirators involved in the attempted coups capture the government through their figurehead, Biden.
Clearly, voter fraud must be investigated. If elections continue to legitimize practices that sidestep Constitutional and state laws, as they threaten to do in two run-off elections in Georgia on January 5, the US will no longer be a viable republic. The Georgia elections to determine control of the Senate may end up the last firewall of a workable multi-party nation.
It is also clear that the election of Biden was made possible not only by the support of almost universally biased mainstream newspapers and television stations that distorted and snuffed out stories at will, but also by Wall Street corporations and Big Tech companies aching to do business with a lucrative, if hegemonic, China.
Power in America is currently concentrated in six companies. News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, and Comcast own 90% of the TV stations, radio stations, movies, magazines, and newspapers that 277 million Americans rely on for news and entertainment, according to Business Insider.
Those companies have been “consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983.” Supporting them are supposed “fact checkers” who are funded in large part by liberal billionaires such as George Soros and Bill Gates who almost invariably support Democrats.
Meanwhile, countless Americans have had their advertising accounts or websites abridged or closed simply because Big Tech does not agree with their views. The investigative organization “Project Veritas” exposed Twitter’s practice of “shadow banning” mainly right-of-center views, meaning “users were blocked from the platform without even being notified.”
On November 17, 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about their political biases and practices, perhaps in an effort to curb their manipulation of information via their overwhelming market dominance. Republican Josh Hawley questioned Zuckerberg about one program in particular, “Tasks,” which is ostensibly used to share and coordinate “security-related” information among Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
Zuckerberg claimed the coordination was confined to “terrorism and foreign government influence but not content.”
Really? Then why did the media “breathlessly” cover Adam Schiff’s fake “content” that the laptop scandal was “Russian disinformation,” a claim emphatically denied by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe?
Despite Big Tech’s millions in donations to members of Congress, some members are considering either revoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity to Big Tech from content they post; or breaking up the Big Tech companies as violators of antitrust laws, the better to enable competition.
Zuckerberg mentioned the intention of the three media giants to support the two Democrats in the Senate run-off races in Georgia on January 5. A George Soros-Bloomberg group has already contributed $300,000 to the two Democrats in their attempt to defeat incumbent Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
Of the Democratic challengers in Georgia, Jon Ossoff has had business ties with a Chinese telecom company, PCCW Media, whose chairman, Richard Li, has for years opposed pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. Rev. Raphael Warnock, who is backed by billionaire George Soros, is anti-military and anti-Israel and has praised fellow preacher Frederick Haynes III, a Louis Farrakhan supporter who “compared President Donald Trump’s election to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and applauded efforts to defund police departments.”
The latest effort by the media giants is the discrediting of President Trump’s claims of election fraud, claims that are backed up by lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Lin Wood, and Sidney Powell, as well as experts in technology.
How did this situation come about in star-spangled America? The radicalization seems to have begun in the country’s institutions of higher learning. Many radical protestors of the 1960s and 1970s have been indoctrinating students with a version of history calculated to make them despise their country and accept communism.
As presidential historian Craig Shirley wrote in “They’re Coming for you, Mark Zuckerberg”:
As instructed in Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, the left either destroys or takes over institutions in order to gain control; power. Public education … is now under the thumb of the left and their labor unions, and our children are not learning, except to mouth leftist bromides.
Not surprisingly, radicalized schools are turning out radicalized reporters. According to a study by the National Association of Scholars, Democrat professors outnumber Republican ones by nine to one. In the northeast, the ratio is 15.4 to one. If you want to know what happened to the Republicans, just ask Daniel Ravicher, a law professor at Miami University who was censured for tweets that supported Trump.
What we are witnessing in the universities appears to be grand-scale Marxist-inspired group-think. It has infested the media and other areas of society and is crushing another essential linchpin of democracy, the free marketplace of ideas.
If you think a slow-motion coup is unlikely, tune in to William Binney’s interview with Chris Hedges. A former technical director of the National Security Agency, Binney says he retired in disgust when he realized the agency used the technology he had created to spy on Americans.
In the US, complete censorship does not prevail—at least, not yet. The principle of freedom of the press is a protection for the freedom and welfare of the people.
As more and more details of election fraud have come to the attention of Americans, rallies have sprung up in support of honest elections. Still to be answered is the question: If election officials can ignore legalities with impunity, how can there be trustworthy elections in the US from this point forward?
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Gatestone Institute on December 16, 2020.
Dr. Jiri Valenta, a former professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European Studies at the US Naval Post Graduate School, is author of Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia 1968: Anatomy of a Decision. He is a non-resident senior research Associate at BESA and a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Leni Friedman Valenta has contributed to The National Interest, Circanada, Aspen Review, and other publications. The Valentas’ website is valenta-center.com.