“But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength, by recalling it within the pale of truth.” —Thomas Jefferson (1805)
Imagine, if you will, what the American political landscape would look like if our national mainstream-media outlets were actually neutral in their reporting — conducting themselves as journalists rather than ranting political puppets. It would look much more like what our Founders intended — a nation where protecting Liberty and the Rule of Law enshrined in our Republic’s founding documents was chief among the concerns of our people.
Unfortunately, we have ventured far from that landscape today, largely because of the influence of an unethical and prejudiced mass media.
In a single headline and its opening paragraph this week, The Washington Post provided the most blatant example of that subversive corruption I have seen this year — a case study of what we have defined as the “Pollaganda Effect.”
If you recently joined the ranks of our American Patriot readers, or even if you’re a seasoned veteran, allow me to share with you a couple definitions.
“Pollaganda” is a word we created to describe the most egregious Demo/MSM propaganda machine abuse of the First Amendment. It is defined as follows:
Pollaganda — n. 1. mainstream media (MSM) polling used to manipulate public opinion and advance a particular bias. 2. Outcome-based polling; instruments designed to generate a preferential outcome, which can be used to manipulate public opinion by advancing the perception that a particular issue, individual, or group has a majority of public favor or disfavor. 3. A “dezinformatsiya” (disinformation) campaign of political polling used for propaganda; polling masquerading as “objective journalism” designed to advance a liberal bias.
In its active form:
Pollagandize — v. 1. To engage in pollaganda. 2. To utilize instruments of pollaganda, or selective poll reporting (reporting polls that comport with a particular ideological viewpoint), to advance a bias.
The Leftmedia strategy is to achieve what we call “The Pollaganda Effect,” defined as follows:
A self-perpetuating cyclical effect — the intentional and systematic propagation of mainstream-media polls to manipulate public opinion by first saturating viewers with “reporting” that reflects a particular bias; second, conducting public-opinion polls in concert with like-minded organizations or campaigns, which will reflect that bias; third, further proselytizing to a readership by treating these poll results as “news”; and fourth, using pollaganda to induce “bandwagon psychology” (the human tendency of those who do not have a strong ideological foundation to aspire to the side perceived to be in the majority), thus further driving public opinion toward the original media bias, ad infinitum.
The Pollaganda Effect depends on outcome-based opinion samples (polling instruments designed to generate a preferential outcome), which in large measure reflects prior-opinion indoctrination or cultivation by the same media conducting the poll. The incestuous results are then used to manipulate public opinion further by advancing the perception that a particular candidate or political position enjoys majority support. The MSM fallaciously presents such polling as if it were completely objective.
Which brings me back to this brazen and inexcusable Washington Post example of the Pollaganda Effect.
Leading the news Tuesday was this top-of-the-fold WaPo headline proclaiming: “Six in 10 Americans expect a recession and higher prices as Trump’s approval rating slips, poll finds.”
The opening paragraph declared: “President Trump’s approval rating in the Washington Post-ABC News poll stands at 38 percent, down from 44 percent in June. The survey highlights how one of Trump’s central arguments for reelection — the strong U.S. economy — is beginning to show signs of potential turmoil.”
So, despite a strong economy, WaPo and other Leftmedia propagandists have been pushing the “imminent recession” narrative for six weeks in order to shape public opinion on the economy and then poll on the opinion they’ve twisted into the desired outcome.
As I wrote last year, Democrat Party leaders are pinning their 2020 political prospects on a pre-election economic downturn, hoping for a recession, and doing everything they can to create one by undermining consumer and business confidence in our economy. That was the successful model they used when seeding the 2008 financial crisis, which paved the path for Barack Obama’s ascendancy and his ruinous eight-year presidency.
Notably, the same day this WaPo pollaganda piece ran, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly “Employment Situation Report” indicating that the U.S. unemployment rate remains at a near-historic low of 3.7%, while unemployment rates for black and Hispanic Americans remain at historic lows.
That notwithstanding, WaPo then noted: “The Post-ABC poll finds that Trump’s economic approval rating has also declined from 51 percent in early July to 46 percent in the new survey, with 47 percent disapproving. His relatively positive standing on the economy continues to buoy his reputation amid public criticism on other issues.”
And there you have it. A textbook example of Pollaganda.
The political collusion between Democrats and their media opinion shapers results in the most insidious form of “fake news,” which Donald Trump has correctly and continuously identified as “the enemy of the American people.” We’ll go further, calling it a pernicious violation of First Amendment principles regarding freedom of the press and, thus, a perilous threat to American Liberty.
According to Trump: “The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open and obvious hostility and report the news accurately and fairly. That will do much to put out the flames of Anger and Outrage and we will then be able to bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony. Fake News Must End!”
Regarding Trump’s MSM callout, distinguished journalist Brit Hume observed, “There has been more bad and biased reporting such as I have never seen in the 50 years I have been in this business.” (For the record, The Washington Post has never in its history endorsed a Republican for president.)
In January, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unwittingly identified another version of Demo/MSM collusion to propagate disinformation and perpetuate a BIG lie — the “wrap-up smear.” According to Pelosi: “You make up something. Then you have the press write about it. And then you say, ‘Everybody is writing about this charge.’ It’s a tool of an [authoritarian regime] to just have you always be talking about what you want them to be talking about.”
The Demo/MSM collusion is an abject betrayal of the First Amendment, whose assurance of freedom of speech and of the press our Founders intended to be among the most significant checks on centralized government power. The press was charged with a heavy burden — that of providing impartial reports about the issues of the day and those running for political office. Fair and unbiased reporting was therefore essential to an informed citizenry.
Among the First Amendment’s strongest advocates, Thomas Jefferson penned, “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” Likewise, James Madison wrote, “The right of freely examining public characters and measures … has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.”
Unfortunately, when the press discovered it could exercise enormous power over public opinion, those who controlled it began to use their pages to that end. Neither Madison nor Jefferson could have imagined the power of today’s mass media and the dumbed-down bias used to shape mass opinion. Over the past 40 years, the Leftmedia has become the primary empowering agent of those who support the central government’s exponential (and extra-constitutional) growth. In this way, the Leftmedia has become little more than the public-relations arm of the statists.
Long ago, Founder John Adams warned, “We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.”
To Adams’s point, another equally insidious threat to our “free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections” has emerged in recent years, in the form of Big Tech bias, both by social-media giants and the “search-engine manipulation effect.”
Caught in the crossfire of all the subversive Demo/MSM machinations endeavoring to create a politically induced recession between now and the 2020 election are the job and income prospects for tens of millions of American workers. Unfortunately, this rotten cabal considers grassroots Americans to be nothing more than collateral damage necessary for the Left’s resurgence.
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776