Does the Mainstream Media Influence American Elections?
Here in the U.S., there’s an entire industry devoted to influencing the outcomes of elections, actions, policies, or decisions of officials.
Professional lobbyists are people whose business is trying to influence legislation, regulation, or other government decisions, actions, or policies on behalf of a group or individual who hires them. It’s partially this process that allows well funded deep state corporate interests to push laws through Congress that benefit and protect them.
Lobbying is done by many types of people, associations and organized groups. It’s not just the megalithic multi-national corporations attempting to influence policy, but also special interest groups of every imaginable flavor. Foreign-funded lobbying efforts include those of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, and China lobbies. In 2010 alone, foreign governments spent approximately $460 million on lobbying members of Congress and government officials.
It’s a Russian Invasion
Following the upset victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, Democrats claimed their widespread losses were because of Russian meddling in our electoral process. Never mind there was no evidence of the Trump campaign working with Russians in the campaign, the accusation was enough to set off a firestorm of debate and seemingly endless fake news stories in the mainstream media claiming collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians.
After spending over $7 million dollars to investigate Trump collusion, the Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation did result in a federal grand jury indicting 13 Russians charged in a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election through their use of social media. The grand jury found there was probable cause that the Russians posed as Americans and purchased political advertisements and organized political rallies with the aim of boosting Trump and disparaging Clinton. The investigation also led to charges for several Trump campaign associates, though none of the charges were directly related to misconduct by the president’s campaign.
However, the conclusion of the investigation was there was no evidence that President Trump’s team or any associates of the Trump campaign had conspired with Russia to sway the 2016 election. Did that stop the collusion conspiracy theory and endless fake news reporting by CNN, MSNBC, and others that Trump had colluded with the Russians? No.
I don’t particularly have a problem with anybody using the Internet to promote their personal viewpoint. That’s FREE SPEECH! Should it surprise anybody the Russians might have an interest in U.S. elections and might want to influence the outcome? Or we having an interest in Russian elections, or anywhere else? Surely you can’t believe we don’t have operatives in Russia… do you?
What I do object to is for others to attempt to silence my viewpoint because it differs from theirs.
Nobody should have the monopoly on acceptable thoughts, beliefs, or speech. While I might not agree with what you say, I do support your freedom to say it, however distasteful.
I also object to multinational corporations or governments use of mind control techniques to manipulate others. That’s simply dishonest.
As for meddling in the 2016 elections, there were numerous documented examples of Democrats rigging the elections and depriving Bernie Sanders the presidential nomination. The media chose to downplay that.
Published by WikiLeaks, a collection of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails leaked to and subsequently published by WikiLeaks included emails from seven key DNC staff members which suggested the party’s leadership had worked to sabotage Sanders’ presidential campaign. The emails include DNC staff’s “off-the-record” correspondence with media personalities, including the reporters at CNN, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
In December, 2016, the CIA told U.S. legislators that the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded Russia conducted operations during the 2016 U.S. election to prevent Hillary Clinton from winning the presidency. Multiple U.S intelligence agencies concluded people with direct ties to the Kremlin gave WikiLeaks the hacked emails from the DNC.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange initially stuck to WikiLeaks policy of neither confirming or denying sources but in January 2017 said that their “source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party”.
It was suggested instead, that perhaps Seth Rich, an employee for the Democratic National Committee who was fatally shot in Washington, D.C., was the real source of the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. The authorities ruled his murder was a robbery gone bad, however, nothing was taken except his life. Investigator Rod Wheeler, a former D.C. police homicide detective who was hired by a third party to investigate for the Rich family, told Fox 5 in Washington, D.C., Rich’s laptop had evidence indicating he had been in contact with WikiLeaks. Of course the mainstream media has said the Rich tie in to the leaked emails is all a conspiracy theory.
Google Influence of Elections
While not generally associated with the “mainstream media,” perhaps an even more influential player in shaping public opinion and swaying elections are the tech giants making up social media like Google, YouTube, Twitter, and others.
Leaked documents show that Google, for example, clearly has a political bias and that bias influences their ranking of news stories and search results through the use of “news blacklists,” and the use of “human raters” in determining how some content is handled. One document clearly shows a Google “blacklist,” which restricts certain websites from appearing on news feeds for an Android Google product. The list includes conservative and progressive websites, such as newsbusters.org and mediamatters.org. In one video targeting Google employees, the presenter clearly exposes censorship by Google in their strategy of ranking so called authoritative news sources while demoting those news sources that conflict with their views.
Watch the complete interview with Google whistle-blower, Zach Vorhies, on InfoWars.
Testifying before the Senate was top social scientist and former Psychology Today editor Dr. Robert Epstein, whose extensive studies reveal that Google manipulated voters in 2016 and may have swayed from 2.6 million to 10.4 million voters to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Bogus Election Polling
Dating back to 1913, the Tavistock Institute used polls to shape public opinion into accepting Britain’s entry into World War I. The plan to ‘create’ public opinion through the fake reporting of bogus polling date began as a propaganda factory centered at Wellington House in London. Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, installed Lord Northcliffe (Britain’s most influential newspaper magnate) as its director. Lord Northcliffe’s position was supervised by Lord Rothmere on behalf of the British Crown. The operational staff of Wellington House consisted of Lord Northcliffe, and Arnold Toynbee, according to John Coleman. [The Common Sense Show]
John Coleman, the author of the classic book Conspirators Hierarchy, The Committee of 300, was one of the the first writers to call attention to the existence of Tavistock, in 1969, and the rest as they say is history. Subsequently, we learn from Coleman’s work that polls were designed to not really measure public opinion, they were designed to shape public opinion.
Donald Trump highlighted the problem of the dishonest mainstream media in his campaign for President in 2016. For example, his rallies were drawing overflowing crowds of tens of thousands, but the media would not show those crowds or report on them. Conversely, they would use tight camera shots to conceal the small crowds attending Hillary Clinton rallies.
Another example were the distorted polls the media fed the public to discourage potential voters from voting. If the country believes the race is essentially decided, some deflated voters stay at home and don’t vote. WikiLeaks published emails among Democrats talking about inflating poll numbers of key Democrat constituencies by oversampling the number of Democrats surveyed and under-sampling Republicans.
In a recent FOX poll, it consisted on 43 Democrats, 36 Republicans, and 21 other. An NBC poll consisted on 44 Democrats, 37 Republicans and 19 other. Clearly, the oversampling of Democrats are designed to provide a Democrat result. In 1980 a Gallup poll released two weeks before the election had Jimmy Carter leading Ronald Reagan 47-39. Two weeks later Reagan won in such a landslide that Carter conceded before California was closed.
Because polls are designed to project the behavior of more than 120 million people, an incorrect voter model in a survey of several hundred people can easily throw election results off by many percentage points.