MSM: just say no

Those damned Mainstream Media. Or MSM as the more dismissive term has it. Always telling things the way no one wants to hear them.

Take the MSM in the United States. They’ve been claiming that Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential Election. Extraordinary. All they have to back them up is dozens of court decisions, huge numbers of legal opinions and the reports of even more election officials. What’s more, some of those officials come from Trump’s own Republican Party, so they’re not just lying scumbags, they’re traitors too.

In Britain, the MSM used to keep warning the Labour Party that it couldn’t win an election under its hard left leader Jeremy Corbyn. Such lies. I mean, it’s true that he didn’t win. In fact, he was defeated twice, the second time massively. But here’s the thing: that doesn’t prove the MSM were right, just that their cynicism denied him the easy victory he would otherwise have won. Helped, again, by traitors, inside the party, who lacked the fervour of the true believers.

Then there was vaccination. The MSM kept coming up with all that stuff about Covid vaccines being low risk and far less dangerous than the disease. What a load of rubbish. I mean, it may be true that there’s no evidence they did any harm, and lots of evidence that they did a great deal of good, but what does that matter? With important people like Robert Kennedy Junior on your side, who needs evidence?

Some people, of course, rise above all that MSM propaganda. Take the Hungarian electorate, for instance. It’s just returned Viktor Orbán to power for an unprecedented fourth term. That’s despite the MSM pointing out that he’d spent his first three undermining the country’s democracy. Actually, he really has been undermining its democracy like they say, but hey, he was re-elected in a democratic election, so what he does must be democratic, mustn’t it?

It's curious, isn’t it? People who believe in democracy seem to want to oppose it when a people democratically chooses to do away with democracy. It’s sort of a paradox of democracy. Like back in the 1920s, when Mussolini’s Italian Fascists launched a coup d’état. It could only be stopped by a state of emergency for which the decree had to be signed by the then King. And he refused. What should the democrats do? Uphold the state of law by breaking the law with an illegal state of emergency? Makes no sense, right? So they let things go. That only cost Italy 20 years of dictatorship, half a million war dead and rather more foreign victims killed in various overseas adventures.

Talking about overseas adventures, the author of Europe’s latest invasion of foreign territory, Vladimir Putin, was one of the first to congratulate Orbán on his success. The two are old friends, you see. The English expression is “birds of a feather flock together”. The French put it rather more forcefully: “tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are”. As well as Putin, Orbán’s best friends apparently include England’s Nigel Farage, France’s Marine le Pen and Italy’s Matteo Salvini. By curious coincidence, all these fans of democracy belong to the hard, far right.

Aftermath of Russian occupation of Bucha in Ukraine
But the Kremlin assures us the pictures are all faked

Curiously, Putin’s congratulations to Orbán coincided with the MSM’s latest nefarious outburst. They’ve been writing at length, with pictures in support, about atrocities against civilians allegedly carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine. Can you imagine? They persist with these accusations, despite Moscow’s denials. Just as they apparently reject Moscow’s denial of any involvement in the murder of a Russian defector by Polonium poisoning in London, the attempted poisoning of another with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, the carpet bombing of Syrian cities or the massacre of civilians in Chechenia. 

You can imagine that the MSM’s insinuations might make people who had the vision to vote for Orbán or, indeed, back Putin, feel uncomfortable in their choices. Most people don’t like to be associated with war criminals and genocidal tyrants, or even with their more supportive friends.

Fortunately, they don’t have to feel uncomfortable. They can just ignore the MSM with their tedious insistence on getting independent confirmation of facts before publishing them, their obsession with making statements backed by evidence, and their attempts to offer people the chance to challenge any assertion they quote. 

Instead, they can insist on getting their information only from sources acceptable to the politicians they support. So they can wait for any criticism of Putin until some appears in RT, the former Russia Today, the mouthpiece of the Kremlin in general and of Putin in particular. It could be a long and peaceful wait.

It’s so much more comforting only ever to read what you want to be told. It’s Putin’s wish. Apparently, it’s the wish of most MSM critics too. Because those MSM pests keep telling them things that challenge their fondest prejudices.

And who could possibly want that?