The mainstream media has been feeding the American public disinformation for decades, but ever since Donald Trump became president, it seems to have gotten worse. Part of the situation was because Trump shined a light on the darkness of fake news journalism, and so we are more aware than ever. However, a large part is lazy journalists looking for clicks instead of trying to report the truth.
We know Drudge Report has gone from one of those sites that told the hard truth to one that presents an establishment-friendly narrative over the last several years. Rumors swirl on the internet about what happened. However, I still check the site periodically to see the globalist opposition’s narratives, and today, I found an article that exemplifies how the media lies to people.
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Drudge linked an article from Barron’s, reporting from AFP News about Russia supposedly raiding several gay nightclubs in Moscow this week. The media loves to use Russia as a scapegoat in their propaganda, dating back to the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton accused “Russian bots” of influencing the election. Since then, I’ve viewed any reporting with "Russia" in the headline as suspect.
Barron’s headline gives a clue as to their report being fake news, demonstrating how the lazy media operates. They cite themselves as sources. Their headline reads, “Russian Police Raid Gay Bars In Moscow, Media Says.” Note the important part: "media says."
This is how they lie for their narrative. There’s no actual source; it’s just an unvalidated rumor, but they wanted the clicks, and it worked. The story became featured on Drudge Report, which will make a ton of ad revenue for the service.
The report goes on to talk details about one of the suspected raids, making it sound valid. This is enough to get people talking about it on social media, painting Russia as some villainous nanny state that is just raiding innocent nightclubs and harassing people dancing for little to no reason.
It takes scrolling about two-thirds through the article to get to an inconvenient fact about the supposed raid, where the author admits, “AFP was not able to immediately verify the reports.”
The article had a clickbait headline, giving the imagery of Russian police going door to door as if they are targeting innocent citizens, but they can’t verify the report? They got around libel by putting “media says” in the title, but the damage is done as most people only read headlines and the first short blurbs on stories.
This kind of manipulation happens often. The media reports “sources say” or “rumors are” for many of their stories and try to get sensational headlines out expeditiously rather than informing on the truth. This has caused large divisions in our society and has had terrible impacts on civic debate over the last decade, as emotional hypersensitivity on topics like abortion has been weaponized by the Democratic party for their talking points as a result.
Ronald Reagan once told us, “Trust but verify,” but at this point, when you read an article from one of these establishment sources, you should not trust and verify.
What happened in Russia this week? We’ll probably never find out the real truth.
