The Editor
DTNZ
Almost a week after the fact, the leftist meltdowns and MSM pundit soul-searching over Donald Trump’s historic landslide election victory continue unabated.
In the wake of the devastating defeat of their favoured Democratic Party, the global legacy mainstream media network is already laying the groundwork for their false narratives over the coming four years of Trump’s second presidency – chaos, mayhem, racism and misogyny.
But will anyone still be listening to what they have to say?
RNZ were among the worst of the lot. Here are some of their headlines in the days leading up to the election:
- ‘Conspiracy theories and threats: The new reality of US elections’
- ‘Trump distances himself from racist remarks at New York rally’
- ‘Trump unveils the most extreme closing argument in modern presidential history’
- ‘The air was full of hate: Shane Te Pou reports from Donald Trump’s MSG rally’
- ‘Harris hopes final speech will promise optimism, contrast Trump’s chaos’
- ‘You want a fight? You going to get it. Puerto Ricans ready to punish Trump’
- ‘Harris appeals to Christians and Arab Americans, Trump embraces violet rhetoric’
- ‘Arizona prosecutor probes Trump’s firing squad comments’
- ‘Trump suggests politician should face firing squad over foreign policy’
- ‘Has the Trump camp’s divisive rhetoric shaved off key demographics?’
and so on and so on.
RNZ is a state-funded news outlet. Because of the distinct public nature of its funding, it should be the epitome of journalistic balance. But 99 per cent of its US election coverage was a disgraceful combination of lies, twisted facts and biased opinions mainly written by people who suffer from acute ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. Taxpayers should not be funding this kind of partisan, unethical garbage.
Once again, as we saw with Covid, the international legacy media complex – MSNBC, CBS, NBC, BBC, CNN, The Guardian et al and their local flunkies Stuff, NZ Herald, Newstalk ZB and RNZ etc, swung into action with relentless mass propaganda narratives, this time trying desperately to convince everyone that Donald Trump was the next Adolf Hitler.
The American people didn’t buy it, delivering Republicans a clean sweep of the Presidency, the House, Senate, as well as a decisive win in the popular vote. Gains for Trump were recorded among women, Hispanics and black men (shock! horror!).
The resounding defeat points to a watershed moment in news and information consumption, particularly in the realm of important geopolitical and social events. The changes witnessed will render the legacy media obsolete within five years.
We all know that trust and confidence in them is in sharp decline. Of itself that trend is devastating for the future of legacy media. But that is the least of their problems.
The combination of X and AI enables the rapid gathering, curation and publishing of uncensored news direct to a mass global audience who are searching for and are highly interested in news. The number of people turning to X to find their news in the future will increase significantly. Podcasts with big audiences, such as Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, provide raw, in-depth and unfiltered information direct from the horse’s mouth, without the need for Simon Dallow and his teleprompter.
Even worse for the legacy media, however, is the fact that the ascension of independent media is only just beginning. Imagine what new technologies for news gathering and dissemination will be available for independent outlets in five years time.
The only advantage legacy media can cling onto now is its ability to mobilise a network of nationwide journalists and resources for major breaking news events, such as natural disasters. But with the rapid development of AI, and even holographic technologies, the end of this advantage is only a matter of time.
The legacy media tried to portray Trump as a racist bigot who was a danger to society, women’s rights, world stability and peace, while promoting Kamala Harris as some kind of virtuous Messiah.
But millions of uncensored stories and videos shared on X by citizen journalists, independent media and ordinary Americans at the rallies, speeches and interviews, showed the opposite. I saw, for example, videos of black men whose college education was paid for by Trump – racist? I think not. While on the other hand, I saw a moving video of a young black mother who was imprisoned by Kamala Harris in California for her daughter’s truancy – her daughter had not been wagging school, but was in fact, in hospital for a number of days due to a life-threatening condition. Nevertheless, Harris sent her to jail, and the mother implored her fellow Americans not to vote for the Vice President.
While the truth about Covid and the mRNA gene therapy has taken time to filter through to the mass of the people – a legacy of the extreme censorship in place during 2021–23, the US election saw uncensored information that undermined the legacy media’s narratives spread at lightning speed to a mass audience.
Millions saw with their own eyes, at rally after rally, in interview after interview, that Kamala Harris was the most inept and unsuitable presidential candidate in US history – someone whose characteristics were very far removed from the person described in glowing terms ad nauseum by the BBC, CNN or RNZ and their ilk.
There is an out, but will anyone in the MSM take it?
Having described the impending doom of the legacy media, there is nevertheless, a way for them to redeem the situation.
And the solution is ridiculously simple: Provide balanced reporting, all of the time, without exception.
Despite this easy way out, I am still confident in the demise of the legacy media, because the people in charge of those organisations do not have the moral honesty or capacity to admit they are doing their job wrong. I can safely say this because, while they managed to brainwash and fool a large section of the population through Covid, that was only achieved through extreme Big Tech and government censorship of independent media and opposing content.
The US election was a big opportunity for them to show they had learned from their mistakes during COVID. That was a period in which trust in the legacy media declined dramatically, and which should have been a wake up call to their bosses.
They learned nothing.
This article was originally published by the Daily Telegraph New Zealand.
