Media Manipulation: Did Big Tech Deliver A Win To Biden?
UPDATE: Having buried the explosive revelations of the Biden familiy’s business deals in China and Ukraine before the election, the Media Party is now grudgingly acknowledging that Hunter Biden is under legal investigation for tax fraud. They’ve still yet to examine evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s businesses— involvement he’s categorically denied— including Joe sharing an office in DC with his son, his wife, his brother and a Chinese businessman with ties to the Chinese military.
Good things come to those who wait. In the case of New York governor Andrew Cuomo, you send infected people from hospitals back to nursing homes, and then you wait for them to die. And die they did. An estimated 7,500 of the 34,305 Covid-19 linked deaths in New York State occurred in nursing homes after Cuomo’s actions.
For this incompetence Cuomo is receiving an honorary Emmy Award® for his daily Covid-19 press briefings where he sloughed off responsibility for those deaths onto president Donald Trump. Even as he wrote a book on his leadership in the crisis.
In earlier times a chastened Cuomo might have kept a low profile to avoid criticism. But whatcha’ gonna’ do when the media people who are supposed to critique you are the ones giving you hardware? Cuomo knew that blaming Trump gave him a hall pass to do whatever he pleased.
It was similar to 2009 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Barack Obama for… actually, the Nobel people weren’t sure why. “It is true, Obama did not do much before winning,”one judge conceded. Obama didn’t know either. “To be honest, I still don't know," Obama later told Stephen Colbert.
But it’s easy to laugh when, to borrow a phrase, you could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with thanks to your fellow travellers in the media. Cuomo and Obama recognized that liberals’ resentment of Donald Trump and his “deplorables” was so toxic that all previous rules were forgotten.
Angelo Codevilla observed in The American Thinker, “When those at the top of American communications’ food chain, the folks at the New York Times, said openly that they would put truth aside during the noble fight against Trumpism, when the news industry shamelessly purveyed obviously incredible stories about Trump’s alleged Russia collusion; when they shamelessly purveyed obviously unsourced rumor as truth; when they seconded officials’ using classified information as a shield and sword against conservatives…
“Americans did not realize how thoroughly their ruling class had already jelled into an oligarchy with the intention above all to crush them.”
As the howler moneys of establishment media (see: Jim Acosta) berated Trump and— by extension— the culture of middle America, the exacting standards were not applied to their benefactors. Stories that in any way flattered Trump— the rebound of the economy, his Middle East peace accords, his tax cuts, the rapid vaccine production— disappeared without a trace.
In addition, the major social-media search engines of Google, Amazon, Twitter etc skewed story searches to promote liberal stories first. Finding on Big Tech material critical of Biden during the campaign was needle-in-a-haystack. Leading Missouri senator Josh Hawley to tweet “#BigTech wants to control all news in America and soon will if we don’t stop them.”
Did the fatwa matter? Polling since Nov. 3, 2020 by The Media Research Center found that one in six Biden voters said they would not have voted for the president-elect if they had been aware of one or more of the news stories that “the liberal news media had failed to cover properly.”
Examples of those stories: over half of Biden voters were unaware that, due to the Trump administration’s efforts with energy independence, America became “a net exporter of oil for the first time in September 2019.” The polling also found that 36.1 percent of Biden voters “didn’t know about Trump’s role in getting vaccines researched”.
And “over one-third of people surveyed who voted for Biden” did not know of the allegations (of sexual assault) by former Biden staffer Tara Reade. (His notorious groping was similarly ignored.)
Most egregious was the concerted media decision in the last month of the presidential campaign to bury the well-sourced allegations that the Biden family was running a shakedown grift in China, Ukraine, Iraq and other places, trading on Biden’s proximity to power and influence.
The press that had dissected every Trump quote in microscopic detail issued a collective “meh” over this story. No surprise when MRC discovered that many voters knew nothing of the allegations. As author/ cartoonist Scott Adams noted, “Low-information voters can't distinguish between problems Trump allegedly caused versus problems the fake news caused and assigned to Trump.”
Again, this manipulation was brazen, in the certain knowledge that a Biden win would expunge any responsibility for whitewashing the news.
Adding to this bias was the frequent banning or subversion of conservative messages on social media with Twitter messages such as "This claim about election fraud is disputed". Nearly 60 percent of Trump’s tweets were pulled down or altered in the closing weeks.
If you believe post-election research by Dr. Robert Epstein, a Democrat who has been following the influence of big tech on American politics for decades, the treatment by social media and the legacy press did sway the election. Last year, Epstein had predicted that big tech companies like Google could shift up to 15 million votes.
Now, his research concludes that Google search engines were strongly biased in favour of Democrats. Epstein estimates that, at minimum, six million votes could easily have been sent to Biden by Google’s multiple manipulation. “The maximum (number of votes)? We haven’t even begun to estimate, because we have so much data."
Epstein adds that, before the election only Democrats received Get Out & Vote messages on Google. Only when he went public with that discrepancy did Republicans start receiving the message in the final days of the campaign. (Ironically, video of Epstein on FOXNews with Carlson was labelled with “This claim about election fraud is disputed". )
Why is this going on? Simply put, Epstein says Big Tech is buying up academics, media and politicians to do its bidding. The American knowledge industry notoriously does not bite the hand that feeds it.
This is less of problem in Canada, because domestic media surrendered en masse the past decade to Trudeau Bucks, and had reporters whose union was openly rooting for the Left. With no active conservative media to fight back, Google can save its money. The media here is virtually all bought and sold already.
Whether the U.S. follows suit will depend on how scared Big Tech is of their anti-trust status being yanked by Congress.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx