When the Media Assumes the Freedom to Lie...

…we are in trouble as a society. News doesn’t square with what the people know to be true; distrust spreads and can mutate into hate and violence. The power-hungry and unscrupulous take advantage, and chaos results.

That’s the path America is on right now, as one of its flagship news organizations, The New York Times, has undeniably crossed the line into sheer propaganda generation, unadulterated information manipulation in pursuit of its worldview.

The latest but by no means only example is today’s Page 1, above-the-fold publication of a poll suggesting that Americans by 2 to 1 favor paying increased taxes over cutting the pay and benefits of government workers. Yes, you read that right.

Against a backdrop of large and growing unemployment and record foreclosures, in the midst of another oil price shock stretching and stressing family budgets again, and just five months after the American people voted in overwhelming numbers throughout the nation to elect new leaders who would put a stop to out of control spending and the rest of the radical left agenda, the NYT comes up with a poll that suggests Americans have done more than a 180, and now by 2 to 1 want to pay more taxes to keep government employees whole. Please.

There is no way to sugarcoat this. This is a lie. And it is deliberate. It is designed to present to Americans a false picture of collective opinion in an effort to mislead Americans into accepting false conclusions and supporting false remedies.

Now, the circumspect among us will never use such words; they hold to belief that surely the NYT would not simply make things up, and so they presume honesty of motive and then go to work analyzing sampling data to show how the results may have been skewed. A good takedown of the Times’ poll using this more civilized method can be found here.

But a key to America’s recovery from the ongoing nightmare of radical leftist lies will be found when enough media industry leaders, observers and readers recognize that using a page 17 paragraph (as the NYT did) to identify wildly skewed sampling data does not exculpate the NYT. It does not make their work merely ‘shoddy’. It does not shield their behavior in creating and publishing the poll from the label of ‘lie’. When it is identified for exactly what it is: a lie told by an organization of many liars, people will fully and finally stop reading a word of it, or being afraid of it. It will stop doing damage to the culture, and solutions to heretofore intractable problems will be found--because people of good faith will work from a groundwork of shared truth.

We wouldn’t be at all surprised if full investigation of this particular NYT poll would show that more than mere sampling was skewed; we frankly wouldn’t be surprised if the poll itself is for all practical purposes an outright fabrication (or maybe the real sample was five NYT employees gathered around a conference room).

An important remaining question is whether the many news organizations who slavishly and unfailingly take their cues from the NYT have any editors and reporters left with an ounce of integrity and discernment—enough to cause them to finally wake up and STOP following the NYT or giving credence to anything printed by that organization. If America has enough honest editors and reporters left, then America can and will overthrow this tyranny of deceit. But it will take more than Fox News.

The big picture good news is that truth is outing these lies more vividly than ever before, and the American people—presumably including even some editors and reporters elsewhere in the media—are awakening as never before. Indeed, the transparent absurdity of this particular NYT poll may by itself accelerate the ongoing awakening. The NYT has jumped the shark in its concoction and use of opinion-shaping polls, and may never recover.

Which would be good. Americans cherish their first amendment rights, including instinctive support for freedom of the press. But they are seeing what happens the press interprets that freedom as including the freedom to lie. It’s extremely dangerous to the nation; extremely harmful to the social fabric. In a great irony, let’s hope the NYT’s latest lie will help to put a stop to further lies.

Paul Gable

March 1, 2011