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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
15:31
5 Myths Perpetuated by Leftwing Media Bias | Larry Elder
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If you're wondering about the t-shirt I'm wearing, stick around to the end of this video.
Now, when people talk about media bias, they normally mean things the media gets wrong.
You know, like the two and a half year collusion between Russia and Trump's story that was pursued and pursued and pursued.
If that were all it is, We wouldn't have a problem.
Media bias is so much deeper.
It's culture.
It's the stories they choose.
It's the angles they take.
I have five outstanding examples of media bias.
Get ready.
Example number one.
Number one, the blatantly left-wing nature of how most people get their news.
This is the top 15 web sources for news.
Look at them.
There's the crew.
Yahoo!
News, left wing.
Google News, left wing.
HuffPost, left wing.
CNN, left wing.
New York Times, left wing.
Fox News, right wing.
NBC, left wing.
Mail Online, sort of center right.
Washington Post, left wing.
The Guardian, left wing.
The Wall Street Journal news section, not its editorial section, news section, left wing.
ABC News, left wing.
BBC News, left wing.
USA Today, left wing.
LA Times, left wing.
Now, how does this work in the real world?
Let me give you a concrete example of this media bias in action.
The anchors of ABC, NBC, and CBS were Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather for years.
They were the anchors on the desk the first day of George W. Bush and the first day of Bill Clinton.
In the case of Bill Clinton, he reversed an anti-abortion policy of Ronald Reagan.
In the case of George W. Bush, he reversed a pro-abortion policy of Bill Clinton.
Here's how the various anchors covered these presidents' first days in office.
Peter Jennings, ABC News, 1993.
President Clinton kept a promise today on the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.
Peter Jennings, ABC News, 2001.
George W. Bush's first day.
President Bush began by taking a tough line on abortion.
One of the president's first actions was designed to appeal to the anti-abortion conservatives.
Tom Brokaw, Bill Clinton's first day, 1993.
Today, President Bill Clinton kept a campaign promise, and it came on the 20th anniversary of Roe v.
Wade.
Brokaw, 2001.
George W. Bush's first day.
We'll begin with the new president's very active day, which started on a controversial note.
And he went on to point out that he reversed the pro-abortion policy of his predecessor.
Dan Rather, 1993, Bill Clinton's first day.
Today, with the stroke of a pen, President Clinton delivered on his campaign promise.
Dan Rather, George W. Bush's first day in office.
This was President Bush's first day at the office, and he did something to quickly please the right flank of his party.
He reinstituted an anti-abortion policy, end of quote.
You get the point?
The Democrats fulfilled a campaign promise.
The Republican did something to appease his right flank.
The Democrat began by fulfilling a campaign promise.
The Republican began his day on a controversial note.
You get the point?
And as to two of our major newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, the Washington Post has never endorsed a Republican for president, and the New York Times has not done it since 1956.
Number two, the media's absolute obsession with race and racism, even as it deteriorates as a major factor in American life.
They're obsessed with racism, institutional racism, systemic racism, structural racism, and a new one that we got from Beto O'Rourke, foundational racism.
Here's the deal.
There was once an article in the LA Times I read.
It was about a black laborer who worked in a predominantly upper-class area of LA like Beverly Hills.
And it was about the number of times that somebody didn't open the door when he knocked on the door, somebody kicked a dog on him, somebody once turned a water hose on him because they thought he was an intruder and so forth.
And I'm not saying it was pleasant.
I have a friend who works for the LA Times.
I called him.
I said, I read this article.
The other day I had a roofer come over to my house to prepare it.
He happened to be white.
He told me that he was working in an area of L.A. known as Compton, which is primarily black and brown.
He said somebody shot a gun at him as he was on top of a house trying to work.
Now, I ask you, who is probably going to have more stories to tell?
A white guy working in a predominantly black or brown area, or a black guy working in a predominantly white area like Beverly Hills?
I ask you.
I have a friend who told me he was one of the only white guys at a black school, and he was picked on a lot.
I said to my friend from the LA Times, who's going to have a harder time?
The only black kid in an all-white school or the only white kid in an all-black school?
He said, you have a point.
The reason we don't pursue those stories is they will get the wrong people mad, meaning the civil rights establishment.
You do a story about how a white laborer in a black area like Compton or Watts gets hassled, we're going to have trouble.
So therefore, we avoid it.
Number three, the use of the media's term undocumented drives me insane.
Six in ten Americans say they would prefer to see a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants.
Meanwhile in America, California becomes the first state in the USA to announce a program for direct disaster assistance to undocumented immigrants.
The text message that I sent to my friends last night Last night, Brenda Lyra did something she thought she would never do.
She came out to her friends and told them she was undocumented.
I once had a column with a local newspaper, and I used the term illegal alien.
And the editor of that page was so angry, she said it was racist.
So, I wrote a column.
Check it out.
Larry Elder calling term illegal alien racist is just plain racist.
And in the column, I dared to point out that the term undocumented does not appear anywhere in our federal statutes.
By the way, nor does the term illegal immigrant appear anywhere.
Somebody in the country illegally is an illegal alien.
And that is a race and gender and ethnic and religious neutral term.
Look at these statutes.
In that column, I point out what the head of the Association of Hispanic Journalists said about language.
Check this out.
If you can control the words people use, you can frame the issue.
That's how propaganda works.
Repeat the words continually until it reshapes the way people think.
End of quote.
Number four, the media's use of the term the Great Recession to describe the meltdown of 2007-2008.
Everything changed for the Boscos and millions of others after the Great Recession.
From December 2007 to June 2009, the United States suffered an extended economic downturn that came to be known as the Great Recession.
Let me tell you why the term the Great Recession is liberal bias.
During this recession, unemployment got to what?
10.0.
Inflation, negligible.
Interest rates, negligible.
The recession that Ronald Reagan had to deal with, the unemployment rate got to 10.8%.
Inflation got to 13.5%.
Interest rates for a prime, if you could get one, 20.5%.
So by all the major indices, the recession that Ronald Reagan dealt with was worse than the one that Obama dealt with.
But nobody calls Reagan's recession the Great Recession.
And I'll tell you why.
Because Reagan did the opposite of what Obama did.
Reagan cut taxes.
Reagan slowed down the rate of domestic spending.
Reagan reduced regulations.
Obama did the opposite.
And the results!
We're the opposite.
Obama gave us the worst economic recovery since 1949.
Reagan, we had quarters where the GDP did 5%.
4%.
It was substantially better than the results gotten under Barack Obama, who pursued the opposite policies that Ronald Reagan did.
Ergo, let's call the Obama recession the Great Recession.
The Reagan one was, well, just a recession.
Number five, and this one drives me crazy, the use of the term trickle-down.
Reagan's solution was an economic plan that became to be known by his supporters and critics alike as Reaganomics.
Reaganomics was heavily based on the trickle-down theory.
This argues that if you lower costs for corporations by cutting their taxes, businesses use those savings to invest.
The thinking was more money for corporations would mean more jobs and higher wages for workers and thus increase spending.
But trickle-down is a controversial idea.
Joe Biden is Joe.
And again, he brings those values and his personal experience to a vision for America that is about fairness and not trickle-down economics, but bubble up from that kitchen table from working families in our country.
Now, you will not find any economists using the term trickle-down.
No matter how right-wing, no matter how conservative, that is not the term the economists use.
It is a dismissive term, mean to trivialize the idea that if you put more money in the pockets of job creators, they will produce more than if you take the money and give it to people who don't produce.
The term was first popularized and used by that well-known economist and Democrat Will Rogers.
I kid you not.
This is from a column he wrote in 1932.
Mr.
Hoover, referring to Herbert Hoover, was an engineer.
He knew that water trickles down.
Put it uphill and let it go.
It will reach the driest little spot.
But he didn't know that money trickled up.
No kidding.
That's where the term came from.
It is a demeaning term, and that is why the Democrats use it.
By the way, JFK explained his economic philosophy in the same way Ronald Reagan did.
Nobody called it.
Trickle down!
Such a bill will be presented to the Congress for action next year.
It will include an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in both corporate and personal income taxes.
It will include long-needed tax reforms that logic and equity demands, and it will date that cut in taxes to take effect as of the start of next year, January 1963.
The billions of dollars this bill will place in the hands of the consumer and our businessmen will have both immediate and permanent benefits to our economy.
Every dollar released from taxation That is spared or invested will help create a new job and a new salary.
And these new jobs and new salaries can create other jobs and other salaries.
And more customers and more growth for an expanding American economy.
To say the left-wing Tavis Smiley, formerly of PBS and NPR, is not a fan of Ronald Reagan is to understate the matter.
Despised Ronald Reagan and made all sorts of fallacious claims about how things were during the Ronald Reagan era.
Unfortunately for Mr.
Tavis, he agreed to come on my radio show.
Here's what happened.
Here's what I find puzzling, Tavis, about your analysis.
I know you're not a fan of Ronald Reagan.
You once said that Ronald Reagan, quote, tortured blacks, end of quote.
Ronald Reagan did not have a specific black jobs agenda.
What he did was cut taxes very deeply, he slowed down the rate of government spending, and he continued and accelerated deregulation policies that have been started by Jimmy Carter.
The black adult unemployment rate fell faster than the white adult unemployment rate.
The black teenage-age unemployment rate fell far faster Then did the white teenage unemployment rate.
Black businesses were created at a rate faster.
The revenues grew at a rate faster.
All because Ronald Reagan dramatically cut taxes, dramatically reduced the rate of government, of domestic spending, and he deregulated.
This president is doing the opposite.
He has spent money.
He is taxed.
He's threatening to increase taxes even more.
He's imposed billions of dollars in regulations.
And fast forward two and a half years later, we got 9.1% unemployment.
And during the Reagan era, Tavis, unemployment, in fact, was even higher than the highest during this Great Recession.
So I don't understand why it is that you don't say the agenda ought to be what Ronald Reagan did.
The short answer is this.
You're awfully good at this.
That's why you've been doing it for 17 years.
Nice try with respect.
But Ronald Reagan decimated this country.
I don't know what America you were living in respectfully during the Reagan.
He decimated America economically in every In what way?
Give me one way.
Give me one way.
The one thing that Ronald Reagan did for people of color was to support the Earned Income Tax Credit.
But every other stat you cited, we don't have time on radio to go number for number, but every stat you cited vis-a-vis people of color does not measure up when you talk to the people of color who had to live through the hell of those eight years of Ronald Reagan.
What do you mean talk to the people?
I've just given you labor stats, census stats, These are facts, Tavis.
Unemployment fell faster in the black community than in the white community.
It fell faster for teens.
It fell faster for adults.
It fell faster for Hispanics.
And you're telling me when you talk to people, they don't like Reagan, so therefore the stats go out of the window?
Larry, your numbers are not true.
When I get back to my office later today or tomorrow, I'll send you some more numbers.
You know this.
Numbers don't lie, but people do.
The numbers are very clear.
You're not calling me a liar, Tavis.
No, I'm saying numbers don't lie.
People do.
You want to take it outside?
No.
I'm saying the people who provided you those numbers put a spin on those numbers.
I'm still waiting for Mr.
Smiley to send me the correct information.
Now before I close, I want you to know why I'm wearing this t-shirt.
Ta-da!
This is about my upcoming movie, tentatively scheduled to debut on June 19th.
Check out this trailer.
Most people are completely oblivious to the history of the Democratic Party.
The party of slavery.
The history of the Democratic Party.
Zinco laws.
They're erasing all of the history of this country.
They want to cover up history.
The real history, not the revisionist history.
If you are educated.
White people have been taught a narrative that has been created.
You're actually miseducated.
And that's when I realized I've been lied to.
I had been misled.
It unraveled everything that I need to be true.
To see other trailers, just go to UncleTom.com.
Coming to a theater near you.
I'm Larry Elder, and we've got a country to save.
I will see you next time with five more examples of stunning media bias.
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